16

The Primacy of Character Over Action: The Non-American Screenplay

One of our goals with this book is to contextualize screenwriting as a form of storytelling related to and growing out of early forms of storytelling. Another of our goals is to challenge the myth that a single formula, form, or structure is sufficient to write a good screenplay. In this chapter, we challenge another myth—the myth that European and Asian films are a different type of screenplay and that what we have implicitly ascribed so far in this book is only applicable to American screenplays.

It is our goal to bring some clarity to the discussion of the non-American screenplay by illustrating how it is similar to as well as different from the American screenplay. In order to do so, however, it is critical to put forth the rationale for this chapter. The dramatized nature of the rationale is purposeful.

The Rationale

The contentious issues about non-American screenplays vs. American screenplays are best characterized by the following five statements:

1.  European and Asian films differ so greatly from American films as to be considered a distinct form of storytelling. Often we see the observation made that European film is high culture and American film is pop culture. Many perceive European and Asian film as cultural and American film as purely entertainment.

2.  Ideas about screenwriting, particularly those developed in the United States in the past 20 years, are not applicable to European and Asian film.

3.  Both European/Asian and American films are forms of storytelling with more similarities than differences.

4.  Those differences, where they do exist, are principally cultural and could be described as preferential storytelling strategies rather than as a different form of storytelling.

5.  The dominance of American film in the past 20 years can be attributed to an international preference for action-oriented, foreground or plot-driven screen stories over background or character-driven screen stories.

By looking at European/Asian screen stories and by using case-study comparisons, we will explore these five propositions to arrive at our assessment of how wide a difference there is between the American screen story and the non-American screen story.

Classical European and Asian Film

When one looks over the breadth of classical European and Asian storytelling, one is struck by the literary quality of the work, whether considering the Tagore adaptations by Satyajit Ray or the Zola adaptations by Jean Renoir. Indeed, if we look at writers such as Dostoevsky, we can readily find French, Japanese, and American adaptations of their work. And if we look at a popular American writer such as Ed McBain, we can find Japanese as well as American adaptations of his work.

Our point here is that whether one is looking at an American version, a French version, a Russian version, or a Japanese version, the literary qualities, the storytelling virtues that made the original endure, transcend national boundaries. They are great stories and, in many cases, have become fine film stories. To explore this notion of a close, literary cross-national boundary to classical stories, we need only look more closely at a number of great non-European writer-directors.

Beginning with the work of Ingmar Bergman, we can distill certain storytelling characteristics to his work. Bergman has a propensity for domestic melodrama and moralistic fables—in essence, life lessons. His style is very reminiscent of theater, in which he also works—his stories often have a dialogue-intensive quality. Referred to more than once as the spiritual descendant of August Strindberg, Bergman is distinct but easily identified in the mainstream of storytelling. Like all great storytellers, his insight into human behavior transcends national boundaries.

Frederico Fellini, at least in the first part of his career, had many of the same storytelling qualities as Bergman has. Working most often with co-writers Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, Fellini was also influenced by theater, principally by Pirandello. Fellini’s screen stories can be viewed as an exploration of particular character types—the fool, the clown, the brute, and the cynic and their attempted relationships—and the comedy and tragedy of everyday lives. His artistic point of view is unique, but as a storyteller, Fellini, too, is part of the larger tradition of storytelling.

We can draw similar comparisons between Luchino Visconti and Leo Tolstoy, and between François Truffaut and the great early French filmic storyteller Jean Vigo. And we can look at the relationship from another perspective—how literary figures, such as novelists and playwrights, have been the screenwriters of many of the most famous European films. Jacques Prévert wrote Marcel Carné’s famous Children of Paradise; Charles Spaak, working with Renoir, was responsible for La Grande Illusion; and Raymond Chandler worked with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity. What would the later career of Luis Buñuel be like without the storytelling skills of Jean-Claude Carrière? Would Volker Schlöndorff have been as successful without the script collaboration of his wife, Margaret Von Trotta? And what would Howard Hawks’s classic film noir films have been like without the novelist Leigh Brackett? Whether American or European, the classic filmmakers have aligned themselves with the best writers possible. Their great work stands out internationally in the transnational tradition of storytelling.

