Carina Böhm

Beyond my screenwriting self – A more-than-human exploration of the screenplay text

University of South Australia

Words written on the screenplay page. They tell of action, scene setting and make drama with all sorts of
dialogue and literary description. But in between all the verbal human fuss and the loudness of my
screenwriting self, there is a calm wordlessness. Silences spread. Absences tell. And while these may have been caused by the (my) human self, they tell alongside the stories of others.

Screen storytelling has always been intertwined with the affordances of the more-than-human entities
that provide the materials, resources and inspiration for its making (Pick & Narraway 2013), yet screen
practices continuously struggle to be sustainable. Pick and Dymond (2022) warn that unless we drastically restructure our storytelling towards a cinema beyond cinema, it will go extinct alongside those who sustain it.

Is there a screenwriting beyond screenwriting?
This research investigates screenwriting practices that tell beyond just human agency, by investigated
how the screenplay’s “invitations for others to collaborate on a work of art” (Schrader in Hamilton 1990:
ix) can be expanded to its nonhuman contributors. Experimenting with polyphonic assemblage as a telling with many voices (Tsing 2015), I work with the idea of screen work as palimpsest (Davies 2013) to explore the sensuous landscapes that open themselves up beyond the human word.

As my screenwriting self becomes entangled with the sensuous silences, absences and presences of
others, I experience a collaborative storytelling with others as participative acts of listening. This leads me to propose an understanding of the screenwriter not as ‘the’ storyteller, but as one who sets up the
relational infrastructures that allow others to tell their story.

Carina Böhm is the name of the body that lives the realities of many different stories. She is a screenwriter and PhD candidate at the University of South Australia on Kaurna Country. Her research is focussed on evocations of more-than-human perspectives in screenwriting practices. As a writer, she has worked across various story departments for daytime television series. Her publications feature in New Writing and the Journal of Screenwriting.