The basic art of motion pictures is the screenplay; it is fundamental.

Raymond Chandler, mystery novelist and twice Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Without it there is nothing ........

If you want to be a writer and a great one at that, don’t start by reading the theory of writing. Just write. Hear Terry Rossio in Wordplay, “"Those who can, do, those who can't, teach‘ maxim. Writing about writing is, in a way, an admission of defeat.” And this was confirmed by a linguistics professor friend of mine, Professor Andrew Haruna, during the fund-raising ceremony for my first novel which was later published without the need for the fund. In introduction, he says writers give us lecturers jobs. They write what you teach. “And so, Lere, I would say, please continue writing. Without you, we have no job.” He concluded to the applause from the audience on that night.

            The same maxim holds for script writers. If you think about genre and such matters, you will never write that story. If you have the thought, yes the very idea about a story, just write. By the time you complete it, the story will find its own genre or a genre will find it.

            In talking about film and theatre and how they impact on the society, we shall not be talking about genres because, films and theatre plays have no departments in the Muse but messages. It is these messages that translate into the stories. It is these stories that translate into action. It is this action that is recorded by cameras or watched by people as film or theatre play. The naming ceremony of genre comes after the film and theatre have been translated into action by the actors on the screen or stage.

            Without talking genres, we want to explore the role of the film and theatre in the society. To do this we need to begin with the effect of film or theatre on society. We begin with film. To do this, we need  a quick immersion in the life of the script. The script brings together characters with different backgrounds, life experiences, dreams, likes and reservations into the single space of the script. The story in real life takes far longer than what it takes on the screen to play out. For historical film, this may cover a whole century what it takes the characters, drawn from diverse ages and generation and in some cases different cultural backgrounds, to cover as embodiment of historical event in two hours or more. As a work of art, the film overcomes geographical barriers and temporal limitations.

            When a film is watched, various forms of human awareness are compressed into a single story. Let’s see how this works out by immersing in the mind of the writer. She begins with an idea. Strange Car Stealer. The story wants to change the stereotype about those who steal cars, for example. Stereotypical thinking is the pasture of lazy heads. The shortest route to lack of a head to use on what matters is to say things or people are like that. And so the shortest route to producing human robots is to feed people with stereotypes. In the case of the stolen car, the mental muster is that the car that is going to disappear in the story is stolen by a very poor hapless, helpless and vindictive desperado whose sense of value is in the gutter. The writer wants to show that life in its immense creative possibilities, has nothing to do with stereotypes which is the reason why no two people are the same, why no two leaves have the same lines criss-crossing them on the tree, while,  even where history repeats itself, the uniform is never the same and the actors differ too.

            Now the idea is there. Strange Car Stealer. Its central message is that the robin hoods have different motives which put them in different classes. The owner of the car is an old man. He has a daughter. The daughter is married. Together with her husband, they have four children. For many years the family could not travel out of town to spend some days together on holiday in summer. The location is Europe. The town is Hamburg. Somehow, this year (of the story) they have a windfall of a present. They can at last spend some days out of town in summer. But the money is not enough to rent a car for the family. And train tickets they could not afford too. The father-inlaw says not to worry, you can have my car. They travel to their holiday resort enjoying the cozy room of a large car, an Audi to be precise, for the first time ever as a family. It is a beautiful holiday. They come back. They park the car on the street. But then the parents forget their wallet which contains all their documents including the Eurocheck card and identity cards and driving license in the car. The wife remembers early in the morning and runs to the car. Gone! The car is no longer there. She reports the matter. The search begins. A week later the car is found around the bend. The door is left open. Nothing is removed except the purse which contains twenty euro. The money is removed but the purse and the Eurocard and all other documents with which the thief could make thousands were the owner of the car to be that rich are inside the car. So what kind of thief is that? The strange thing about that story has just begun. Stranger things occur during the pursuit of the thief. He is shot but he runs away. He leaves his fingerprint on the purse. The search continues with the clue. And of course, he alone, even though he was shot on the ankle and gets away with it, stages a showdown that puts the whole town in panic for almost an hour. One strange thing is that while working with stereotype, the search for the car was not launched initially in the vicinity of where it was stolen and where it was eventually found but in another parts of and faraway to the town. Strange are the infliction and the mindset of stereotype!

