The screenplay this article addresses was written using a factual subject, the filming of On the Beach (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1959) in Melbourne, Australia as a framework on which to hang a fictional story. The story moves back and forth between contemporary Melbourne and 1959 Melbourne. The protagonist, Nora, searches for an actress who was murdered during the filming of On the Beach. The victim of a hit and run she ‘comes to’ to discover herself back in 1959 during the making of the film and embodied as the murdered actress. I aimed to create a ‘faction’, that is, the impression that the story was factual, that the events had occurred but were then forgotten. There was to be a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction. In this way my work approximates ‘drama-documentary’, which is historically accurate and stays close to the historical event, in this case the original film, but ‘fills in’ the emotional landscape of factual material with fiction.

My starting point was different however from the usual drama documentary. In drama-documentary, the starting point is the historical event and the purpose of the ‘filler’ is to construct a credible narrative of facts to convince the audience of the veracity of a particular reading. My starting point was fictional. My intention was to use the ‘blurriness’ around the historical event, the existence of deleted scenes for example, to alert audiences to the idea of many possible truths. My purpose was to create a historically accurate version of what might have happened but then instil doubts as to the veracity of that version. Instead of convincing the audience of the truth of one particular reading, I wanted to alert them to the possibility of many possible readings. In production there are several methods of doing this, some of which are discussed in more detail below in relation to the television series Life on Mars (2006-7).

In writing a film about a film I was also able to use what audiences know about filmmaking to both increase the credibility and fictional possibilities inherent in filmmaking. The filmmaking process has been demystified in the last fifty years due to films such as 8½ (dir. Frederico Fellini, 1963) and Bowfinger (dir. Frank Oz, 1999). Most audiences know that not all the scenes shot for a movie are used. I could use that knowledge to create a fictional storyline in the real On the Beach for an actress whose scenes were lost ‘on the cutting room floor.’

This additional storyline also serves to underline the fictional nature of my story. The part of Tania played by my protagonist Nora in the screenplay doesn’t exist in On the Beach. Anyone familiar with the plot of On the Beach would realise this. That storyline began as a way of avoiding copyright problems if my screenplay were ever made, but the storyline is credible as it plays with the theme of loss present in the original. Tania is not present in the existing shooting script of On the Beach, though of course she may have once been.

Although important elements of my screenplay rely on verifiable aspects of the historical event, I wanted to play on audience expectations to enhance the fictional construct. If the script were to be produced, I would use name actors to represent historical stars such as Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and the director, Stanley Kramer. For the 1959 sections I would work for a softer look with bleached colours, as if that part of the story were filmed with the technology and film stock of the time and the On the Beach scenes would be shot in black and white. By contrast, the contemporary sections of the story would be cooler and crisper, darker and more crowded.

Appropriating 1959

The concept of a ‘1959 look’ raised an interesting set of questions. A 1959 look (such as bleached colour) appears to be based on a set of conventions that satisfies contemporary audience expectations of visual representations of 1959. But are these expectations valid? And are visual conventions sufficient to appropriate the past, when it is often other senses such as sound and smell that take us back to the past? Is it even possible to appropriate the past?

There is increasing emphasis on the embodiment of the film experience so that in experiencing a film we become ‘spatially and temporally embodied’ by the film’s subject, which includes the ‘constraints of history and culture’ (Sobchack, 2004: 2). This embodiment is not just visual but includes the other senses, particularly sound (including language) and touch. Sobchack is a phenomenologist after Merleau-Ponty, for whom meaning and value emerge as a synthesis of the subjective and objective experience. Sobchack argues that this materialist approach means that particular historical and cultural experiences can be unpacked to reveal ‘general or possible’ structures to make that experience meaningful to others. The proof of success here is not whether the reader/audience has had the experience, but rather that they could contemplate ‘inhabiting’ it (2004: 4).

