Watch the video essay on this topic here
The first film we were required to make in NYU’s graduate film program was a classic exercise: tell a story in four minutes or less without dialog. We were required to shoot outdoors on 16mm black and white film without any lights and couldn’t record sync sound. It was a challenging but sensible exercise, as sync sound, lights, and dialog would only add more difficulties to those we already faced. (spoiler: filmmaking is hard, especially with a crew who mostly has little or no experience).
Even now, I still remember the feedback; painful experiences are hard to forget. The only positive comments praised the cinematography and the sound design. The rest of the criticism was encapsulated in this statement from the chair of the program: “This is a situation, not a story.”
So what’s the difference, and why does it matter?
Profluency defined
One of the basic principles that was hammered into us was the concept of what one teacher called profluency. It seemed like an awfully fancy word for a concept that’s easy to understand, if not necessarily to implement. I would put it like this:
Stories must move forward.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “profluent” as “Flowing copiously or smoothly.” The key word here is flowing: a good story is propelled along its timeline. One of the revelations I had over the years is that the film cannot create this by itself. It’s something that the film has to stimulate within the viewer: a sense of urgency that keeps them glued to their seats because they must know how the story resolves itself. They’ve become emotionally invested.
Without forward momentum, a story dies. No matter how beautiful it might look or sound, a story without it fails. (The pace at which a film proceeds is another matter, and is as subjective as it is execution-dependent.)
This is not a principle invented by screenwriters, but something every human being knows in their bones. In real life, everything changes. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the one non-negotiable element we require from good stories is also change.
Why a story without profluency fails: an example
My little story showed a day in the life of a 40ish woman dealing with her mother, who is suffering from dementia. She picks up her mother from a care facility, drives her along a riverside in her wheelchair on a sunny day, panics when her mother occasionally runs away without knowing where she’s going, and at the end of the day, she takes her mother back to the care home.
I thought I was being clever by using some specific shots to make the sunlight a symbol of the dementia, repeating the shot in the end to suggest that the daughter feared suffering the same fate. It was a situation familiar to me from my own family, one I cared deeply about.
I already had years of experience as a cinematographer by that point, so it was skillfully shot, but at the end of my story, things were exactly the same as they’d started. Neither the characters nor the situation had changed. Nor was it evident that either of the characters were trying to do anything in particular other than just survive the situation. There was nothing to root for, no revelations, no accomplishments to celebrate.
Provoking an active viewer
As viewers, we all learn the grammar of cinema by watching many, many films (not to mention videos on social media). And one of the things we quickly learn is:
In stories, stuff happens.
We also learn that everything in a story should happen for a reason. But if every character explained why they did what they did and then just did exactly that, the story would be unwatchable (unless they turned out to be lying). The reason gets to the heart of what profluency really is: we are shown events and behaviors that provoke us to watch actively. We wonder what’s really going on and why people are behaving as they are. If the story engages us, we start actively imagining the best and worst outcomes for the characters we come to care about.
We didn’t acquire this habit from watching movies. Human brains are wired for pattern recognition. We are fiercely predictive. If we weren’t reasonably successful at guessing the implications of sounds, weather, animal and human behavior around us, our species would have disappeared eons ago, surprised by predators, killed or defeated by competitors.
We bring this automatic habit of predicting the future to reading, listening to, or watching stories unfold, calculating the implications of every scene and guessing how they connect. We wonder how we would fare if we were in the same situation.
The build-up of complications raises the stakes and makes the protagonist’s desired outcome seem increasingly impossible, escalating the tension and our desire to know the outcome. More than anything else, the tension between what we hope will happen and what we fear is what propels a story forward.
In an effective story, we cannot remain passive observers. We actively imagine how things will turn out. You might have even found yourself shouting a warning to a character out loud, forgetting it’s just a movie. In a sense, every story is a detective story. We are both Sherlock Holmes and the person to whom the crime is happening. And nothing is more mysterious, confusing, fascinating, and high stakes than other human beings.
In part two of this topic, I discuss practical techniques for launching a story into motion right from the beginning and specifically what kind of change is the engine of all effective storytelling.