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Sept. 28, 2007
Framing the unconventional
Director undertook to faithfully represent a non-linear novel.
ELLEN RAINE-SCOTT
Flashback to the 1980s. Maureen Medved is living in Montreal, exploring
the hotbed of creativity in the city's vibrant arts scene. In particular,
she's trying to break into modern dance management, at a time when
Montreal is one of the world centres for dance theatre. The performances
she witnesses there are so daring, so deeply personal, that she's
inspired to pursue her own creative endeavors. She takes up writing.
Fast forward to Berlin in February 2007. The wildly experimental
and stylistically bold film, The Tracey Fragments, based
on Medved's novel by the same name and adapted for the screen by
her, opens the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival. The
film, directed by Bruce McDonald, wins the Manfred Salzgeber Prize,
impressing the jury with its daring form. McDonald uses a multi-frame
approach throughout the entire film to capture the multiple fragments
of the main character, 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz.
If Medved has arrived at a place of comfortable career success in
the worlds of both literature and cinema, her path hasn't exactly
been linear. In the 1990s, Medved found herself performing bits
of The Tracey Fragments as live theatre before punk shows
in Vancouver.
"It was interesting," said Medved in a recent interview,
"to perform these monologues for an audience that came out
specifically for an evening of music, but got hit unexpectedly with
performance as an opening act. It was very exciting to receive their
response, which was usually one of surprise. I don't think the audience
knew what to make of it. But at the end, it allowed me to test out
and hone my material."
Medved continued to experiment with the story when she arrived at
the University of British Columbia as a student in the creative
writing department (she is now an assistant professor in the same
program).
"I think, essentially, when I came to UBC, I began to think
in terms of dramatic arc," she said, "and to actually
study and understand the craft of writing in a much deeper way.
I worked on The Tracey Fragments while at UBC, as well as
other writing projects, so that I could strengthen my understanding
of the form. I wrote another novel while I was there, as well as
a few plays and screenplays. I learned a lot from the instructors
and the other students there. I'm very grateful for that experience
and I got a lot of support from everyone there to complete The
Tracey Fragments."
When Medved's novel was initially published, it was optioned for
film by another director. The option lapsed – and Medved's
agent found the story was generating a lot of interest from other
producers.
"At the time, I told my agent, Dacia Moss, that I wanted Bruce
McDonald (Hard Core Logo, Highway 61) to read the
book. I had just seen Hard Core Logo, and I really felt that he
would be the perfect director to take this on. It just felt like
the right match to me, and I was right about that. Bruce got Tracey
right away. He called us back within a few weeks, if I remember
correctly, saying he wanted to direct Tracey. He sent me a pair
of his cowboy boots to seal the deal."
Now began the difficult task of taking a work of literature with
a highly fragmented style and translating it to screen, traditionally
a more linear and structured form.
"This is a story told by one person, but from multiple time
periods," Medved continued. "There are flashbacks within
flashbacks, as well as fantasies and tiny fragments that come out
of Tracey's consciousness. I was trying as much as possible to access
the mind of a 15-year-old in crisis. The challenge in this kind
of writing is that it could be very confusing for the viewer, and
the trick was to communicate Tracey's state of mind in a way that
told a compelling story, maintained dramatic integrity and stayed
in character.
"The other trick, and one that the director, Bruce McDonald,
excelled at, was that he was able to communicate Tracey's fragmented
frame of mind in a non-linear way on screen. I had to write the
screenplay in a way that told the story dramatically, while resonating
with the mind of a 15-year-old on the run. But Bruce took it much
farther by using multiple frames to allow Tracey's psyche and storytelling
to resonate visually. What he did, I thought, was very impressive,
daring and difficult to pull off. But he pulled it off."
McDonald understood Medved's exploration of Tracey as experimental
narrative. They spent hours on the phone discussing their individual
visions for the film and how to put together the pieces of the novel
into a visual medium, while still honoring the experimentation of
the original work. McDonald began to think about using a multi-screen
approach as a possible solution to communicate Tracey's psychological
fragmentation. He pitched the visual style to executive producer
Paul Barkin, describing the film as "kind of like Laser Floyd"
and "cubism." According to McDonald, Barkin didn't even
blink – he simply asked, "So, who is going to shoot this,
uh, Laser Floyd movie?"
After years in the making, Medved's 15-year-old Tracey finally came
together on screen, in a brazen pop-art, multi-frame form that would
make Andy Warhol proud – and keep Medved's original goal to
create a daring and deeply personal work in the spirit of the Montreal
dance scene that first inspired her to become a writer.
The Tracey Fragments screens at the Vancouver International
Film Festival on Sept. 29 and 30.
Ellen Raine-Scott is a Vancouver writer and filmmaker.
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