Just for a change, I went and saw a documentary the other day.  Sleep Furiously is a lyrical portrait of a Welsh farming community viewed through the eyes of filmmaker Gideon Koppel.  It commences with a town cryer wandering somewhere out of town with a dog, and the images and narrative fragments that follow stack up to create a collage highlighting different aspects of the ebb and flow of rural life.

The overall effect is not unlike a dream.  There’s not really the kind of figure and ground relationship that happens when a camera points at a scene in a drama, where there’s purpose to the piece within a whole narrative, and the need to reveal elements of plot or character.  Instead, the feel is of a series of life studies done in an art class by a perceptive student: each choice creates another layer, and those layers combine in more or less coherent ways to produce an overall impression.  Musically, the analogy would be the distinction between a well-crafted pop song and an ambient mood piece; quite apt since the film’s music is culled from Aphex Twin recordings.

Given my immersion in the world of narrative, I was interested in how methods used within film of this kind could be used to the advantage of more story-based pieces.  Robert Altman had a flair for creating a documentary feel with much of his work: what choices are necessary to produce such an effect?  Part of it, alluded to already, is the suspension of a figure/ground relationship: rather than a particular character being the focus of the camera’s attention, a whole scene is captured, and the moves of the camera follow the rhythms of that scene rather than the purposeful actions of an individual.  Each element of what is seen is equal to the others: you choose what to highlight, rather than being led.

To introduce narrative into that approach, you might as well start at script stage.  So set up scenarios where the interest comes from anything other than the narrative thrust of the story.  Instead, allude to the narrative in metaphorical ways perhaps: have a romantic comedy start at a cattle auction, say.  Or a thriller that will become violent in an abattoir.  And use that setting to captivate the viewer at an unconscious level before doing the bit they’re expecting of introducing the protagonist.  Why not even have the protagonist present as one of several people amid what’s going on before concentrating on them further?

The oft-referenced barn building scene in Witness could be an inspiration here.  How about having such a scene early on in a film where your protagonist is participating in communal activity before leaving it to individuate?  Imagine: you have a scene where a whole bunch of people are mending the village’s fishing nets.  It’s  a group activity, good-humoured jibes exchanged as the task is undertaken.  Then there’s a cry from the nearby beach.  A child is in danger of drowning.  And one of the villagers is quicker onto his heels to save the kid than the others: this is our hero.  The other end of the tale, child rescued, misdeeds thwarted, etc, the returning hero once again gets absorbed in communal activities, balance in the world restored.

In Sleep Furiously, one particular communal activity helped get across what’s different: the choir, singing harmoniously together in Welsh, a beautiful otherworldly sound that was of the villages and the people who’d lived there for centuries and longer.  And dramatically speaking, that’s something to bear in mind when thinking about communities: what is it that distinguishes this group of people here from those there?  Your hero is going to be away from their people for the bulk of the film: make clear what it is they’re going to miss, to make more apparent the things they learn and change through, before their probable return to the fold, the same but different from the person they started the story as.