An example of this concept is Robert Toplin’s, ‘Hollywood’s D-Day from the Perspective of the 1960s and the 1990s: The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan‘ (2006) in which he compares two Hollywood war movies, The Longest Day (dir. Ken Annakin, 1962) and Saving Private Ryan(dir. Steven Spielberg 1998). Both movies have the same subject matter—the D-Day landing of June 1944—but Private Ryan concentrates on the experiential, while Longest Day shows plenty of bodies but no blood and concentrates on giving information about the landing. According to Toplin, the difference occurs primarily because the audience of The Longest Day would have had a much closer connection with the D-Day landing either through direct experience or through that of their parents. What that audience wanted from The Longest Day was information on strategy, tactics and the like. Most of the audience of Private Ryan, on the other hand, would not have experienced warfare. They needed and desired to be reminded of what the experience could be like.

Increasingly however, contemporary audiences are not asked to contemplate inhabiting an experience, rather they are thrust into it. In an historical film, technological advances such as Dolby sound and Steadicam camera are used to enhance the experiential nature of the medium to make the windows to the past more transparent. Of course paradoxically, the more one strives to find windows to the past the further away it becomes. There is no way to return to the past, as it was when it was the present, as we constantly mediate it consciously and unconsciously. The best we can do is to create a simulated past based on traces. It’s a ‘what might have been’ story constructed to create meaning in the present. Returning to Sobchack’s premise of success as the reader’s ability to imagine the experience, perhaps this depends on the ability of the creative work to create structures that allow the reader to respond emotionally.

Creating emotional meaning remains the central challenge for the filmmaker and it is increasingly difficult. Postmodernism tells us there is no grand historical narrative but now there is no border between what is significant and what is trivial, what is fact and what is fiction. This idea appears to come from modernism. Hayden White’s essay, ‘The Modernistic Event’ (1996), gives an example from Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941). Here, as the central character muses on books and newspapers, she recalls a rape reported in the newspaper. Just then her sister-in-law enters carrying a hammer. The two events are given equal meaning and intermingle so the otherwise ordinary entry of the sister-in-law becomes threatening and potentially violent. Examples like this, where we can’t distinguish between the real and the imaginary, abound in contemporary films, such as Jacob’s Ladder (dir. Adrian Lyne, 1990), Shutter Island (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2010) and Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010). Whereas occurrence of an event once automatically endowed meaning, this no longer holds. It’s not just because we can’t distinguish between what has and what has not occurred. Replaying footage of an event over and over doesn’t offer insights as to the meaning of it. I’ve seen footage of the plane crashing into one of the Twin Towers on 9/11 over and over and my insight into the event has not increased.

White suggests different techniques of representation other than ‘artistic realism’ may be required to regain meaning. He urges us to resist making stories of these kinds of traumatic events (1996:17). Such stories have the potential to create ‘narrative-fetishes’ which keep us bogged down, unable to transcend the narrative and see any meaning beyond. White specifically mentions the Holocaust and the Kennedy assassination, but 9/11 would fit here too. White advocates the ‘anti-narrative non-stories’ (1996: 23) of modernism as a way forward but is unclear as to what these are. One possibility of the ‘anti-narrative, non-story’ may be the multi-narrative. In conceptualising my creative work, I found the concept of a multi-narrative form incorporating the past and the present compelling, but knew I needed a powerful narrative driver to push the plot back and forth between the present and the past. Such a driver could be provided dramatically via the murder mystery genre with a detective character searching for answers. I also needed a credible plot that would straddle the past and the present.

Inspiration was provided by the British TV series, Life on Mars (2006-7). Sam Tyler, the central character in the series is a Manchester detective who has an accident and wakes up in 1973. James Chapman’s article, ‘Not “Another Bloody Cop Show”: Life on Mars and British Television Drama’ (2009), suggests how the series might be read. Throughout the series, Sam Tyler can still recall his ‘real’ life in the ‘present’ (2006) so when he hears ‘voices’ inaudible to others from the television, radio and telephone, he assumes he must be in a coma and the voices are those of the medical team. He decides the world of 1973 is a construct of his imagination that he must deal with, until he can return home. He even asks one character, ‘Which part of my imagination do you hail from?’ (Chapman, 2009: 9). Yet, the writers leave room to doubt Sam’s assumption: in every title sequence after Episode 1 Sam’s voiceover asks the question, ‘Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time?’ and the question is not answered until the end of the series. Even so, Sam’s reading that 1973 is imaginary is the preferred one (Chapman, 2009: 9). The historical anachronisms and non-sequiturs that appear throughout the series, such as digital watches, satellite dishes and CCTV cameras, can be explained as evidence of his brain damage (Chapman, 2009: 9).

