Journal of Screenwriting - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017

Portuguese screenwriter/director Manoel de Oliveira (1908–2015) survived almost the whole history of cinema, starting in the silent film epoch with Douro Faina Fluvial/Labor on the Douro (1931), and premiering his last film, O Velho do Restelo/The Old Man of Belem (2014), on his 106th birthday. During the political dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, from 1933 to 1974, Manoel de Oliveira had to deal with exhaustive supervision over his projects and screenplays. The documentation held by the Portuguese National Archive reveals the complex conditions imposed by the censors (Secretariado Nacional de Informação (SNI), the Portuguese National Secretary of Information), as well as the filmmaker’s screenwriting strategies to circumvent those rules (not always with success, unfortunately). Throughout the files of Angélica (1954), Acto da Primavera/Rite of Spring (1958), A Caça/The Hunt (1958), among other film projects that did not succeed in passing the SNI evaluations, we can observe how decisively censorship influenced Portuguese cinema and the screenwriting of that time. This article explores how, under the tight control of the SNI, Manoel de Oliveira was not allowed to follow the original ‘finale’ foreseen in his screenplay A Caça/The Hunt and how, instead, he was bound to film a new ‘happy-ending’ according to the regime’s premises.

This article explores the concept of an identifiable screenwriter’s voice, proposing that voice in a screenplay can be understood and described based on its formal and personal characteristics. The term voice can be understood to refer to the authorial presence of the screenwriter(s) whose consciousness has shaped every aspect of the text. This article also argues that the authorial presence is inscribed in a screenplay through the decision-making processes within screenwriting practice which lead the screenwriter to make many concrete and conceptual choices based on their own knowledge, perceptions and sensibilities. By disengaging the argument for voice from questions of quality, any voice is opened to interrogation and description based on its stylistic continuities. The article presents the conceptual framework for screenwriter’s voice, which is argued to be an effective tool through which a screenplay text can be interrogated to locate voice, whether this voice is created by a single or multiple authors.

Drawing on the experience of researching Indigenous screenwriting, as well as the work of Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton, this article seeks to reflect on the universalism that underpins certain forms of screenwriting criticism. I highlight existing arguments focused on cultural diversity, draw on linguistic and anthropological perspectives (especially the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), and examine issues of universalism and cultural context. I argue that universal forms of story and storytelling need to be approached more critically in screenwriting research. Without a critical attention to universalism radical differences in the way different cultures construct story, and the way different cultures explore different story worlds, will not be adequately recognized.