Perhaps no filmmaker has been as international in his work as has Akira Kurosawa. As a writer-director, Kurosawa has adapted at least two Shakespearean plays; Macbeth became Throne of Blood and King Lear became Ran. Kurosawa also adapted Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and Gorki’s The Lower Depths. In addition, Kurosawa has adapted the work of Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashômon and has written original work as well.

To restate, classic European and Japanese screen stories tend to be part of the broader panorama of storytelling. In this sense, the international fame of Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa is far easier to understand.

Exceptions

Although we could apply the three-act structure, main character–secondary character, and foreground–background strategies to classical European and Asian films and determine that there are more similarities than differences, there are exceptions. As with the examples of much of Spike Lee’s work in the feature film and of Su Friedrich’s work in experimental narrative, there are filmmakers who disregard three-act structure for two-act structure and who seek vehicles beyond the main character to express their particular voices. Those filmmaker-writers, such as Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard, attempt to tell their stories in unique ways. Some, such as Godard and Buñuel, use the conventions of storytelling as their basis. In doing so, they subvert storytelling methodology as much as use it. Others, such as Antonioni, subvert our notions about character and plot. Still others, such as Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, challenge a single narrative strategy and focus on how dialogue subverts the visual action (or vice versa), and yet others subvert the form of the genre, as Rainer Werner Fassbinder does in melodrama and Werner Herzog does in the adventure film, both in Aguirre, Wrath of God and in Fitzcarraldo.

At the heart of these exceptions is an exploratory narrative intention—with structure in the case of Resnais (Muriel) and Antonioni (L’Eclisse), with irony as applied to structure and character in the case of Buñuel (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) and Godard (Weekend), and with character identification in the case of Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses) and Jodorowsky (El Topo). This impulse to experiment, to find interior stories, and to contradict convention is not exclusive to non-American film. There are many examples of experimental work in American film, yet it is more often associated in an evaluative sense with non-American film.

European and Asian Experiments in Foreground Stories

In spite of the superficial impression that European and Asian films are principally character driven, there have been many efforts in non-American film at foreground or plot-driven stories. Beyond the Indian musical and the Asian science fiction films, a number of important writers and directors have tried their hand at foreground stories.

François Truffaut made a thriller, The Bride Wore Black, while Akira Kurosawa made a gangster film, High and Low, as well as two films remade from classic Westerns, The Seven Samurai, remade as The Magnificent Seven, and Yojimbo, remade as A Fistful of Dollars. Phillipe de Broca made the adventure film That Man From Rio, and Luc Besson has even mixed genres in the thriller-police story La Femme Nikita. In addition, Bo Widerberg made a straightforward police story called Man on the Roof, and well-known writers such as Jean-Claude Carrière have written gangster films, including Borsalino. In fact, American genre films have been a mainstay in national European cinemas—the Western in Germany, the gangster film in Italy, and the situation comedy in France. All of these genres are principally foreground stories.

Our point here is that the foreground story hasn’t been the exclusive domain of America, nor has background storytelling been the exclusive domain of non-Americans.

The Success of Old-Fashioned Storytelling: The Australian Case

Few countries have been as successful in exporting film talent and in capturing international attention as have Australia and New Zealand. Directors now working internationally include Phillip Noyce (Clear and Present Danger), Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy), Fred Schepisi (Six Degrees of Separation), Peter Weir (Witness), George Miller (Lorenzo’s Oil), Roger Donaldson (No Way Out), Jane Campion (The Piano), and Paul Hogan (My Best Friend’s Wedding). From 1974 to 1994, the outpouring of fascinating narratives, from Miller’s The Road Warrior, to Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, to Vincent Ward’s The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey, to Campion’s An Angel at My Table, has been remarkable. It is our contention that the success of these non-American films as a whole is due to the storytelling skills exhibited. In a sense, these films and this movement represent storytelling at its old-fashioned best.