My screenplay is also a ‘timeslip’ story. Like Sam Tyler, my protagonist Nora is the victim of a hit and run and wakes to find herself in 1959 and an actress in On the Beach. She is in fact the very actress who was murdered—her mother. Nora has hazy recollections of her life in 2011 before the accident but, unlike Sam Tyler, once in 1959 she is too preoccupied with what she discovers and the subsequent task of staying alive to contemplate occupying the imaginary construct of a coma.

It’s obvious to the audience that the timeslips in both my screenplay and Life on Mars are products of the protagonists’ minds and certainly in my story, a search for identity. Both protagonists explore some Oedipal issues (Chapman, 2009: 9) although not in the usual sense of incestuous dilemmas as in the 1980s movie, Back to the Future (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1985). My character, Nora, comes to understand her mother and meets herself as a baby, and, in Life on Mars, Sam Tyler meets his parents and discovers who his father was. Unlike Back to the Future, however, Oedipal issues are not the central purpose of the journeys to the past. Instead the timeslips in both my screenplay and Life on Mars work as ways of cinematically examining the mind.

According to Chapman, Life on Mars ‘revolves around the disjuncture between a discourse of rationality (Sam’s insistence that he is from the future and in a coma) and unreality (the world that he believes exists only in his imagination) (2009: 10). The series does this by moving back and forth between two different points of view. Chapman draws on John Ellis’s analysis of A Matter of Life and Death (dir. Michael Powell, 1946) to show how that movie uses the same method to examine the nature of representation. It is unclear here whether the two discourses of rationality and unreality are mutually exclusive. Chapman appears to be arguing they are, yet these positions seem to predicate rather than contradict each other because Sam is living in a coma he can rationally create and inhabit a world that exists in his imagination. Also where does one go from there? Chapman doesn’t go further other than to say the series, ‘also examines the nature of representation by refusing to clarify what is real and what is not’ (Chapman, 2009: 10).

A more fruitful path for me were Gilles Deleuze’s theories of cinematic time-image, not only as methods of investigating concepts of rationality and unreality, but also in the rich narrative possibilities they offer. The film 12 Monkeys (dir. Terry Gilliam, 1995) and its inspiration, La Jetée (dir. Chris Marker, 1962), where a character haunted by a killing he witnessed as a child returns from the future to discover he is the murder victim, spring to mind as examples of theory informing and enriching narrative. 12 Monkeys and La Jetée employ the notion of ‘the crystal’, where virtual and actual time, subjective and objective points of view are indistinguishable from one another. In these films the character experiences two different times simultaneously; he is child and adult simultaneously but it’s impossible to tell one time from the other, the real from the imaginary, because they conflate. In developing my narrative, I knew I wanted Nora to go back to 1959 and encounter herself as a child. And, although she doesn’t experience two different times simultaneously, the concept of the crystal convinced me that Nora the daughter could become Nora Stovale her mother.

I also knew my character was a time-image protagonist. Her search for identity meant she had to go back in time, but in order to do this she needed to be immobilised. I wanted to find a framework that would establish the idea that the character’s thoughts instead of her movements decided what the audience saw. If the audience understood this, they could jump from place to place and forward and backward in time depending on the character’s memories. If this were accepted, the audience would not even have to suspend disbelief because they would be experiencing time for themselves. A coma provided the narrative framework I was looking for. My protagonist, Nora, became the victim of a botched attempted murder—a hit and run. With her body immobilised in a coma in hospital Nora’s mind travels back to 1959 where she becomes her mother, the actress in On the Beach. Now, not only could Nora encounter herself as a baby, she could also find out what happened to her mother.

