ABSTRACT

What parallel can we draw between film editing (seen here as an assembly) and screenwriting principles? And how can it be useful to us? This chapter proposes that screenplays are thought of and developed according to the same principles as “montage cinema”, namely: “as a system that bounces from one composition node to another” (Picabia, 1928, p. 113). As a matter of fact, the complex and unique form of the scenario is consistent with what it strives to build and helps to create through the assembly of scenes and sequences: the film. In order to write a screenplay, one must have the capability to think in a fragmented way, in bits and pieces of reality. We never tell it all, we choose the most potent parts of the story.

As screenwriters, our way of grasping reality, of organizing our fictional constructed reality is not an echo of that of novelists and playwrights and is not literary, instead, I put forth that it is closer to the logic and work of film editors.