The virtues of storytelling can be grouped in three areas: character, structure, and voice. In all of these areas, the films of Australia and New Zealand have shared a vision that is striking. In terms of character, these narratives test the nature of both men and women against the prevailing power structure, whether it is the British mother country, the land itself, or, for female characters, the male power structure.

Character is explored in Breaker Morant, a story of three lieutenants who are accused of murder during the Boer War. The drama is not only enhanced by the severity of the charges, but is compounded by the fact that the lieutenants are Australians fighting as part of the British forces. In Gallipoli, this tension between British politics and Australian principle and sacrifice is also explored. The subject is played for adventure in The Lighthorsemen, but more often the British wars and the Australian role in them provide a layer of drama that strengthens the sense of the characters: they have not only the Germans or Boers to contend with, they also have the British. The resulting dramas make for a heroic sense of character. Individualistic, strong-willed but generous, the Australian main character is certainly appealing. The same sense of character infuses the female protagonists in The Piano and My Brilliant Career. Australian main characters in these films are goal directed, willful, and energetic; in short, they are appealing.

In terms of structure, character-driven stories such as The Piano also exhibit a boldness of dramatic clash as much as a vigor of plot, as in The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith. Whether character-driven or plot-driven, these films use structure to intensify the narrative. Breaker Morant moves between the past (the events) and the present (the trial) of the three soldiers in a dynamic and urgent manner. Few foreground stories unfold as boldly as the adventure form does in The Road Warrior. Just as with character, there is a confident utilization of classical dramatic structure in these films. Attention is paid to joining the story at a useful critical moment.

Finally, these films have a tone that marks them as unique and committed. Beginning with a respect for genre, writer-directors such as George Miller bring an over-the-top zeal to making The Road Warrior, an adventure story to top all other adventure stories, while Jane Campion brings a poetic, complex feminism to the melodrama in all of her work, especially The Piano. Whether the racial rage in The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith is due to Thomas Keneally’s original novel or to Fred Schepisi’s passion, there is a definite point of view that drives the narrative. Other countries deal with issues such as racism by using irony and metaphor; not so the Australians. They have a directness that makes the narrative incredible rather than simply credible. Tone, structure, and character have all been used in the old-fashioned or classic sense to tell tales we may recognize, but they are told in such a way that we don’t forget them. This immediacy, passion, and storytelling strength—this approach explains the success of Australian and New Zealand films. It also explains why so many veterans of that movement are now prominent Hollywood filmmakers.

Success of Personal Storytelling: German French, and Hungarian Examples

The reputation of European and Asian film rests on the intimate storytelling identities of filmmakers such as Bergman, Fellini, Renoir, Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Ray. This tradition—call it personal vision—is so marked that, in the minds of many in the audience, European filmmaking is associated with personal filmmaking and with many others in the business of film art and its expression. This reputation is the context in which to consider a number of current European writer-directors, who are very much in the mold of the personal tradition.

Although many of the German filmmakers are essentially genre filmmakers (Fassbinder, melodrama; Wenders, the road subgenre of melodrama), there are writer-directors, such as Werner Herzog, who fall into the category of personal filmmaking. The result from a narrative perspective is that Herzog is likely to make adventure films with considerable background story (Aguirre, Wrath of God) and melodramas with considerable plot (The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser). In this sense, Herzog follows a different tradition—the artistic tradition of breaking the rules, challenging the conventions, and creating an artful alternative.

Like Herzog in Germany, Louis Malle and Éric Rohmer in France push the classic parameters of storytelling. Malle is as interested in the negative character in Lacombe Lucien as he was in Le Feu Follet. In Atlantic City, he challenges the story form and produces a gangster film with considerable background story and a motif twist: the gangster not only survives, he thrives. In Murmur of the Heart, he challenges the narrative tone of the classic war film. Malle makes his films his own by challenging narrative convention.

