Scripting silence: the expanded screenplay as present-traumatic language

This research orbits the ‘auto’, a personal and critiqued experience of psychiatric and psychoanalytical treatments: on the one hand a pathologised fixing of speech, on the other the possibilities of new and fluid approaches of speaking and listening to trauma. My practice artefact, Instructions from Light, employs a constellation of methods that turn on an expanded translation and critical examination of the French filmmaker Louis Delluc’s screenplay for his impressionist film LE SILENCE (1920). Instructions from Light manifests as a collage of hybrid writing and found / reworked image and also embeds my translation of LE SILENCE, the first into English. Through uncoupling the idea of ‘screenplay’ from a fixed and finished endpoint of film, working with this form that maps and narrates in the present tense, I reject ideas of the post-traumatic and formulate a new concept, the presenttraumatic. I refigure screenwriting as resistant, metaphorical, and mobile. Although currently on the page, Instructions from Light emerges from processes of speaking and listening—rehearsal, performance, discussion, and symposia—an actual and metaphorical polyphony. I follow Audre Lorde in asking ‘What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?’1 Employing metaphor as ‘meta-methodology’ I offer a new approach for working critically across disciplines—screenwriting, translation, psychology, language practices, and a politicised autotheory. Translation as method is used as an embodiment of struggle—I deliberately chose LE SILENCE as my ‘practice-centre’ because it is written in a language I could not, at the outset of the research, understand. This research is not interdisciplinary, but transdisciplinary, demanding a new approach in producing a neologism—presenttraumatic— that is more than the sum of the disciplines I inhabit. Present-traumatic is a critical concept through which silence can speak and interrogate hierarchies of communication.