In a previous post, I mentioned Terry Keefe’s Venice magazine profile of
Norwegian film-maker Bent Hamer and it was interesting to find that Hamer
approached the writing of two of his films in very different ways.
The first was “Kitchen Stories,” which was based on an actual
study done in the 1940’s by a Swedish kitchen appliance company. In the film a
researcher is sent to study the kitchen habits of an elderly Norwegian bachelor
and bonds with his subject.
Hamer says, “With ‘Kitchen Stories’ I worked from the
inside, to my way out, around a very focused idea.”
The more recent film is “O’Horten,” a character study of a
train engineer who spent forty years on the same route and now is about to retire.
O’Keefe
writes that the film “is marked by a number of striking images: a POV shot of
someone going down a seemingly unmonitored ski jump at night; a businessman
willingly sliding down an iced-over road because it is too difficult to walk
on; and another POV shot from the engineer’s seat of a train going through a tunnel…so
it comes as little surprise that Hamer constructed his story with various
images such as these in mind.”
Hamer says, “…this time, I had to piece it together, and I
started from the outside with a lot of loose ends, and then tried to find the
center…I didn’t always know where to go.”
Of course you can combine the two. I’ve been toying with a
plot idea that has a very focused concept and I think now the way forward is to
free-associate for a while about images and characters before returning to plotting.
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