Cinematic Writing, in and around London

About fiction and space(s)

Saturday, I took my son on a date. He’s six and he likes impromptu adventures. After decadent pastries and a walk through the Japanese garden at Regent Park (and mandatory stop at the playground), I took him to one of my favorite bookstores: Daunt in Marylebone (a gorgeous village-y part of London between Hyde and Regent parks). I love it there. It makes me feel serenely happy. I never go with an agenda but this time there was one: to show him my bookshop, to let him choose a book.

Ok, so it was two. And they weren’t the books I would have chosen. I have to bite my tongue a little in recognition that part of the joy of reading is choosing your own, of having that autonomy to be one with your book once you are able to read chapters fluently by yourself. He’s not quite there, but he wants to be.

Regent Park, Marylebone & tasty pastries (hands off for the photo!)

I also found a few gems myself and limited purchases to two from the Scandinavian area of the bookshop, which was simply where I happened to drift. On the Calculation of Volume, by Solvej Balle (translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland), is part of a five-part set about a time loop that Balle originally self-published despite previous ‘mainstream success’ to maintain full control and is in the process of being translated. It was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize this year and my other choice was shortlisted last year. The Details, by Ia Genberg (translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson), asks: “Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush?”¹

Have you been to Daunt? The main attraction is this beautiful three-story wooden room (photo below), organized by national/cultural sections. On the German shelf, for example, one would find travel guides, philosophy from Heidegger, and both poetry and fiction from Ulrike Almut Sandig. (The Japanese and French sections are humungous!) In other words, it is an internationalist’s dream. The entryway also has more conventional popular fiction and non-fiction on exploding old-fashioned tables as well as a back room for kids of all ages (mixed in with cooking and gardening, which somehow fits quite nicely as a bridge).

Photo of Daunt Books (Marylebone) by Alexandra Kirr on Unsplash

Some ensuing shopping on high street led to tired feet, so we stopped at The Marylebone for aperitif. It was the perfect day for apple juice at an open window…with a book.²

We then ate a late brunch at a French brasserie called Soutine. The kind of place you can order steak tartar and trust it to be both safe and delicious. For two hours, it was as if we were immersed in a Parisian scene I once knew in my dreams.

If this day had been cinema, it would have zoomed in on the roses when the wind blew and captured the heel clicks of anachronistic ladies walking down high street. The waiter would have been a caricature. The soundtrack would have played the occasional accordion and the camera would have zoomed out to a panorama of the rooftop terraces.

In a different shade, it would have featured jump cuts with eclectic indie alternative beats, some that you could sing along to. The faces would tell the stories of joy and annoyance, of heartbreak and intrigue. Extreme close-ups of furled brows or flashing, comical smiles would jump into the em dashes of narration. Symbols of passions — books, cocktails, poodles — would take over the wide screen with sound effects of surreal crispness.

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I’ve been thinking about this book I want to write with a not-him protagonist who uncovers the layers of history of our local park, possibly time travels, discovers mysteries, philosophy…a little bit like Orlando meets Murakami but for pre-teens.³

Part of this is to write something that features not-my-son as the center of perspective instead of writing about him. If I try to write about him, it sounds clichéd or empty. Trite. It never captures the idea.

I was thinking about this when I thought about writing in a cinematic way.⁴ Some things are hors-langue: outside of language. Enter, the cinematic. When done well, you can use all the languages you like: that of words, of music, visual artistry, and movement. And then the language of cinema itself, as a whole, as a history.

I’ve been watching the trees a lot lately — the way they move in the wind, their colors, their shapes, their juxtaposed varietals that often seem asynchronous with the surroundings. These, like my son, are almost impossible to capture in words. I’ll still try. But what if one, in a similar way to my above project, could be the tree?

It’s quite relaxing, watching a tree move. I do it from the static box of my apartment. Too often, we feel we need a purpose to our time. What if that purpose were to bring our minds a little closer to a natural phenomenon and achieve pieces of that oneness we may aspire to in full immersion with our worlds, as if delineations of time and us vs. them disappear?

This is also something good cinema can achieve. Just look at the work of François Ozon, most famous for Swimming Pool (2003) and 8 femmes (2002).

BBC: Films about writers are notoriously difficult. The act of writing is a pretty boring subject isn't it?

Ozon: Maybe you'd need to ask the audience! For me it's not boring. When you have someone like Charlotte Rampling [who plays mystery writer Sarah Morton] on a word processor, it's already sexy. I wanted to let the audience feel the rhythm of the creative process. At the beginning you don't know exactly where you are going, you have to take your time, you have to think. Then suddenly many things happen and the story arrives and things go very quickly.

From an interview with the BBC about Swimming Pool

Recently, I saw some fresh Ozon by accident. Well, I purposefully hit play, but I saw it on a plane and isn’t time there like a weird loophole, not unlike Balle’s experimental texts?

When Fall is Coming (2024, original: Quand vient l’automne) brings together toxic mushrooms, friendship, forgiveness, alternative families in an exploration of subtle horror, everyday beauty, and the fragility of relationships (familial especially, but not only). It has inspired many starts and stops in my notebooks and meanderings in relation to several brewing projects.

I watched Double Lover (2017, original: L’amant double) soon after to dive into some of Ozon’s more recent work I had missed. The story is farcical and imaginative, but rooted in ideas of the Freudian double and perhaps would be better in its original short story “Lives of the Twins,” by Joyce Carol Oates, which I have yet to read. It would be better as a written story, I think, but there was another layer of cinematic language from Ozon and his acclaimed cinematographer, Manuel Dacosse, that created labyrinths of the mind through architectural shots and visceral intimate moments alike.

