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Marcus Coelen's essay 'An Eclipse of the Screen: Jorge Semprún's Scripts for Alain Resnais' starts from the assumption that the peculiar status of film scripts (not written to be read as such) can be illustrated by the figure of their eclipse. For they are, in inverting the very logic of the figure they invite, eclipsed for the sake of and by the fractured light on the screen they help to produce. Yet just as the sun, obscured by the 'black writing' of the moon, leaves an ephemeral contour in the skies - a spectacle to many when happening - so too can the script that is made to disappear by the screen be assumed to draw its own particular and even more vanishing traits into the movie that is given not only to sight but also to thought. The analyses and critical constructions proposed by Coelen try to detect such traits in the work of Jorge Semprún the screen writer. Writing not only for movies by Alain Resnais - most notably "La guerre est finie" (1966) and "Stavisky" (1974) - but also publishing versions of them after their release and calling those versions 'scénarios' despite various divergences and subtly violent inversions of the movies' images, the screenwriter's figure describes yet another twist of the eclipse. It can be assumed not only that Semprún strongly resisted the influence of the constellation formed by writing and cinematographic shooting, as well as projecting, but furthermore that this writing was almost imperceptibly yet essentially directed against the eclipse it was drawn into. No minor forces are conjured up in this enterprise. Driven by the desire to re-appropriate cinema's a-personal and anti-psychological movement, to domesticate the images of scribbling lights drifting away from the mental and into thought - as well as into a history not mastered -, Semprún attempted to shape mastery itself and most traditional forms of authorship, along with memory and agency, in order to cloud the eclipse of script - that is, we might add, to conjure up a ghost recovering the trace of what has been eclipsed so that it may continue to haunt.
This paper compares Friedrich Dürrenmatt's drama script titled Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit, 1956) with the screenplay of the same name by Susanne Beck and Thomas Eifler (2008) with regard to emotionality in language. Due to the fact that the paper cannot focus on all aspects of emotionality, just one significant phenomenon will be addressed, namely certain features found in Dürrenmatt's text which are mostly lost in the screenplay and vice versa. The main focus is on the grotesque and absurdity on the one hand, and the text's closeness to reality and sentimentality on the other. The differences are illustrated using extracts from two selected scenes - the so-called Konradsweilerwald scene and the final scene. From the viewpoint of methodology, the linguistic text analysis of emotions will be used. Within the analysis, expression of emotions, description of emotions and evocation of emotions will be distinguished.