A similar pattern characterizes the moral tales of Éric Rohmer. Whether one considers Claire’s Knee or Summer, and whether the issue is sexuality or the permanence of relationships, Rohmer uses ironic structure, character, and dialogue to probe the behavior of his characters in a series of melodramas he calls his moral tales. Although they are more difficult to identify with, his characters nevertheless have enough determination to keep us curious as to whether they will succeed or fail.

Finally, in Hungary, István Szabó has maintained a singularly personal view of life. As with Rohmer, there is an irony in Szabó’s approach to character. In Father, his concern is personal relations in a communist period; in Mephisto, his concern is personal relations in the Fascist period; in Colonel Redl, his concern is personal relations in an anti-Semitic period; and in his English-language film Meeting Venus, his concern is personal relations in an artistic period. Szabó, as you can assume, is always fascinated by the irony of human behavior, by the will to survive, and by the will to find love. Szabó’s is an ironic approach to narrative, but as with his spiritual mentor, Luchino Visconti, he is capable of great feeling and empathy. In both cases he follows his own personal direction in the tradition so well identified by Bergman and Fellini.

Case Studies

Emir Kusterica and Gordan Mihiś have written a classic melodrama in Time of the Gypsies. In exploring this film, we will determine how it is different from, and how it is similar to, American melodrama.

In scale, Time of the Gypsies is comparable to the work of the great novelists Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dreiser. A young boy, Pheran, is brought up by his grandmother. He wears thick glasses and looks sickly. His sister is physically disabled, and his mother died giving birth to her. Only a vagrant uncle provides a perspective on the gypsy adult male and family life. The story follows Pheran through his youthful romanticism to his adult paranoia. He joins a local gypsy criminal as he travels to Italy to make money. En route, they drop off Pheran’s sister for medical treatment. Pheran leaves the girl whom he loves in the village, and her family totally rejects him.

Later, prosperous, Pheran returns and marries the girl. When he discovers she is pregnant, he does not believe it is his child, and his wife dies in childbirth. He also discovers that he has been deceived by his criminal patron. His sister was never medically treated but was instead used as a beggar on the streets of Rome. He sends his sister and his son back home and seeks out his former patron. As he kills him, he is also killed. At Pheran’s funeral, his son, now 4 years old, steals the gold coins that cover Pheran’s eyes.

This brief synopsis cannot do justice to the richness of the narrative of Time of the Gypsies. The detailing of the script creates a sense of the gypsy subculture and of the male character Pheran, who starts out optimistically but is doomed. He is doomed because he cannot accept his wife as faithful and as the mother of his child. This paranoia seems endemic among the men, who change wives as readily as Americans change jobs. But there is another unique quality to Pheran and to his culture—he has a primitive belief in a world that embraces superstition and magic. Consequently, in his world, personal will, divining, and magic all play an active part.

As with classic melodrama, there are characters who help Pheran, mainly the women, and there are characters who oppose him, mainly the men. The power structure that Pheran tries to challenge is the economic power structure of his village. The criminal is on top, with most of the villagers eking out a living. Only by establishing his base in Italy—that is, outside Yugoslavia—can the criminal enjoy prosperity. When Pheran attempts to join this power structure, the poison of deception infiltrates his ideology and he believes he has been deceived by his wife. In reality, he has been deceived by his patron, not his wife. Once he has crossed over to the model of his patron, Pheran is doomed.

As in classic melodrama, Time of the Gypsies has a strong background story. It differs from the classic melodrama in two areas: it has a far more elaborate plot than is usually found in melodrama, and it spends a great deal of Act One acclimatizing us to the gypsy culture before it introduces the main character. This latter decision may not be so much cultural subjectivity as much as essential exposition, given the lack of widespread knowledge about gypsy culture and its importance to the story. In tone, the film shares the ironic position so often used in central Europe. Consequently, humor plays a very important part in drawing us into what is essentially a tragic melodrama. Even after the death of Pheran, Kusterica uses humor in the last scenes—the stealing of the gold coins and the hasty departure of Pheran’s uncle. Summing up, Time of the Gypsies is a classic melodrama with modifications in tone and in the pace of the story, particularly in Act One.