According to Chapman, Life on Mars ‘revolves around the disjuncture between a discourse of rationality (Sam’s insistence that he is from the future and in a coma) and unreality (the world that he believes exists only in his imagination) (2009: 10). The series does this by moving back and forth between two different points of view. Chapman draws on John Ellis’s analysis of A Matter of Life and Death (dir. Michael Powell, 1946) to show how that movie uses the same method to examine the nature of representation. It is unclear here whether the two discourses of rationality and unreality are mutually exclusive. Chapman appears to be arguing they are, yet these positions seem to predicate rather than contradict each other because Sam is living in a coma he can rationally create and inhabit a world that exists in his imagination. Also where does one go from there? Chapman doesn’t go further other than to say the series, ‘also examines the nature of representation by refusing to clarify what is real and what is not’ (Chapman, 2009: 10).

A more fruitful path for me were Gilles Deleuze’s theories of cinematic time-image, not only as methods of investigating concepts of rationality and unreality, but also in the rich narrative possibilities they offer. The film 12 Monkeys (dir. Terry Gilliam, 1995) and its inspiration, La Jetée (dir. Chris Marker, 1962), where a character haunted by a killing he witnessed as a child returns from the future to discover he is the murder victim, spring to mind as examples of theory informing and enriching narrative. 12 Monkeys and La Jetée employ the notion of ‘the crystal’, where virtual and actual time, subjective and objective points of view are indistinguishable from one another. In these films the character experiences two different times simultaneously; he is child and adult simultaneously but it’s impossible to tell one time from the other, the real from the imaginary, because they conflate. In developing my narrative, I knew I wanted Nora to go back to 1959 and encounter herself as a child. And, although she doesn’t experience two different times simultaneously, the concept of the crystal convinced me that Nora the daughter could become Nora Stovale her mother.

I also knew my character was a time-image protagonist. Her search for identity meant she had to go back in time, but in order to do this she needed to be immobilised. I wanted to find a framework that would establish the idea that the character’s thoughts instead of her movements decided what the audience saw. If the audience understood this, they could jump from place to place and forward and backward in time depending on the character’s memories. If this were accepted, the audience would not even have to suspend disbelief because they would be experiencing time for themselves. A coma provided the narrative framework I was looking for. My protagonist, Nora, became the victim of a botched attempted murder—a hit and run. With her body immobilised in a coma in hospital Nora’s mind travels back to 1959 where she becomes her mother, the actress in On the Beach. Now, not only could Nora encounter herself as a baby, she could also find out what happened to her mother.

The coma provides the potential for other readings. Chapman raises several, which are suggested at the resolution of Life on Mars. What if, for example, the whole diegetic world of the coma was a fictional text? That is, instead of Sam imagining himself a detective in 1973, what if he were imagining himself in a 1970s police series? Or even what if he was a character in a series and didn’t know it, as in Dennis Potter’s television series, The Singing Detective (1986). Various clues support this reading such as the 1973 police show (The Sweeney) plays on the television in Sam Tyler’s hospital room (Chapman, 2009: 10-11). Although Chapman never refers to Deleuze, his suggested readings have a Deleuzian element.

One possible reading is that the entire story takes place in Nora’s mind rather than ‘real’ life. The existence of Nora Stovale’s body proved she died, but Nora’s explanation of the events—the one presented in the screenplay—is only one of many possible explanations. Doubts as to the truth of Nora’s explanation might be raised if, say, clues to 1959 or the femme fatale theme of the lying woman, for example Whistle Stop (dir. Leonide Moguy, 1946), one of Ava Gardner’s early femme fatale movies of the period, happened to be on the television in comatose Nora’s hospital room.

