Poetic Storytelling, notes from the Berlinale Forum50

If we are going to change our society for the better, we have to tell different stories.

I’m echoing a statement from the Brother Phan Dung of Plum Village in his 2016 New Year Eve talk.

But I think we know this, instinctively.

And I would add, we need to tell stories differently from the current Hollywood model which is based on heroes and conflict.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY

There are many traditions of storytelling but the one being sold today as “storytelling built for the way the human brain works,” is what Joseph Campbell called the Heroes Journey. In this formula, we see a hero, generally one person, with a goal but who faces resistance to starting moving towards that goal until they are challenged in some grand way after which they start out on the path towards achieving their goal but are met with many obstacles along the way until they finally resolve their goal and learn something from the journey.

I’m not opposed to this format and in fact I use it often in my writing. There is something about a journey that pulls an audience into a story.

But in Hollywood, this story formula has come to require many high stakes. The stories using this formula tend to assault our senses, drilling in a way of feeling and reacting rather than whispering to them, awakening something from within, letting us find the resonances and connections based on our own experiences and knowledge and understanding.

I’ll call this purpose-driven versus poetic filmmaking. In purpose-driven storytelling the author wants everyone to walk away with the same experience and the same conclusion. This person was good. This person was bad. If I was in this situation, I’d do the same thing.

POETIC FILMMAKING

Poetic filmmaking lets the audience be part of the process. They receive the film with its words, images, stories, and they find their own meaning. The author whispers their subjective take on the idea but they let you find your own way to the conclusion.

I fell in love with this kind of filmmaking when watching independent films of the 1970s, early Scorsese, Cassavettes, Jarmusch, and later filmmakers like Agnes Varda and Chris Marker.

I tried to make a documentary film with an open ending back in 2013 but was told by funders and advisors that I needed a more obvious conclusion. But the topic didn’t have an obvious conclusion. Trying to fit my ideas into a box was very frustrating.

This year I managed to squeeze in three films at the Berlinale, all part of the Forum program. All were poetic films in different ways.

VICTORIA

Here I want to share my thoughts on Victoria, a documentary film by three Belgian directors Sofie Benoot, Liesbeth De Ceulaer, and Isabelle Tollenaere.  

The film is about Warren, a young African American man from LA who comes to California City with his partner and three kids to build a better life. It is also a film about the effort to keep the dream of California City alive as the desert tries to reclaim the unpaved streets that hold water pipes and electrical grids hidden below the surface, waiting for residents to arrive.

The film opens in darkness. We see tumbleweeds blow in the wind through a set of still car headlights as Warren makes a diary note on his phone. Next, it is bright daylight and the family is walking through a deserted desert golf course, Warren is carrying his young baby. The film continues at the pace of walking. We take in the scenery and learn about Warren and the city through the rhythmic back and forth steps between diary and a reality set in moments of time traveling through the spaces of work, home, walking and school.

In this slow rhythm, we journey with Warren, learning about the birth of California City, the economic and spiritual migration taking place from LA to the desert, the slow work of occupying a new life, and the joys of staying curious.

The series of moments reveal the story and allow in a complex web of narratives. As an audience member, I was able to relax into the unfolding.

In most mainstream narratives, the story of an African American moving from LA for a better life would be reduced to one thread. You can guess the thread. 

For me, one thread is much less interesting than reality, which is complicated.

UNEXPECTED VOICES ON YOUTUBE

I was reminded of a set of YouTube videos I saw back in 2016. Homeless people started sharing their tips on YouTube, for ways of making money, stories of their struggles of repairing their car so they could get to a job, and one in particular that struck me, a man in LA walked through a park and talked about the importance of looking at nature and appreciating the flowers.

As I sat in Silicon Valley working in video as my craft was being reduced to something you could get a high schooler to do for free, I admired how these homeless people were leveraging YouTube to try to better their lives and help others in their situation by sharing their experiences.

I thought to myself, because they are not building technology or creating a new platform, they will never be recognized as innovators or entrepreneurs.

Victoria humanizes Warren and the others who are working to get their GEDs and find a better life in the circumstances they exist in.

QUEEN & SLIM

During the same week, I saw Queen & Slim, a film set in the contemporary US environment of police killings of unarmed black citizens.

The protagonists were on their first Tinder date when they were stopped by a police officer because of failing to make a complete stop at an intersection. The police officer escalates the situation and chaos ensues. He shoots the woman, Queen, and the man, Slim, kills the officer. They are then off on the hero’s journey.

The characters had clear goals. They encounter obstacles that cause escalating tension. Throughout the narrative, the film reveals struggles of race, justice, police brutality, citizen anger. But by the end of the film, I was emotionally fried. I was left feeling dark.

WE ARE NOT USED TO THE SLOW REVEAL.

Following stories with subtlety is contrary to our current environment. We’ve moved away from conversations, from connecting, from the pace of walking.

Even nature has been moving away from this pace and bringing on more and more extreme weather events and a rapid pace of ice melt, desertification and ocean acidification.

I think one of the ways to get back to a healthy, sustainable, human pace is through curiosity.

The more difficult the times, the more the world focuses on us versus them, the more violence that emerges, the more chaos we experience.

And the more subtle we need to be in our search and in our storytelling. 

Here are a few samples of tips for surviving homelessness videos. I was unable to find the video by the man sharing the importance of nature. If you run across it, he is in a park in LA on a hillside, please send me the link.

Top Ten Survival Tips | Old Homeless Guy, by brian noel, July 4, 2016, US 

Being homeless, tips and positive thinking, by Lioness, January 18, 2015, UK