As with so many other central European writers and directors, Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz have deployed an ironic structure to explore the life of a contemporary young woman. Far more subtle in their irony than either Kusterica or Szabó, Kieślowski and Piesiewicz sidestep the political dynamics in favor of the psychological.

The Double Life of Véronique is about two young women, Véronique in France and Veronica in Poland. Both were born at the same time and grew up to look alike, but do not know each other, at least not consciously. Veronica is a musician, a gifted singer who dies in the midst of a performance. At that moment, Véronique is making love and suddenly feels a sense of loss. She gives up her voice lessons, without understanding or explaining why. The story that ensues is about Véronique falling in love with a man who is a puppeteer and writer. Véronique seems to know what he will do to reach out to her, even though she has only seen him once at a children’s school performance. As the relationship develops, Véronique is aware of a level of knowing, of consciousness that anticipates emotion and events, as if she’s had another life. Near the end, the puppeteer finds a picture he believes to be of Véronique from her visit to Krakow, but it is a picture of Veronica. Finally, there is a conscious acknowledgment of the other Veronica. The writers connect the two women beyond appearances. Each is very close to her father, each lost her mother at a young age, and each has a musical talent.

In terms of the structure, the notion of having a dramatic double invites the character and the viewer to reflect on the character. The double is the distancing device. The question in The Double Life of Véronique is: What purpose does irony serve? Véronique is lively, beautiful, appealing—an example of a positive life force. And yet the double, Veronica, dies suddenly in Krakow. It’s as if Kieślowski and Piesiewicz are exploring, through a young, attractive woman, the loss, the fear of loss, and, inevitably, the fear of dying. By giving Véronique a double, the writers explore the dialectic between living and dying and, in the course of doing so, comment upon the quality of life. For Véronique to live means to love and to remember the other Veronica, who represents the cumulative losses in Véronique’s life.

Another reading of the structure is to view the device as a way of depicting gaining control of events. When Véronique knows what will happen via the other Veronica, she can protect herself. This more cautious view of living is reflected in the puppeteer as well—he makes puppets of Véronique and Veronica, but tells Véronique that he uses the double only if injury or destruction occurs to the original during a performance. The artist, in this case the puppeteer and writer, is as cautious as Véronique is.

The Double Life of Véronique provides but one example of ironic structure. Kieślowski’s work is often ironic in its structure—White and A Short Film About Love are powerful because they use ironic structure. But again, Kieślowski uses irony in a more delicate and subtle manner than do many other central European writers and directors.

Comparing American and non-American treatments of the same subject yields other insights into the deployment of the mix of narrative strategies. Ghost, written by American Bruce Joel Rubin, and Truly, Madly, Deeply, written by Briton Anthony Minghella, are both stories of male–female relationships in which the man dies unexpectedly. A major part of the story is how the woman copes with the loss. In both stories, the supernatural is invoked, and the dead male plays a significant role; in essence, the relationship continues in spite of death.

In Ghost, the main character (Patrick Swayze) is killed in a robbery. Unsatisfied with his departure from life, he hovers between worlds; he is in essence a ghost. He tries to communicate with his wife (Demi Moore), but only when he uses a medium (Whoopi Goldberg) does he communicate with her successfully. Before he goes to the other world, however, he must protect his wife from the advances of his best friend, and he discovers it was his friend who had him killed. Once he has settled the score, he can say good-bye and move on to the other world. In Ghost, the male is the main character and his goal is to move on with his loved one’s affairs in order. By doing so, his love is confirmed in the life of his wife.

The main character in Truly, Madly, Deeply is a woman (Nina, Juliet Stevenson) who has lost her lover (Alan Rickman). Her goal is never to let go of her grief. All men, including her landlord and her boss, seem to love her, or at least want to protect her. But her grief is so deep that her lover returns as a ghost, and she is happy. At the same time, a teacher who works with limited young adults falls in love with Nina. He is the opposite of her lover—unsure, but startling in his honesty. Now Nina lives with a ghost and is pursued by an earnest mortal. Who she chooses is the substance of the second half of the script.

