Storytelling and film school

I want to circle around the idea of the storyteller again, this time with examples from the NYU film writing department. I learned from three teachers: Jackie Parks, Mardik Martin, and Charlie Russell. Mardik Martin wrote the screenplay to "Raging Bull."

The film school was filled with students who wanted to hold a camera, be on a film shoot, and have their name on the screen. Martin Scorcese had taught there, and his early film "Mean Streets" with Robert Deniro seemed to be the quintessential post-NYU film.

The writing department seemed resigned to the fact that no undergraduate wanted to be a writer. I hope that they at least had graduate students that were more motivated.

The cliche was, "I can write a script, but I can't write dialog." The word "improv" was not commonly used outside of acting classes in the 70's. I think we all felt that improvisation was a way for a director to give up control and we hadn't learned to get control yet.

In retrospect, I realise that Jackie Parks had read theories of semiotics and was kind of testing them out with us -but she never used the word and we weren't even vaguely interested.

Mardik Martin had one big message for anybody who would listen: "Conflict. Every scene has to have conflict." I thought I got it at the time, but I've come to realize that this was the most important critical lesson I learned at film school, and I still use it to think about films. If you ever wonder why a film is so boring, it's usually because someone has written a scene that moves the plot along (at least), but has no conflict.

Now, is conflict the essence of storytelling? I don't know for sure, but you can see how someone could make the case for it. The contrasting viewpoint is: "No. Conflict is great for comic books, but characters make the story." (In fact "Characters Make the Story" is a pretty influential scriptwriting guide.

Let me try to sum up where I'm going with this: film making is not a fine art. That's not news. There are only three fine arts: painting, sculpture, and architecture. And I don't give a damn what anybody in any theatre department says (or, in my experience, hints at): film making is not some modern branch of capital T Theatre. In the past 50 years, film making has become the greatest method of storytelling ever invented.
I know it would be cute to come to the defense of campfires and puppet shows, but nobody serious really would. Someone really serious would come to the defense of Theatre, and that's where a real argument exists. (To use the word "argument" is a real 60's thing, but at least I know when I'm being old-fashioned.)
And, of course, we're in Visual Arts World here. I have no bone to pick with the written word, because words just exist in a different world, and that's just how I see it (pun intended.)
Even Brakhage said, "A picture is worth a thousand words, except when a poet is speaking." (No, that does not sound quite right, but you get the idea. He wrote a lot, but never well.)

This is my prejudice completely: "suspension of disbelief" works much better for me at the movies than at the theatre. And, to be honest, it does not require a complicated philosophy to be truthful about that.