There was another aspect of Deleuzian theory that seemed relevant to my script. This was Deleuze’s concept of the ‘peaks of the present’. Peaks of the present make sense if we think of time vertically rather than spatially. According to Deleuze, if we are in a single event which can be anything, such as a world, a life or a single episode, then there is no successive past, present or future because we can’t tell where each ends and the next begins (1989: 100). Peaks of the present opened narrative and character possibilities for my story in terms of who knew what when and in what world—the present or the past. Characters could make decisions in 1959 that had implications for the present and events could happen in present time that influenced what happened in 1959 because the main character was present in both time frames.

Conclusion

People have always looked to the past to create the meaning of the present, but the slipperiness of postmodernist culture creates many meanings and many pasts, not necessarily validated by their existence. Visual culture is easily able to express the presence of many narratives so easily that many mainstream films such as Christopher Nolan’s Inception now play with the idea of the valid and invalid past.

With this in mind my primary purpose changed. It was no longer how authentic can the fictional world of my creative work be, but rather, how can the past be used to make the present more meaningful? I understand from my research into the past that what returns will be different from what was once there but that is not the point. If history appears to be now more than before a chance selection of occurrences that could just as easily not have happened as happened then our engagement with the past and its infinitely possible variations becomes more exciting. We understand there are many possible pasts. We are forced to think more about possible connections between past and present than if we accept the view that the past as presented is the only possible past. The desire to perceive possible new connections between past and present becomes a new driver.

References

Chapman, J (2009).’Not “Another Bloody Cop Show”: Life on Mars and British Television Drama’ in Film International, vol. 7, no. 2: 6-19.

Deleuze, Gilles (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ellis, J. (1978). ‘Watching Death at Work: an Analysis of “A Matter of Life and Death” in Ian Christie (ed.) Powell, Pressburger and Others. London: BFI.

Sobchack, V. (2004) Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment And Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Toplin, R. ‘Hollywood’s D Day from the Perspective of the 1960s and the 1990s: “The Longest Day” and “Saving Private Ryan”‘, in Film and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, Spring 2006: 25-29.

White, Hayden (1996). ‘The Modernistic Event’ in Vivian Sobchack, ed. The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event. New York: Routledge.

Filmography

12 Monkeys (motion picture) 1996, USA, Universal Pictures, prod. Charles Roven, dir. Terry Gilliam.

8 1/2 (motion picture) 1963, Italy, Cineriz; Francinez, prod. A Rizzoli, dir. Federico Fellini.

Back to the Future (motion picture) 1985, USA, Universal Pictures, prod. Neil Canton, dir. Robert Zemekis.

Bowfinger (motion picture) 1999, USA, Universal Pictures, prod. Brian Grazer, dir. Frank Oz.

Inception (motion picture) 2010, USA, Warner Bros. Pictures, prod & dir. Christopher Nolan.

Jacob’s Ladder (motion picture) 1990, USA, Carolco Pictures, prod. Alan Marshall, dir. Adrian Lyne.

La Jetée (motion picture short) 1962, France, Argos Films, dir. Chris Marker.

Life on Mars (television series) 2006–7, UK, Kudos Film & Television, creators: Mathew Graham, Tony Jordan, Ashley Pharoah.

Longest Day, The (motion picture) 1962, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, prod. Darryl F. Zanuck, dir. Ken Annakin and Andrew Marton.

Matter of Life and Death, A (motion picture) 1946, UK, The Archers, prod. & dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger.

On the Beach (motion picture) 1959, USA, Stanley Kramer Productions, prod. & dir. Stanley Kramer.

Saving Private Ryan (motion picture) 1995, USA, Amblin Entertainment, prod. Ian Bryce, dir. Steven Spielberg.

Bradley J Fischer, dir. Martin Scorsese. Singing Detective, The (TV mini-series) 1986 UK, BBC created by Dennis Potter.

Sweeney, The (TV series) 1975–78 UK, Euston Films, created by Troy Kennedy Martin.

Whistle Stop (motion picture) 1946, USA, Nero Films, prod. Seymour Nebenzal, dir. Léonide Moguy.