One clear difference between the two treatments of the story is the main character. Ghost is told from the point of view of the ghost; Truly, Madly, Deeply is told from the point of view of the survivor, the one who has to go on living in the light of the loss. This choice of main character puts the British film in the more realistic camp, while the use of a supernatural being as the main character makes Ghost principally a fantasy. This tonal difference is an issue we will return to.

Another difference between the stories is their emphasis. Ghost is plot intensive, while Truly, Madly, Deeply is character or background story intensive. In fact, Ghost has considerable foreground. The plot focuses on the killing of the main character, his own investigation of the killing, and the resolution of the foreground story—the killing of the best friend, who is the antagonist of the story. The background story of Ghost focuses on love and loss in the relationship between husband and wife. The believability and emotional complexity of the background story is seriously eroded by the dramatic device of a comic medium, which allows the dead husband and living wife to communicate with one another.

Truly, Madly, Deeply, on the other hand, has very little plot. The background story unfolds after the level of the main character’s grief and longing are revealed. By Act Two, when her lover returns as a ghost and the teacher begins to pursue her, we proceed along the classic relationship triangle: Whom will she choose? Once she has made her choice for life, a choice to bear a child, her ghost lover recedes, and she begins her life again. The entire story has been, in essence, the main character’s mourning over her loss. The resolution of the background story, her choice for life, ends this deeply emotional, painful story on an upbeat note. Ghost, on the other hand, ends with the admission of loss and the transcendence of the relationship beyond mortality into that realm best described as “foreverland.” Truly, Madly, Deeply, having moved into the fantastic in Act Two, ends as it began, realistically, whereas Ghost ends reaching romantically for new heights in fantasy.

To sum up, the two films differ considerably. Not only is the point of view chosen by Minghella in Truly, Madly, Deeply more realistic, so, too, is the resolution of the story. By using background story over plot, Minghella creates more complex, believable characters, and he explores a difficult interior issue, loss. Rubin, on the other hand, has written a romantic fantasy about loss. Ghost is plot intensive, and its tone never veers from the fantastic. Ghost consequently requires an antagonist, whereas Truly, Madly, Deeply doesn’t. The main character is both protagonist and antagonist. When she lets go of her grief, she overcomes her loss.

Generally, we expect a main character to sit in the middle of the screen story. The screen stories in this case study, however, differ. All three films, Dances With Wolves, Black Robe, and Close to Eden (Urga), position their characters differently. Each could be called an East-meets-West story.

Dances With Wolves, written by Michael Blake, is set in the post-Civil War West. The main character, Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner), is a white man assigned to an abandoned fort. We sense he is fed up with war and the white man. He is first curious about and eventually utterly taken with his neighbors, the Sioux. The story is essentially about the clash of native culture with the dominant Eurocentric white culture. Dunbar clearly comes to admire and imitate the native culture. As a main character, he is an outsider who comes as close to being an insider as is possible. The foreground story follows Dunbar the soldier; the background story follows Dunbar the individual in search of his humanity. He finds this humanity in the Indian culture.

Black Robe is set 250 years earlier. The central character is a French priest, and, as in Dances With Wolves, the story deals with the clash of cultures and religions—the priest’s religion is spiritual without the physical; the Indian religion is physical, spiritual, and animistic. In this story, the priest holds to his position. He does not enter the Indian culture; instead, he attempts to alter it. In terms of the story, since so much is taken up with articulating and validating the Indian culture, the priest remains an outsider. Consequently, we stand aside from the story, not quite in an ironic position, but far more distanced from the story than was the main character in Dances With Wolves. The result is that we don’t see a victor in Black Robe. Whether this is more realistic or ascribable to cultural differences is worth considering.

