THE WRITER’S METHOD

In considering Guerra’s personal work on the basis of Tarkovsky’s dia-ries and the film Voyage in Time (1983), many questions arise and many are left unanswered. For example, does all that material reveal anything about the ways of writing that were typical to him? How did he make his own creative work possible with auteurs like Antonioni and Tarkovsky?

What was the method of writing and creativity specific to Guerra in the challenging conditions in which he worked? And how were the image and the word, the narrative and the structure, all considered in relation to each other and dealt with in the practice of his work?

The director’s diary, as such, is not the place to find detailed answers concerning Guerra’s own work. Instead, in an interview conducted by Guerra for an Italian film magazine during their period of collaboration Guerra asks Tarkovsky to describe his visions in detail (Guerra 1979:

166–70), and this may give a clue to his personal method: ‘Would you be willing to tell me the end of the film, shot by shot, as if I were a blind man?’ he asks (Guerra 1979: 169). In Voyage in Time too, Guerra keeps on asking detailed questions, demanding descriptions, digging deeper into the images that arose, along with Tarkovsky’s and his own impressions during the journey. This method brings to mind the defi-nition by Greek director Angelopoulos mentioned above, of Guerra as the psychoanalyst or the confessor to his own story. If the screenwriter is seen as such a confessor and a mediator to another person’s hid-den vision, one of the most important skills for him would then be to know professionally, like an analyst, how to relieve and challenge the buried, unconscious images of another person. If we assume that this was his method with Tarkovsky too, all the exploration here shows, however, that Guerra, in the guise of ‘devil’s advocate’, also needed to expose himself personally and culturally for the sake of the characters and the fictional world of the film, and not just to remain the passive recipient of another man’s visions.

For Nostalgia the ‘analytic process’ of gathering and sketching mate-rial happened at first primarily over the telephone between Italy and Soviet Russia. Later it was replaced by personal travel, which now appears as a methodical journey, an exploration of the themes and materials of the film as well. Travelling also gave Guerra another stance to be adopted in his role as a co-writer. He was the guide, as Virgil was to Dante, the one who knew where they were going and where they wanted to go and should go. He was giving space for Tarkovsky’s own ideas and images, as affected by Italy, to rise into the process at their

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own pace. Thus he seemed to be the driving force of the project during this time, propelling both of them forwards like a quasi-producer.

In addition to the roles of the analyst and the guide, there is yet one side of Guerra’s expertise as a screenwriter fully at work in the writing of Nostalgia, as it was in the screenplays of Antonioni too; his work with structure and cinematic images in the medium of words. Some of the elemental images of the film arose as expressions of Tarkovsky’s inner self, from sketches written in his diary many years before. To make a complete narrative stand on its feet, a wider and more sig-nificantly defined flow of ideas, themes and images was needed. Most importantly, it required the poetic, dramatic and narrative skills of a professional, Antonioni’s ‘technical sweetness’ mentioned above, for the dynamic relationship of the story to be constructed.

What counts in the task of the screenwriter the most is what to make out of all the material brought up by these or any other methods and, most importantly, how to build them into meaningful constella-tions, structural and syntactic units and a moving image narrative, into a ‘language’ of cinema, without shattering the often very abstract and fragile core ideas and the mystery involved in their creation.

To conclude, the authorship here should be considered not in terms of a personal signature, but more according to the mathematics of the child and the madman as they appear in Guerra’s oeuvre; as one plus one equals one, so Guerra and Tarkovsky’s work constitutes a whole in which one is inseparable from the other. Even though Tarkovsky can be seen as the ‘auteur of auteurs’, he nonetheless allowed Guerra to be a poet in the practice of screenwriting. Thus he makes Guerra a creator, not just serving Tarkovsky, but rather conceiving the story and the visual and poetic world of the film. Furthermore, what their liaison suggests is that, at its best, collaborative screenwriting – the shared authorship between a writer and a director on a screenplay – can be an organic and intimate thinking process shared between two creative minds, arising from the specificity of the film’s visual vocabulary, and its conditions and possibilities.

REFERENCES

Amarcord (1973), Wrs: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Dir: Federico Fellini, Italy, 127 min.

Angelopoulos, Theodo-ros and Fainaru, Dan (2001), Angelopoulos Theo:

Interviews, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Antonioni, Michelangelo (1963), Screenplays of Antonioni, New York: Orion Press.

—— (2007), ‘Mitä olen halunnut sanoa’, Filmihullu, 6, pp. 28–32.

