How and why involving the natural elements in a script anchors the film in a deep relationship with the viewer.
Our nature mobilized
We are living beings who are an integral part of nature. In an unconscious, intuitive and intrinsic way, we all feel the power of our connection to nature, this organic link, this link that is our life itself. So, when writing a film script, even if it’s not an explicitly ecologist film, taking into account the presence and impact of nature on human characters brings something organic and almost supernatural. It makes us feel naturally connected to the film.
How can this be embodied? For example, by working with elements such as heat, cold, wind, rain, noise, insects, animals and the seasons. The fact that, in a story, the presence and action of natural elements on the characters are taken into account makes the film profoundly organic and gives it an anchoring in natural reality, which gives it an astonishing power.
This power is not artificial or manufactured; it emerges naturally from the fact that spectators, through their own sensibility, receive real sensations. Unconsciously, they link what they see to their personal experience, to their life, to their sensory memory. This strengthens their connection with what’s happening in the film’s story.
It’s not a question of dispensing with the dramaturgical work, which the natural elements would compensate for. Nature’s active presence on the human characters in the story being told will engage us in a lived experience, felt when watching the film. In this way, whatever story is told, it anchors itself in the lives of the spectators, in a natural way, and opens us up to our own depths, in the regime of the living.
