Unspoken Desires: Lore as case study on shadow narrative

JOSC 5 (3) pp. 343–353 Intellect Limited 2014

Journal of Screenwriting Volume 5 Number 3 © 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/josc.5.3.343_1

Margot Nash University of Technology, Sydney

Unspoken Desires: Lore as case study on shadow narrative Abstract

Keywords

This article explores the concept of a shadow narrative lying under the surface of the main film narrative through a case study of the 2012 film Lore. The film is based on the second story in Rachel Seiffert’s book The Dark Room. It was adapted for the screen by British screenwriter Robin Mukherjee and Australian director and screenwriter Cate Shortland. I will search for the structure of this narrative through an analysis of key emotional scenes, moments or spectral traces when the unspoken desires of the protagonist, Lore, surface and take form, when subtext becomes text and nothing is ever the same again. Using film analyst Paul Gulino’s argument that most narrative films consist of eight major sequences, each between eight and fifteen minutes, I will break the film into eight sequences and then identify one key emotional scene in each sequence. I will then analyse the eight key scenes and discuss the development of Lore’s shadow or unspoken narrative of desire. Some of these key scenes re-imagine or extend narrative moments from the book, but most are new, created by the screenwriters in order to make visible the invisible transformation of character and to heighten themes introduced in the first story in the book and brought to a resolution in the third.

subtext desire shadow narrative sequence structure key scenes adaptation

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Introduction Lore (2012) is based on the middle story in Rachel Seiffert’s book The Dark Room (2002) about three Germans whose lives are changed forever by the events of World War II. The title The Dark Room is a reference both to the holocaust and to the role of photography in bearing witness to history. The first story ‘Helmut’ is about a young man, born with a physical disability, who photographs daily events just as Hitler is coming to power. The second story ‘Lore’ is about a young girl who is left in charge of her four younger siblings when her Nazi parents are interned at the end of the war. ‘Micha’, the last story, is set 50 years later and tells the story of a young German man’s search to find out what his Nazi grandfather really did during the war. The three stories are thematically, but not narratively linked. Set in spring 1945, Lore’s story begins as the Nazi regime is crumbling. Stranded with her four younger siblings, 15-year-old Lore (Saskia Rosendahl) must take the children, including a baby in a pram, on a perilous journey across war-torn Germany to the safety of their grandmother’s house in Hamburg. Lore encounters Thomas (Kai Malina), a mysterious Jewish refugee who follows them and helps them. As in the classic hero’s journey, she must endure many trials and tribulations and overcome numerous obstacles in order to achieve her goal, and, like Little Red Riding Hood, when Lore does get there, her grandmother is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The overall action of this film is to ‘get to grandma’s house’, but what is happening for Lore (both consciously and unconsciously) that drives this film emotionally?

A world turned upside down The story was inspired by the true story of Seiffert’s mother, Gretchen, whose parents were Nazis, but the screenwriters made an important decision early on. In the book, Lore is eleven years old and still a child − in the film she is fifteen, with all the desires and confusions of a young woman. Caught between the anti-Semitic ideologies of hatred her parents have taught her and her growing

Figure 1: Lore (Saskia Rosendahl). Photograph courtesy Porchlight Films – Australia.

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desire for this young man, Lore’s internal conflict and questioning become the sub-textual terrain that drives this film. Shortland’s previous film Somersault (2004) also explored the story of a young woman whose world is turned upside down. Both Lore and the young protagonist in Somersault, Heide, find themselves adrift in hostile worlds and both search for love in all the wrong places. In Somersault, Heide returns to the mother she has been searching for all along, but she is still the damaged needy daughter defined by the desire for her mother’s love. Lore, on the other hand, questions the very basis of her parents’ beliefs and finally finds the courage to reject the ‘misguided dream of an arrogant nation’ (Soutland 2012). She confronts the wolf and nothing will ever be the same again. Shortland notes that she was attracted to this story of a young Nazi girl because she was interested in stories about the children of perpetrators. ‘What happens when you find out that the ones you have loved have lied to you, and the whole society has lied to you’? Shortland draws parallels with the silences in Australian history, the massacres and early attempts at genocide of Aboriginal Australians (Tatz 2013). Australia’s relationship to its colonial history is suppressed, and having spent quite a lot of time in post Apartheid South Africa and in Germany, these questions are often in my mind. What would I have done in the midst of genocide and horror? Would I have stood up for the weak and persecuted or rather, like most, been a silent bystander or even worse, complicit. (Shortland 2013)

Subtext and shadow narrative This article is a continuation of my previous research into the sub-textual gaps and spaces within a screenplay that invite audiences to become active (Nash 2013: 149−62), where I argued: It is the unspoken and often unconscious desires of character that are the fuel that drives the story forwards. The plot unfolds because of them and it is our desire to close or fill in the gaps that makes us, the audience, active as we piece together motivation, desire and need. (Nash 2013) This filling in of the gaps is the work of the shadow narrative, for audiences must try to make sense of the unspoken, and often unconscious, desires of character. This may take the form of a series of questions, for desires that cannot be expressed openly do not appear neatly; they appear as symptoms masking the true nature of the desire. When the film opens, Lore is a long way away from being able to express the true nature of any of her desires. She stands naked in front of the window as her father’s car approaches and then, wearing only her nightdress walks down the stairs to greet him with her hair still wet. These images of a young pubescent girl beginning to explore her sexuality focus on the father as the object of desire, and by displacement, the father is also standing in for the other father − the Führer. Lore’s belief in the ‘ultimate victory’ will soon be shattered, but other events will also shake her world and lead her to question all that she has believed in and held dear.