Astruc, Alexandre (1968 [1948]), ‘The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo’, in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, pp. 17–23. (Orig.‘Du stylo à la caméra et de la caméra au stylo’, in L’Écran Française, March 1948).

Bondanella, Peter E. (2001), Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, London: Continuum.

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Blow-up (1966), Wrs: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Julio Cortázar, Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/UK, 111 min.

Burke, Frank (2002), Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto:

University of Toronto Press.

Casanova ‘70 (1965), Wrs: Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Tonino Guerra, Agenore Incrocci, Mario Monicelli et. al., Dir: Mario Monicelli, Italy, 113 min.

Chatman, Seymour (1985), Antonioni, Or the Surface of the World, Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Chatman, Seymour and Duncan, Paul (eds) (2004), Michelangelo Antonioni:

The Investigation, Köln: Taschen.

Godard, Jean-Luc (1984), Elokuva Godardin mukaan (ed. Sakari Toiviainen), Helsinki: Love-kirjat.

Guerra, Tonino (1979), ‘Tarkovsky at the Mirror’, Panorama, 676: 3, http://

www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Tarkovsky_

Guerra-1979.html. Accessed 25 May 2009.

Il Deserto Rosso/The Red Desert (1964), Wrs: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Dr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 120 min.

La Notte/Night (1961), Wrs: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra, Dir: Michelangelo Antionioni, Italy, 122 min.

L’Avventura/The Adventure (1960), Wrs: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini, Dr: Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 145 min.

L’Eclisse/Eclipse (1962), Wrs: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini, Ottiero Ottieri, Dir: Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 118 min.

McKee, Robert (1997), Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, New York: Regan Books.

Machiavelli, Niccolo (2004), ‘Il pericoloso filo rosso delle cose Tonino Guerra e l(ad)oggi’, in Giacomo Martini (ed.), Tonino Guerra, Modena: Regione Emilia-Romagna, pp. 242–60.

Marrone, Gaetana and Puppa, Paolo (2006), Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, Raton: CRC Press.

Nostalghia/Nostalgia (1983), Wrs: Tonino Guerra, Andrei Tarkovsky, Dir:

Andrei Tarkovsky, Italy/Soviet Union, 125 min.

Norman, Mark (2007), What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting, New York: Random House.

Pellizzari, Lorenzo (2004), ‘Un filo rosso per il cinema italiano’, in Giacomo Martini (ed.), Tonino Guerra, Modena: Regione Emilia-Romagna, pp. 218–40.

Rohdie, Sam (1990), Antonioni, London: British Film Institute.

Stempel, Tom (2000), Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Synessios, Natasha (1999), ‘Introduction’, in Andrei Tarkovsky, Collected Screenplays (trans. and eds William Powell and Natasha Synessios), London: Faber and Faber.

Tarkovski, Andrei (1989), Martyrologia (kotimaassa): päiväkirjat 1970–1981 (ed. Larisa Tarkovskaja, trans. Kari Klemelä), Helsinki: Mabuse.

—— (1994), Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986 (trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair), London: Faber and Faber.

—— (1999), Collected Screenplays (trans. and eds William Powell and Natasha Synessios), London: Faber and Faber.

Tempo di viaggio/Voyage in Time (1983), Wrs: Tonino Guerra, Andrei Tarkovsky, Dirs: Tonino Guerra, Andrei Tarkovsky, Italy, 62 min.

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129 Uomini e lupi/Men and Wolves (1956), Wrs: Giuseppe de Santis, Tonino Guerra,

Ivo Petrilli, Elio Petri, Tullio Pinelli, Cesare Zavattini, Dir: Giuseppe de Santis, Italy, 94 min.

Zerkalo/The Mirror (1974), Wrs: Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Misharin, Dir:

Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union, 106 min.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Pelo, R. (2010), ‘Tonino Guerra: the screenwriter as a narrative technician or as a poet of images? Authorship and method in the writer–director relationship’, Journal of Screenwriting 1: 1, pp. 113–129, doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.113/1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Riikka Pelo is a Finnish novelist and a screenwriter currently working on her Ph.D. by practice in screenwriting in the University of Art and Design, Helsinki. Her novel, The Heaven-Bearer, will be published in English by The Twisted Spoon Press (Czech Republic/USA) in 2010.

Contact: University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland.

E-mail: [email protected]

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131 Journal of Screenwriting | Volume 1 Number 1

© 2010 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.1.1.131/1

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