The work in this film reminds me of that of Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, known especially for collaborations with Hong Kong filmmakers like Wong Kar-wai, Ann Hui, and Fruit Chan. I also recently viewed Conclave (along with the rest of the world) and was similarly struck by Stéphane Fontaine’s camera work of endless interiors that mimicked the imprisoned minds of the still-human cardinals (wasn’t that a brilliant film?). In these films, the camera work tells the story as much as the actors or the plot. And this is precisely what I’m wondering: how the words on the page can mimic the lens. Is it even possible?

And then I thought, maybe all those elusive ideas in my head that seem so otherworldly to write with the language available to me really aren’t at all. Maybe I just need to rediscover the way to access them. Reading in other languages (both originals and in translation) helps. Channeling cinematic tools helps (cuts and fades, extreme close ups, panoramas, over-the-shoulder shots, non-diagetic sound…). There must be some answers if I just start experimenting.

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A very short word sketch in that vein, inspired by a walk near my in-laws in Surrey recently:

One observing him could hear the off-screen piano, like a genius rehearsing and playing around with arpeggios and mixed melodies. He, the boy on the red bicycle, was peddling with eager thrusts of forefoot, each effort taking him farther up the dirt path, weaving around roots or simply zigzagging to fight gravity’s harsh push.

On a perch of dirt, he stopped. And, looking up in constant curiosity of his surroundings, he saw brilliant blue in puzzle shapes as if his eyes contained specks of dust that blinded it from seeing all the brilliant azure. The music was replaced by sounds of his breath, fast and heavy, amplified by the wind’s symbiosis.

The zephyr moved the branches of the cherry blossom trees so that the blue space - once mistaken as subject - now resignified itself as negative space, the emptiness surrounding the beautiful trees. How could they have been invisible to him a moment before? But then, he was a child, and all nature’s beauty weighed equally. The value of a hue or a shape as significant as this iconic tree with ephemeral, seasonal offering.

Closer now at the boy’s visage, the last year or so of rounded cheeks flushed with soft perspiration. The eyes instead held new secrets, new wonders. He closed the lids heavily and thought of the warm home to which he would return.

But onward, to the top of the hill! The lad resolved himself, turned his tires facing up and heaved those first difficult pedals of ascent as the non-diegetic music began again. The movement appeared easier to him now; the prize was closer, within reach.

We zoomed out to find a tiny moving spectacle in the middle of a path, of many trees of various greens, of the dancing light flickering over it all. The distance between us grew and grew until he disappeared.

/

Looping around and undulating with the earth, we finally reached the village in sync, peering around blind drives together. No longer was he pretending to journey alone.

As we approached the pub across from the general store, I had the vision I always do. This is where we saw the fox - dead - after it had observed us earlier that day, staring at us, asking for help or forgiveness or a place to rest. A relatively small creature, it looked peaceful in that corner by the wall, as if this had seemed the right place.

The boy had looked at the fox a long time. He had deduced it must have been very old and I had concurred. This was a year or two ago, but as we approached, the vision was as fresh as a printed photograph in my hand.

He stopped the bicycle and looked at the spot. Usually, he says something like: this is where we saw the fox; it was very old. Right?

But this time, he just looked and turned to me with great big brown eyes. I saw him against the bricks and thatched roof and wondered.

A swarm of bees moved toward us in unison. Danger and beauty all at once. We moved away, down the hill, and held hands…even while he biked.

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How have you been? It has been too long and I think the longer I am away, the more difficult it becomes to publish. So I set myself a goal to get something to all of you this week even though it’s a bit unpolished.

Those of you who have been around a while here may know this lack of weekly publication in 2025 is greatly out of sync with normalcy. Leaving any kind of judgment out of it for now (both of self and others or even societal), the volume of work at my job this academic year has nearly killed me. It’s getting slightly better now, but I think my head is in some kind of recovery fog and it’s difficult to write with the energy and joy I’m used to.

Things are changing drastically come summer. We are moving to Japan!

More on that soon. For now, I wanted to share some recent ideas about cinema and writing. If you would like to read more regularly about cinema, I recommend The Dialectic and Textual Variations as well as Jump Cut (an open-source academic journal).

Thanks for reading.

1. I’ve started Balle’s novel and am drawn by its originality and close voice. I’m one of those people who likes to read by my mood, so I’m also in the middle of a few other good reads from Romania, England, and France…perhaps some book talk is in order soon. Not reviews, but sparks of insight or inspiration. Would you like that?

2. Yes, one of his choices was that graphic novel in the picture. Here’s my thought about these from someone who’s taught teens for decades now: I see kids (boys usually but not only) at age 11 and 12 reading loads of these books and consider that perhaps a younger child could get them out of their system early. When I say these books, it’s the kind of goofy graphic novel that Captain Underpants has concocted into a subgenre (with words like fart adorning the page and plot lines that include baddies who lawn mow bluebells, which in a way is a quite advanced way of thinking about the importance of the seasons). Also: it is reading. In some ways more complex (pictures plus words, a language all its own, a lot like cinema…). I teach graphic novels, just put together a unit for Satrapi’s Persepolis and have done the adaptation for Auster’s City of Glass (for example). I often say to young students/pre-teens: yes, choose a graphic novel plus a prose book. Or, if you’ve got 3-4 from the library, only one can be graphic novel. If you have a reluctant reader, I can tell you that any reading is good reading and they will find their way to the good stuff if you let them free. So Buzz - my son - chose this one and a solid prose chapter book about space invaders. He is named after an astronaut, after all.

3. The park is the setting of this story I published a few months ago:

The Hedgehog's Quill

4. It’s not the first time I’ve thought about this. Here’s a podcast on said topic:

The Cinematic in Fictions | Episode 29