Studies of narratives as complex systems pre-date the official birth of Complex Systems Theory but only in the last couple of decades a new cross-disciplinary approach picked up substantial pace. Investigations in film and other screen media studies, though, are generally limited to the complexity of narrative structures—and all too often tend to rely on analogies and axiomatic reasoning, rarely tackling screenwriting or the screenplay, if at all. This chapter aims to fill this gap by introducing a screenplectical, that is, a pragmatic/processual epistemological take to the study of screenwriting as a complex adaptive system (SCAS) by: (i) outlining its constituent functional ontologies as they express relational properties and processes of the core screenwriting system that is nested hierarchically within higher-level complex systems with which it constantly interacts; and (ii) proposing modelling options (e.g. cellular automata, networks, 4-D manifolds) that rely extensively on a Critical Digital Humanities approach.
Russo, Paolo
School of Arts
Year of publication: 2023Date of RADAR deposit: 2024-12-05
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