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Freud argued that the repressed always returns (1896: 170). In Lore we see her unspoken desires return again and again. In his early lectures, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that desire is always the desire of the Other (1964: 235) and that we need to learn how and what to desire. This desire of the Other is both the desire of a society and its lores, and of individuals within that society; it is the desire for recognition from this Other and for the thing we imagine the Other desires, that is, what they lack. For if someone desires something it means that they lack that something and there is a gap, or hole, they are trying to fill. The film follows Lore as the desires of the Other (in particular her mother) for a glorious Germany with the Führer as omnipotent father of the perfect Aryan race are slowly undermined. The obedient Lore has always believed that if she is a very good little girl she will be able to fill the hole of her mother’s lack and be rewarded with the love she desires. The trauma for Lore, at the end of the film, is when her faith in this guarantee of happiness is shattered and the fantasy of salvation disappears. At this point she rejects the neat, simplistic solutions of fascism and embraces the complex mess that is life, and in so doing, assumes the burden of history and becomes a part of modern Germany, with its many different voices, its silences and its works of mourning.

The structure of the shadow narrative Gaps and spaces within a screenplay offer readers and viewers the opportunity to piece together a sub-textual narrative of unspoken desire and need. These spaces are what Australian screenwriter Laura Jones (Oscar and Lucinda (1997) Angela’s Ashes (1999) calls ‘… the elisions where the shadow narrative is built’ (Jones 2009). The idea that there might be a subterranean narrative running under the surface of a film and that a screenwriter might approach building this through removing material intrigued me. I asked Jones to elaborate, but she was quick to argue that building a shadow narrative […] is not something you do. It is something that happens through structure but you only see it after you have written it. You have to see if the elisions and gaps mean what you want to say. It is how you make the steps – and the bits that are left out make the leap thrilling. (Jones 2011) In searching for the evidence of Lore’s shadow narrative I decided to look at one particular aspect of narrative structure, which I have found useful as a writer and as a teacher: sequence structure. In his book Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, American Paul Gulino argues that ‘a typical two-hour film is composed of sequences – eight to fifteen minute segments that have their own internal structure – in effect shorter films built inside the larger film’ (2004: 2). I set about the task of looking for the structure of the elusive shadow narrative by breaking Lore into eight major sequences and searching for a key emotional scene in each sequence. I define a key emotional scene as one – where unspoken desires surface – where subtext becomes text – where, after the scene, nothing is ever the same again.

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After identifying the eight key emotional scenes in the film, I then went back and read the book again and, like invisible ink, the fingerprints of the screenwriters suddenly appeared. Not one of the eight key emotional scenes I had chosen existed in the book. Elements of two of them did; however, they had either been added to or shifted in time and space. In the book, Lore’s story reads a little like a film treatment (in fact Seiffert had written screenplays before writing the book). It is visual, written in the present tense and surprisingly devoid of an internal voice for Lore. But it also has a long-drawn-out ending without a clear resolution, which is problematic for a film. (The book, as a whole, does have a powerful resolution, but this occurs in the third story.) I decided to interview screenwriter Robin Mukherjee and ask him about the creation of the new scenes and the adaptation process. Mukherjee had written the initial treatment and a number of drafts before director Cate Shortland was attached. They then worked closely, going to Germany to visit the concentration camps and research elements for the film together. He wrote a further draft that solved the structural problem of the ending and then Shortland prepared a Director’s draft. In the interview he noted: We had to look at all three of the stories in Rachel Seiffert’s book ‘The Dark Room’ because if you take ‘Lore’ in isolation it doesn’t actually stand up as a complete unit and neither is it structured that way. The way ‘The Dark Room’ is structured is that it is introduced and then developed, so the first story introduces a sort of innocent approach to Nazi idealism, and an acceptance of it, because that’s part of the landscape and then this theme is developed through the two other stories. (Mukherjee 2013) Helmut’s story, which introduces the book, shows his ‘acceptance of aspects of Nazi idealism that were seductive, such as joining something that’s bigger than the individual’ (Mukherjee 2013). But Helmut is born with a disability; thus, ‘… the irony is that the main character can’t join the Nazi army because he is a cripple’ (Mukherjee 2013). The theme of genetic and racial ‘imperfections’ that the Nazis tried to eradicate was absent from Lore’s story (although as a reader you carry this with you from Helmut’s story) and so the screenwriters added images such as a farmer’s son who has a clubfoot and an American soldier with a birthmark on his face (Mukherjee 2013). The screenwriters also created a scene in the opening where the children carry large folders of papers to be burnt on a huge bonfire, one marked ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring – Confidential’, clearly referencing both the Helmut narrative and the Nazis’ burning of the books. In the book, Lore’s father does not carry the threat of the Nazi pogrom and so, in the film, the screenwriters made him an officer in the mobile death squads in Belarus (this is the position Micha’s grandfather in the third story held). […] we had to find a way of establishing and resolving those themes within the story of LORE, preferably without introducing material that wasn’t in, or suggested by, the book. (Hunter 2013) So you have the burning of the papers and a slightly more grotesque father than is in the book because as a stand-alone story it is fine to

