Three Sisters in a Sketchbook: Photography as Prosthesis in the Essay Film Form

Building on the research previously conducted, and looking at the narrative strategies implemented in Three Sisters in a Sketchbook (Turina 2024), the chapter deepens the reflection on how geo-cultural negotiations and spaces of historical and emotional resonance allow the essay film to investigate the archive. We look at how screenwriting strategies allow to open spaces of negotiation with silenced history, where personal trauma and personhood emerge through the circular structure of the essay film. We see how the layers of signification emerge progressively, a little more at each repetition/loop within the film, and any hypothesis formed in viewing the preceding sequences is inevitably re-negotiated and never entirely clarified. Following the path, it becomes clear how the openness of the answers not given to the audience is key to the essay film form, as the accumulation of meaning integrated into the visual solutions proposed to the audience is there to open and explore, to think. Accordingly, the idea of thought in motion related to the form becomes evident in the screenplay, as the writing of the page in its first-person format is both apt and odd in classical screenwriting.

Keywords: archive ; biography ; circular structure ; first person script ; history ; Istria ; Italy ; screenwriting ; silence history ; Three Sisters in a Sketchbook