Melanie McDonald at 2014-01-26 17:50:56:

Wonderful interview with Arash Amel, and I cannot wait to see "Grace of Monaco." The recent movie this section also brought to mind for me was "Saving Mr. Banks," because of the way screenwriters Sue Smith and Kelly Marcel chose to reveal the main character, Mrs. Travers, by interspersing scenes from one period of her childhood with the period in her adult life during which she finally granted Walt Disney rights to make a movie based on her character Mary Poppins. (And I also thought Emma Thompson killed it as Mrs. Travers. Wow.) In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, I wouldn't want to give a spoiler here, but the way they used pears as a visual symbol for her greatest childhood tragedy blew me away. It reminded me of "Images & Shadows: Part of a Life" by Iris Origo, in which, after much vivid, eloquent description of saving orphans and aiding patriots as the Fascists and Nazis approached their Tuscan farm during World War II, Origo also wrote of her son Gianni's death - in one simple sentence, in which she states that he died in childhood after a brief illness. The silence that pools around that sentence - a silence that represents the depth of her grief - is shattering. As are those pears in "Saving Mr. Banks."

Jennine Lanouette at 2014-01-26 20:20:12:

Took me a while to untangle that seeming digression about Agathon in the latter half of this passage. But, with a little googling, I think I’ve managed to piece together some sense of it. In the Epic poem, you have the time necessary to fully play out each incident. But in drama, there isn’t the opportunity to give each event a sufficient payoff (which for Aristotle means evoking feelings of pity and fear). Even Agathon, who Aristotle cites in Chapter 9 as one of the first to create dramas about purely fictitious characters and incidents (as opposed to well-known histories and myths), has been known to fail at providing such payoff when his plots become too epic. Instead, Agathon resorts to popular devices, such as the “happy ending” moral comeuppance tragedy. Back in Chapter 13, Aristotle told us that, while watching a villain go from good fortune to bad may be morally satisfying (and therefore pleasing to the popular audience), there is no personal gain to the viewer. Being villainous, we see that character as separate from ourselves. Hence, there is no opportunity to feel pity or terror. Thus, Aristotle sees Agathon, who he generally admires, as resorting to inferior plot devices to sustain his unwieldy epic structure, even though for Agathon they may still constitute a logical dramatic result. Of course, in our American Redemptive Melodrama, we love to see bad guys get their comeuppance. So I’m not sure how much we can gain from Aristotle’s insistence on this point. Only that when it comes to multilinear storytelling, one could look to the multiple story’s ability to evoke pity and terror in the viewer as a possible measure of overall thematic success. Strikes me that those three examples cited – Babel, Crash and Traffic – are each engaging in some form of social commentary in their epic structures. BTW, I have just released a new multimedia ebook giving a screenplay analysis of The African Queen, the first in a series taken from my script analysis lectures. I missed last week’s discussion about how layers are built into film stories (I went to Sundance to chat up the new ebook), but I think you will find some of those points being addressed in this analysis. You can find it at www.screentakes.com. It’s free.