            Now, there are many stories built into a single story in Strange Car Stealer. One of them is the story of a father inlaw’s Audi that was stolen in front of the house. The other is the story of a stolen car of a dancer which she told me after both of us watched Hans im Gluck (Hans All Luck) at the Stadttheater Cöppernick (City Theatre) Coeppernick, a surburb of Berlin. The two stories are woven together because they have something in common: car theft. The first car was not found but the second was found with all the documents, except twenty euro that was removed, intact. The continuation of the story from where the car is found builds from the concept of strangeness that surrounds the form in which the car was found. An element of strangeness, some kind of unusualness that shatters stereotypes, is made to constitute the central idea from which other actions spring throughout the story.

            The message of this story is addressed to the person and the society. There is a philosophical aspect which  contains a lesson for all. To the person, it is that stealing doesn’t pay in the end. The robber is shot in the leg during a showdown later in the story. We can also surmise that he abandons the car hastily as he suspects that somebody shouts at him who sees that he is inside a stolen car. Before he runs away from where he parks the car at the corner, he removes the money. On abandoning the car in haste, he couldn’t take anything along with him. Just a surmise.

He leaves his fingerprint on the purse for the DNA test to track him down. The search continues. To the society it shows that stereotypical thinking dulls the ability to reach and see the truth about persons, places and things. In general, the philosophical aspect shows that what we are looking for in faraway places is or could just be around the corner. In other words, solutions to problems may be just here, indeed right inside the person, while the person looks beyond home and even launches into the world searching for the green pastures.

            Everywhere is combed for the car in faraway places when it is just around the corner, very close to where it was stolen.

            The thief is vindictive for sure but when the film traces him to his family, we got to know that he was summarily dismissed from work by a personnel manager who didn’t like him. That‘s no motive and there is no motive for stealing and that’s why conscience is there.

            One enters the court of conscience on whatever one does and where there is no acquittal from it, whatever the facts of the case may be in the court of law, the person is guilty. In the case of the thief we could say his conscience is dead. But where conscience is dead, the man is dead too.

            The point is that having seen what he passes through, is the viewer ready to forgive him when he is eventually caught? Does his character show him to be a hardened case? Is he still a human being in spite of his failing, that is, judging from how he speaks, how he walks, how, as a family man, he carries himself? All these features will go into the viewer reaching the verdict about the thief. What is important is that this thief is a member of the society. How much of what we know about the thief and what he does and of the same people in the same estate of life in the society can we use as inroad to the structure of the society that constitutes his social environment, part of the source of his identity?

            In fact how much of the mirror of the society does this thief represent? Could he have been a rich person with a wealth of kindness in a society other than the one in which he was born? And while saying this, is it fair at all to use his type as the mirror on the society that is made up preponderantly of innocent and hard-working people who do everything to protect their honour? A viewer leaves the cinema loaded not only with the implications of the central message of the film for his life and society but also about how much of what he does not know about the society is revealed through the film. The film provides also a tour of human possibilities. There may be a romantic scene which shows the viewer what he has been missing all his life about women. The other way is true too.

            Thus a film which mirrors the possibilities of the human psyche brings to the fore the personal and the collective experience on the canvas – the screen – for appreciation, the centrepoint of which is judgement that relates the film to the person, the society and the world.

            The same thing holds true for the theatre too. With this difference. The theatre brings the characters before us on stage while the film brings them to us on the screen. However they come, they are the same. As every script writer who watches the characters coming to life on the paper as she sees them on the screen of the mind before the eyes knows, the actors and actresses are not just role-players. They are replicators of the life in hyper-dimension. This is because in the beginning was the story. The story is based on characters that, like the entities of pure mathematics, live in spiritual world and so cannot be seen physically nor touched practially.

The only difference is that while the entities of mathematics are not only pure but holy the characters of the script that constitutes the soul of the film are the people we meet. The writer can see them and interact with them. These characters now become persons. They are born into the world.    These inhabitants of the spiritual plane have to overcome space and time by breaking down the physicality of geographical boundaries and breaking through the protectionism of nationalism and the culture of myopic apartness than nurtures nationalism. They now come to the world to show us how to live the common thread of humanity.

            So it is not role-playing what acting is but the replication of life to the extent that is permissible in a world that folds space and time into here and now.

Lere O. Shakunle

Editor-in-Chief

Transfigural Mathematics

Berlin, Germany

shakunle@versanet.de

Being the Editorial of the latest edition of the Journal of Transfigural Mathematics, July 2007

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