Canned Film Commentary

"'The Blind Assassin'--Margaret Atwood" by Karol M

Lately, it seems like every book I've read is about to be made into a movie. (Well, I read the "Soon to be a Major Motion Picture!" edition of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, so that's on me, I guess.) Some of them, like Blindness and Memoirs of a Geisha, I had read and loved long before they had a page on IMDB. But with some of them, production details seemed to be springing up just as I was delving into the fictional world of the novel. Like The History of Love, and King Dork, which may not ever be made into films, anyway.

At any rate, and on a somewhat separate note, with certain books I read I can't help but cast the film. Sometimes, after I've put down an especially engrossing book for the evening, and I'm trying to fall asleep, I'll direct the film version in my head. Even before finishing the book; its a hobby of mine, in a way. I imagine the sets, and the scenes left out, and what technique the director could use to convey some abstract character quality.

I recently finished reading The Blind Assassin, and as I was reading I tried to imagine how the three different stories that are layered within the book would be conveyed. There is the present day character, an old lady, remembering her youth, the novel within the book, also called The Blind Assassin, and the story told between the two main characters.

For this prompt, even though it said "an imaginary film," I wanted to write what I imagined when I read The Blind Assassin instead of creating a wholly original film. I tried writing it several times, and kept using too many words. Also, I kept relying on an imaginary director magically telling the viewer that something happened, rather than on images, which is the whole point of this prompt. So I simplified the plot of the book, took some liberties manipulating the characters, and focused more on images.

It was still a struggle, and I'm not entirely happy with the end result. I wasted a lot of words with the main characters, and I sacrificed a lot of the plot for the introduction. Also, I found it difficult to conjure an animated world, a specific time period, and the effect of alternating scenes. Writing an abridged version of a very complex novel was hard too, and I worry that I cheapened the book by reducing it to the romance.

I do think the book would make a really cool movie, and I think it would be neat to use different film styles for the separate plots.

Canned Film

Write a very short synopsis of an imaginary film, as if writing for one of those video analogies—perhaps 10,000 Films in a Nutshell. Concentrate on images as much as you can in this summary of a plot or an interesting combination of images and time.
(from prompt #19 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

Read my response:

"the headless lovers" by Cane Ludico Rosso



The film opens in black and white, with stock footage of the two main characters in their daily life, just before they meet. The woman, played by the ubiquitous leading lady of period pieces, Keira Knightley, is shown wearing pristine white gloves and dining with company at a banquet table, attended to by servants, which is neatly juxtaposed by the man (played by underrated Ben McKenzie), with dirty fingernails, jumping out of view of two slovenly matrons to eat an apple in a busted door frame.

When the two meet up at a greasy café, the woman looks to the man, who ignores her and in fact walks out of the diner. After a beat, the woman gets up and follows the man to a closet-like room in a tenement building with laundry hanging out the windows. In the next scene, we see the two damp with sweat and half-clothed, and the woman is begging the man to tell her a story. As he talks about aliens living in a highly developed industrial society on an arid planet, haunted by ruby-lipped Zombie women and hunted by a nomad army, the camera pans out to the night sky and zooms into a full color, animated planet. McKenzie and Knightley’s voices interrupt each other, changing details in the animated cast. When she is offended by something, the animation pauses while an appropriate substitution is created collaboratively with McKenzie.

As the lovers continue to meet amid poverty and squalor, adding to the story the viewer sees literally animated, the man struggles to avoid imprisonment for arson, which the woman’s father framed the man for in order to collect insurance on his least profitable factory. Tension simultaneously builds between the nomad army and the insulated alien society, but before the woman is ready to leave her life of privilege for her lover, WWII claims the man, which we see amid the devastation in the science fiction story. Years pass, and the animated world begins to fade away, until finally, the animated priestess voiced by Knightley defies the Father figure, and begins to rebuild.