Black Robe, written by Brian Moore, is an Australian–Canadian co-production made by Bruce Beresford, an exceptional filmmaker from Australia. Is the narrative distinctly non-American? The fact that almost all of the Indians (except Chomina and his family) are distinct threats to the priest’s survival in Black Robe positions the main character on the periphery of the narrative. John Dunbar in Dances With Wolves, on the other hand, is a white man in a film about a culture dying because of the white man, and he enters centrally into the narrative.

Only when we turn to the third example, Nikita Mikhalkov and Rustam Ibragimbekov’s Close to Eden, do we see a story of East meets West told entirely from the native’s point of view. In Close to Eden, the main character is a Mongol herdsman in modern Mongolia. He lives with his family on the steppes. He rides a horse, and when he wants to have a child, he follows a ritual of chasing his wife on horseback, staking a suitable hill, and displaying his banner, the urga, the equivalent of a do-not-disturb sign. A Russian trucker gets lost, and the Mongol helps rescue him. The herdsman feeds him, and the ensuing contact between the European Russian and the Asiatic Mongol grows. The Mongol visits the Russian in the town. There, more trucks and the trappings of civilization make the Mongol look ridiculous. Nevertheless, he is not embarrassed, and he makes his way. In fact, he proves to be a man of means, and he purchases a television and other gifts for his family. On the steppes, he stares at the television, clearly considering its utility. He brings the gifts, but in the end, he is unsullied in his true interests in his family and in increasing its size. However, we are left with the sense that the next generation will not be able to resist modern life as well as he has.

As in Black Robe, the Mongol is spiritual, physical, open. He is not a fool, but he does seem a naïf next to the white man, and as in Black Robe, the gulf between the two cultures is enormous. The key difference between Dances With Wolves, Black Robe, and Close to Eden is that only Close to Eden tells the native story from the perspective of a native; the story is told from the inside rather than from the outside. Also notable is that both Black Robe and Close to Eden do not seek the kind of narrative closure used in Dances With Wolves. The shape of the story is more open-ended, a rarity in the Western, a genre often defined by the gunfight or battle that brings closure. Finally, the tone of Black Robe and Close to Eden is far less romantic than that of Dances With Wolves. Irony in both cases distances us enough to consider the actions and the fate of the main character.

Few movies have been as quickly acclaimed as was Schindler’s List. The Steve Zaillian script, the Thomas Keneally book, and the Steven Spielberg direction each have been lauded. In this section, we will look at Schindler’s List as an American war film. In addition, we will look at another recent war film from Eastern Europe, Agnieszka Holland’s Europa Europa. Both are films about the Holocaust, and both mix genres, but for the purposes of our discussion, we will focus primarily on the war stories.

Zaillian’s Schindler’s List is a war film and a melodrama. The war film follows the chronology of events in Krakow from 1942 to 1945. It was throughout that period that the Jews were first placed in a ghetto; some killed there, and the survivors were shipped to concentration camps. In Schindler’s List, the German industrialist Oskar Schindler uses Jewish labor in his factories. Those who work for him are in the end saved because he retains the permission of the authorities to use Jews for labor. The result is that those 1000 to 2000 Jews who worked for Schindler survived the war. In the typical war story, the protagonist does all he can to survive. In Schindler’s List, the Jews as a group are the protagonist, and the antagonist is the Nazi commandant in charge of the Krakow labor camp. The Nazi commandant kills randomly, without pity. And for all the Jews he represents death.

In the melodrama, Schindler is the main character. He challenges the power structure of the Nazis by choosing to save Jews. Schindler’s tragedy is that he can only save a handful out of the thousands who are killed. Schindler’s List uses the war story as foreground, the plot to kill the Jews. The struggle of Oskar Schindler to save Jews from the Nazis becomes the melodramatic background story. The result is a realistic, powerful story that takes advantage of the strengths of both story forms—in essence, plot and character. The tone of the film is serious and realistic, as expected in both genres.

