From the Outside In or From the Inside Out

By Sabine Forsblom

There is a kind of old friend one may not have contact with for years, for one reason or another, but when they turn up again one always feels perfectly comfortable with them. I suppose they’re called soulmates. I met one of them during the literary festival on Åland a few months ago. Suddenly, Ester was standing there after thirty years, and we talked and talked as if we had seen each other a month before. About our childhood friendship, about our lives right now. When we parted, I knew that it might be another thirty years, but that it didn’t matter.
It felt something like that when I rediscovered writing. That I took it up again – I’d severed my contact with writing after school essays – was pure chance. I was working at Finland Swedish Television, and my storytelling needs were more than adequately satisfied by documentaries and fiction. But in the mid-1990s I was lucky enough to be sent on a course in Dramaturgy. It was like pressing a button. The contact was there again. What was to have been a film script became a novel, Maskrosguden (The Dandelion God).
Even early in the writing process, I noticed that I was enjoying the actual job of writing, that I liked playing with language and the new contexts and connections that that created. And I noticed that the language my main characters spoke went on for pages and demanded to be heard. It was clear to me that I would write a literary version of the theme and only then adapt it into a film script.
For a long time, I lived with the pretense of at least making part of the book into a documentary film. In the novel, there is a story that is taken straight from reality. My biological grandfather on my mother’s side deserted from the Finnish army and fled via the Foreign Legion to Brazil, where he built a new family. A story with many layers, I thought, went on a script development course, had a producer ready for the project – and backed off at the last minute. I didn’t want to see my family legend in actual pictures. I didn’t want to give real faces to a tale that was surrounded by myths, was tragic, and spurred the imagination. I wanted to keep my shadows to myself and, above all, I wanted to keep my grandfather as the handsome young man I knew from the photographs.

Filtered light – hidden feelings
I noticed that I wanted to paint moods and feelings as exactly as possible, which – strangely enough – hadn’t been possible on film, despite the capacity for exact reproduction (on a superficial level) that film has and other art forms lack. I knew that I had to write the book first. A decision that led to me quitting my job as a film-maker after ten years in the industry.
Now I can also see another pattern in my way of working with text and pictures. When I was working with film, I functioned to a huge extent from the outside in. I got inspiration for films from a setting, a person, a particular light. My latest documentary, about the fates of people in Saint Petersburg, was inspired by the light in the city. A soft, beautiful, natural light, strained through the enormous filter formed by the city’s exhaust fumes and the mists from the Neva.
When I work with text, I work more from the inside out. Memories, moods and hidden feelings suddenly pop up and appear on paper. One day when I had sat down to write a section about the environment in the little village where the book’s narrator spends her childhood summers, I realised after a while that I was writing a passage about child-abuse. Something physical happens to my body when I’m writing, and it activates my sub-conscious in a completely different way from when I’m working with film. One explanation is of course that I have primarily worked with documentary films, and preferably in a spirit of cinéma vérité. Attention is then directed outwards towards what is happening in front of the camera, and towards the person, environment or event that I am trying to describe.

When I write, I’m free
But my original idea, to write a film script, was also of decisive importance for the form my book came to take. I picked out and described places, daily routines and feelings very precisely, so that I would later be able to stage and describe them for a large working group. And suddenly I realised that that was exactly what was important about my text: the meaning that places and daily activities have when they are described in detail. Describing the material with film in mind supplied not only the book’s outer structure, but also its central content and style. In certain passages, the world is seen through a magnifying glass, like an insect under a microscope.
When I write, I’m free – I have access in principle to the light I want, to the scenography I want. Nobody can tell me that it’s not possible to create the pictures I want. I can go backwards in the text and work on a scene that I wrote several months ago. The time of year is the same, the apartment hasn’t been rented out, the actors haven’t aged or changed their hairstyle, their voices haven’t broken and they haven’t got pregnant.
But I don’t want to be without the living picture of a person’s face. The people I myself have filmed and their tales, which are so intimately associated with expressions, gestures, tones of voice and pauses, have given me some of the most intense experiences of my life. Unforgettable moments of trust, presence, existence. And I want to see the faces that others have immortalised, both in documentaries and in story films. I’m glad that I’ve seen Jackie Coogan as Chaplin’s son in „The Kid“. I want to see when the policeman surprises him with a stone in his hand, ready to throw it at a window. He smiles apologetically, shrugs his shoulders and lifts his legs a little. You can see from his body movements that he is Chaplin’s son. I want to see that on the screen. For me, no words can describe that.
Stopping time
I miss working with the photographer. Shall we put the camera here? Do you think the light’s good enough? Finally: do you want to look through the viewfinder? Two people working towards the same goal. I can tell from his back what he’s thinking. He can see by my expression what I want. Two different ways of working: the empathy, the sweatily erotic mood at a recording; and the solitude, isolation and freedom of writing. Right now, freedom has the upper hand. Filming has left a vacuum that can’t be filled.
One often hears authors say that nothing real can be as good as something invented. For me, the reverse has always been the case. Reality outdoes fiction. When the Lumière brothers showed one of their first films, „Train Pulling Into a Station“, in Paris in 1895, people threw themselves between the seats and screamed in fear of the approaching train, which showed no signs of slowing down. I feel the same fascination for the fantastic fact that reality actually exists, and for the fact that in various ways we can stop time, pin it down: in a photograph, on a canvas, in a strip of film, in a few lines of text.

Sabine Forsblom, film-maker and author

Translated by Roy Hodson