The rasa theory, in brief, states that for a viewing experience to be complete and satisfying, a play must evoke in the viewer a variety of rasas or flavors or sentiments (from the following 8: erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, heroic, terrifying, odious, marvelous). Of these 8, a play may have one ‘dominant’ sentiment, with several others present in smaller, varying quantities. (The original Natyashastra* mentions only eight rasas. The ninth – shanti or peace – was added later, thus leading to the term Navras, meaning ‘nine rasas’. ...)
Western screenwriters spend a lot of time and energy making charts and diagrams to define structure.
But movies are made all over the world. And there are other ways of looking at structure.
Beyond Craft: The Rasa Approach to Screenwriting at the Lights Filmscool blog, reproduces Ashwini Malik's complete essay on the topic.
"I had written an essay attacking screenwriting manuals that went hoarse advocating rules and principles governing screenwriting. I have always felt that such manuals tend to reduce screenwriting to a formula and lead to predictable, formulaic films, which are churned out by the dozen every month in Hollywood. And yet, here I was, awed by what is essentially a manual, with rules, formulae, principles and divisions and sub-divisions!"
The Purpose of Cinema
Let’s start with a fundamental, though regrettably pretentious, question: what is the purpose of cinema? For a moment, let’s put all the exalted purposes aside and look at it purely from the point of view of the viewer. The viewer wants to be engaged, entertained, stimulated, enlightened, occasionally challenged and provoked and disturbed, but finally, satisfied. How does one do this? By creating an experience on screen that is, a) interesting, b) convincing, and c) complete.
An experience will be interesting if it is unusual and/or dramatic. An experience will be convincing if it unfolds plausibly (and the viewer is happy to suspend his disbelief for an experience if it’s interesting enough). Finally, an experience will appear complete to a viewer only if it is meaningful in some way, either by giving him an insight into life or simply the general feeling that he is better off for having seen the film.
So, to narrow it down a bit, for a viewer to be engaged, entertained, stimulated, enlightened, occasionally challenged and provoked and disturbed, what is needed is an experience that not only echoes life, but also makes sense of its seeming pointlessness and randomness. An experience that strives to capture the essence of life. But how does one capture this essence of life? Life itself is the product of all kinds of things, with a multitude of happenings and emotions jostling about in a manner that seems totally random. How then, does one make sense of life? Perhaps an understanding of the rasa theory can help us.
The Natyashastra often gives the analogy of a fulfilling meal that has several spices and other ingredients expertly mixed. In other words, the essence of life can be captured if the viewer is given an experience that contains an organic mix of several sentiments. The operative term here is ‘organic mix’. How does one create an organic mix, where different ingredients don’t stick out awkwardly because they have simply been forced into a work? The answer might lie, perhaps, in fusing the rasa theory with the very form of the screenplay.
There are 4 levels at which a screenplay is put together. (I’m proposing 4, in order to put forth my argument. Someone else might say 3 or 17 or whatever. It doesn’t matter.)
The most basic level is the seed or the germ, which to translate into concrete terms, would be the concept of the story. The very concept must contain the potential to develop into a screenplay that can have various sentiments in an organic mix. The second level is that of character: who are the people that inhabit the story? Do they represent a cross-section of the society in which the story is set? The third level is that of the sequences or the incidents that are used to tell the story. As we know, the story in a film unfolds via incidents and a screenplay is nothing but a series of incidents strung together to make a whole. The very choice of these incidents must be such that they are able to capture the essence of life via a variety of sentiments. The fourth level is that of the scene. The scene is the smallest unit of a screenplay and can be seen as akin to a moment in the script. The moments that a screenwriter chooses to tell the story must be exactly appropriate, ones that, when seen together, reflect a variety of sentiments.
Again, the full essay is here.
*Natyashastra is an ancient Indian text in Sanskrit language, written between 200 BC and 200 AD. It is attributed to the sage Bharata, although it is likely that it was the work of several persons, and was written over centuries. This text encompasses all Indian performing arts – theatre, dance, music. Written in Sanskrit verse
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