Europa Europa tells the story of a single Holocaust survivor, Solly Perel. He is a young adolescent, a German Jew, who does not look Jewish. His parents send him east when the war breaks out. He is separated form his older brother and taken into a Soviet boys school. As the Nazis move into the area, he flees further east, but is captured by the Germans. He makes a decision to pose as a Russian of German descent. He is accepted and survives. As he travels with an army unit, a homosexual sergeant befriends him and discovers he is a Jew. The sergeant promises not to betray him, and Solly finally feels he has a friend, but the sergeant is soon killed. The captain of the unit, an anti-Semite, is taken with Solly and offers to send him to the Hitler Youth in Germany. He will also adopt him. Back in Germany, Solly strives once more to survive, knowing that his identity as a Jew will be apparent if his friends see him naked. He takes on elaborate measures to avoid detection. He seems to be a model young Nazi, as even his teacher, another anti-Semite, claims in front of his classmates.

The next threat to Solly, however, is love. He falls in love with a young German girl but arouses suspicion when he is unable to consummate the relationship. Overwhelmed with adolescent feelings of desire and anxiety, he confesses his identity to the girl’s mother. Again, he is not given away. In fact, he eludes detection until the end of the war. About to be shot by the Russians and the Jews they have released, his brother, a survivor of a concentration camp, recognizes him and he is saved. Together they have survived the war.

Europa Europa follows a chronology, from Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938 to liberation in April 1945. A postscript shows the real Solomon Perel in Israel in 1990. As in the war film, there is a great deal of plot, or foreground story. Solly is clearly a protagonist trying to survive. The many settings and events suggest how dangerous the war is for him. His sister and later his parents and oldest brother are killed. Only his other brother survives. The war is presented in a surrealistic sense; however, since he is a non-combatant, there is a surreal quality to how relentless and eccentric death is to a boy so young.

The other genre used by Holland, however, is far less realistic and tends to exaggerate the surrealism of the story. The second layer of the film is a satire on race. Since Solly looks non-Jewish, he passes as an Aryan. His encounters with the captain and the teacher are deeply ironic, for each man professes an ability to clearly recognize anyone of Jewish descent, yet both mistake him for a non-Jewish German. Satire also allows Holland to be playful about Nazism. Solly is practicing the Nazi salute, which devolves into a jig. What is menacing to so many is amusing to him. We are reminded that he is still just a young boy, barely more than a child. Finally, the satire allows Holland to explore his fantasies, including his thoughts about Stalin and Hitler. The playfulness of the satire is of a different tone than that in the war film. Indeed, the jarring shifts in tone are such that we are left unsettled. Are we to believe this surreal tale, or is it a nightmare—imagined, not real? As we discovered with Szabó, Kusterica, and Kieślowski, irony is an important distancing device to reflect upon the fate of the character and the nature of events. The satire distances us from Solly, and we can consider the nature of the Holocaust as experienced by this one person.

Summing up, Zaillian’s script mixes compatible genres for a realistic presentation of the Holocaust and of Schindler’s role in saving Jews. Holland’s script uses satire to undermine the sense of realism of the war story so that the audience considers Solly Perel’s struggle for survival a nightmare on the level of Kosiński’s The Painted Bird, a totally irrational experience modified by the will of one individual to do anything to survive. The experience of Schindler’s List is dominated by realistic story forms; the experience of Europa Europa becomes more complicated as Holland distances us from the fate of the main character. Schindler’s List reflects the American approach to genre, to work within genre expectations. Holland’s script for Europa Europa deploys irony in its approach to the war film, an approach more typical of other middle European storytellers.

Conclusion

We cannot be definitive about storytelling strategies in non-American film. However, we can point out their linkages to storytelling in general, and we can discern preferences in the narrative strategy mix. Just as plot or action over character seems to be dominant in American film, we can see a clear preference for background story—character over plot—in many European films. This primacy is neither good nor bad; it simply appears to be the preference.

Also discernible is the use of irony in many central European films, and again, given the history of the region, that choice, too, seems understandable. We also note, as in the comparison of Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply, a preference in the United States for fantasy over realism and the preference for realism over fantasy in the British example.

American, European, and Asian films have much in common, but they also have distinct differences. Understanding these distinctive narrative qualities may help screenwriters learn more readily from one another.