ASSET-STRIPPING CINEMA FOR LESSONS IN NARRATIVE by John A. A. Logan
Having recently watched Roman Polanski’s 1976 psychological thriller, The Tenant , for the first time, I was struck once again by the degree to which films have influenced me when it comes to narrative structure. Which isn’t to say that I haven’t been influenced far more by the past 400-years’ worth of novels we’ve been gifted to read…but somehow, as Tanita Tikaram put it back in the 80s, cinema has been the Twist in My Sobriety where narrative is concerned. I’d loved The Fearless Vampire Killers and Rosemary’s Baby , re-watched them many times since initial encounters with them during childhood(!)... And it seems my response to Polanski duplicates my response to Tarkofsky, or to Knut Hamsun, or to Mikhail Bulgakov, where I seem to fall in love early with one piece of work (Tarkofsky’s Solaris , Hamsun’s Hunger , Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita )…this one piece of work then mesmerises me as I watch and re-watch, or read and re-read, through decades, attemptin...