Abstract

This essay from 1982, written in a fragmentary and experimental literary style, addresses the idea of a scene in both cinema and life. A scene is defined as a given, pre-written situation, a familiar or universal human experience captured in the audiovisual media of film and television as an ever-repeatable cliché. These clichés weave together to form a rigid and ideologically conservative Book of Life, informing numerous representations in Western culture. The essay begins by evoking the content and form of typical scenes in narrative cinema: crisis, death, confrontation, decision, and so on. It then considers the 20th century's Modernist art challenges to the idea of the scene: breaking a scene down, dissolving it, downplaying it, eliding it, and escaping it.

Keywords: Scene, script, Chantal Akerman, Brian De Palma, Modernism

We ask our pupils, then, who have finished their books in a couple of sittings and are eager to go onto other books, to tell the story of one moment, one scene, when the hero learned a lesson or gained an insight or had to act in a dilemma. We need to have reports on the exciting moments, on moments that are dramatic, funny, adventurous, violent; but we are looking for those searching moments that brought forth a decision or gave birth to a dream.