Unproductive writing: body, sensation and excess in screenplays

Abstract

This research relies on the notion of 'excess' to discuss modes of sensorial construction in audiovisual screenplays, while attempting to understand how the films' political-aesthetic projects flow through their openness to sensoriality. How do ways of thinking, feeling, and seeing the world leak into the body of the text, and from it splash onto us and onto the screen? My hypothesis is that there are modes of filmic writing that involve the readers/viewers in cloaks of desires and tension games through the use of narrative, discursive, and poetic strategies that appeal to the body and to the senses, which characterize what I have been calling unproductive writing. Drawing on a methodological framework that includes phenomenology, textual analysis, film analysis, and cultural criticism, I will analyze a diverse corpus of scripts from contemporary queer and horror feature films like Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992, UK), Friendly Beast (Gabriela Amaral Almeida, 2017, Brazil), The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011, Spain), Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015, USA), Sense8 (Lilly and Lana Wachowski, 2015, USA), Suspiria (Lucas Guadagnino, 2018, USA), and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma, 2019, France). Drawing on Raymond Williams' (2010 [1977]) concept of 'structure of feeling', I've been understanding excess as a queer structure of feeling present in contemporary films and screenplays that thematize deviant bodilyities and/or dissident bodily and sexual practices. (AU)