As a filmmaker, I often wonder what makes a film organic and captivating. The alternation between day and night, a natural rhythm of our existence, is a powerful tool for creating believability and anchoring the viewer in the story. I suggest ways to integrate this temporal dimension into screenplay writing to enhance immersion and emotion, whether in a short or feature film.
A Living and Organic Film?
Does the film you’re watching feel organic, natural, alive, engaging, or does it seem a bit false, a bit fabricated, and not very convincing in terms of believability? Not realism, but believability. It’s important, as Alfred Hitchcock pointed out, to distinguish realism from believability. Cinema has nothing to do with reality; it’s a staged performance, so realism is merely an illusion. On the other hand, believability—the desire to believe what we’re being told—is absolutely essential for us to receive what the film has to offer.
I find it useful to consider, during the screenplay writing stage, the topic of the alternation between day and night. Because in our real lives, every day, night falls, and every morning, day returns. There’s something that rhythms our senses, our ability to concentrate, our emotions, in this alternation between day and night. It’s a direct effect of the Earth rotating around the Sun. It’s one of the most essential structural elements of nature—mysterious, unfathomable, and magnificent—within which we live.
I believe it’s important to think, when writing a screenplay, about this alternation between day and night, whether for a short or feature film. It’s a way to consider one dimension of the organic relationship between the viewer and the film.
Implementing Alternation, Even When It’s Not Explicit
I’m not saying there must be a simplistic alternation between day and night. In a feature film, it can help create an organic rhythm, as a kind of natural flow to the sequence of scenes and actions, because it ties the story to the inevitable progression of days and nights. But, knowing it can be very disorienting for the viewer, you can also decide to set a film entirely during the day or entirely at night. To make night non-existent or day non-existent. This, in my opinion, is difficult to handle.
In a short film, of course, depending on its length, we may not have as much room to establish this general rhythm as in a feature film. But thinking about the screenplay’s temporality in terms of the rhythm of day and night can still bring an organic quality. For example, simply having characters, in their dialogue, reference something that happened the previous night or will happen tomorrow when it’s daytime. These simple dialogues can give viewers a sense of the film’s reality.
We naturally want to engage the audience in our film, for several reasons: for obvious commercial reasons, of course, but also because, as filmmakers, we want the audience to benefit from everything we aim to offer. This work on the alternation between day and night, or on the presence of this alternation, is one way to make the viewer feel naturally drawn into the film’s rhythm, without being able to explain exactly why. And we now know that one of the criteria for their engagement is the inclusion, in the screenplay, of the alternation between day and night.
