Pablo Gonçalo

Critical fabulation and unfilmed scripts: a decolonial bias

University of Brasília, Brazil

The recent field of Shadow Cinema highlights the challenges of telling an alternative film history emphasizing the role played by unproduced pictures. Under this perspective, directors, producers and production companies may have their work reassessed. Shadow cinema opens up a vital new line of research; its authors, however, do not look into screenplays nor unfilmed scripts, neglecting their contributions to the research.

This paper aims to emphasize the role of unproduced screenplays toward shadow cinema, or a speculative archaeology, and its alternative film history. Initially, a typology of unfilmed scripts will be shared, highlighting four types of unproduced screenplays. Moreover, these types arouse and activate different sorts of imaginary worlds, fictions, fables, timing and speculative approaches. In addition, this typology is influenced by gatekeeping, censorship, and other economical and biographical aspects that may determine the non-production of a script.

Secondly, unfilmed screenplays may have different attributes while contrasting consolidated film industries and ones marked by scarce production. The less a filmmaker or a film company produces, the more revealing their unproduced scripts are. Therefore, film ideas and unfilmed screenplays written by filmmakers from the global south may hide aesthetic worlds. Unfilmed scripts point out to worlds marked by fragments and failure, inviting readers to speculate toward their future fictions as well as worlds and works that haven’t been seen under historical lenses.

Following this decolonial bias, I will bring the cases of unfilmed scripts written by Manoel de Oliveira, Sergei Parajanov, Lima Barreto, Ousmene Sembene and Sara Maldoror. Akin to Saidyia Hartman’s critical fabulation concept, I am going to imagine the combination of these stories, speculating what kind of imaginary and film worlds might have happened if these (or similar unfilmed) stories would have been produced in their own historical time.

I am Brazilian, and a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Brasilia. I have taught undergraduate students for the last 20 years, in different Brazilian and international universities. I have been awarded key grants such as DAAD and Fulbright, and since finishing my PhD I have had the joy of presenting in some of the most important congresses and seminars in the cinema world, such as SCMS, Film-Philosophy, NECS, Screenwriting Research Network and many others. I have had publications in a number of newspapers and film review magazines, for instance The Journal of Screenwriting, Senses of Cinema and La Furia Umana, to name a few. My first book was published in 2016 and the second in 2022; the former is about the partnership between Peter Handke and Wim Wenders, and the latter is about unproduced Hollywood scripts.