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have this elegant, German, aristocratic officer type, but in the reflective process we wanted to have the hint of there being an animalistic, dark, brutal, barbaric, savage side. (Mukherjee 2013)

The key scenes In order to follow the overall action of the main narrative I have included brief paragraphs that outline the unfolding story between the key scenes. My interest is in the key scenes and the unspoken emotional shifts that occur within them that drive the main narrative from below.

(1) The lie This scene occurs as the allies sweep across Germany and the family packs up in order to flee to their country house. Lore, who does not understand what is happening, goes looking for her father. She descends a dark staircase and finds him in the back garden, in uniform, with the family dog. He tells her that the neighbour will feed the dog until they return and implores her to go back to her mother. She reluctantly obeys, only to hear a gun shot as he shoots the dog. She is frozen in silence as he enters the house straightening his uniform. In this moment Lore realizes that her father has both lied and killed in cold blood; thus, the first seed of doubt in him (and by displacement the Führer) is sewn. We see this in her body language as she edges around him, making sure not to touch him. This key emotional scene, which was created by the screenwriters, is also a key scene for the main narrative as the father’s action in shooting the dog makes it clear that this is the point of no return − there will be no going back.

(2) Cover yourself This scene occurs when the family is staying in the country. The father has left and Lore returns to the cottage one evening to find her mother in a distressed and angry state, listening to a patriotic Nazi song and trying to gather wood for a fire. She has been in the village trying to sell the family silver and has returned with the news of Hitler’s death. She is bruised and the skin on her thighs is torn and bloody. In the book the mother does go to the village to sell silver and she does return with the news of Hitler’s death, but she has not been raped or attacked as she has been in the film. This invention of the screenwriters confronts Lore with the visceral nature of war and the reality of the defeat. Lore, the neat little Nazi girl with her perfect plaits, wants to hold onto the image of Aryan perfection. She is appalled to see her mother’s bloody thighs and tries to make her cover herself. Now that Hitler is dead, the dream of the glorious victory is over and her mother is ‘broken and vulnerable, all of the things that are outside of the Nazi appeal’ (Mukherjee 2013). The mother now gives herself up and Lore is entrusted with the children and told to take them to their grandmother’s house in Hamburg. She has her mother’s jewelry to sell for food and a small china ornament, a deer, to give to the grandmother. The third key scene occurs just before they leave for Hamburg.

(3) Desire Lore lies in her mother’s bed wearing her mother’s lipstick and trying on her mother’s wedding ring. Here her desire to be both sexual and a wife emerges from the shadows and is acted out. This moment where she assumes the 348

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role of the mother is a major turning point in Lore’s shadow narrative and in the main narrative for it is the beginning of her journey across a devastated landscape where her beliefs will be challenged and her unspoken desires will surface and be acted upon. Lore meets Thomas, the mysterious young man who follows them and tries to kiss her, but she rejects him. She sees photographs of the emaciated bodies of Jews displayed publicly and returns at night to tear a photograph from the wall. It is only later that we see that the photograph is of her father in uniform. From the very beginning, the film raises questions about the innocence and guilt of children and at this point in the film it is unclear what Lore’s response to the photographs actually is. What keeps the audience engaged in a narrative is the transformation of character and in the fourth key scene something does indeed shift and we see what has been simmering under the surface − and begin to care for her.

(4) Come! In this scene, the filthy and half starved children have been taken in by an old woman; she allows them to wash and gives them some bread. The twins Günter and Jürgen stand in front of a portrait of Hitler in their underwear, holding hands and singing a patriotic song for the old woman’s pleasure. In the book an old woman does give the children shelter, but this uneasy scene with its perverse sexual undertones, has been created for the film. Gazing at the portrait of Hitler, the old woman says how he loved the German people, but they disappointed him. She claims that the photographs of the dead Jews are lies constructed with actors to discredit him. Then she tells the boys to come to the table, but when they do not obey her, she hits the table shouting ‘Come’! This is the first time that Lore sees and openly rejects the perversity and authoritarianism that is at the heart of her parents’ beliefs. She tells the children to put their clothes on as they are leaving. She ignores the old woman’s plea to leave her the baby. This is Lore’s first major step towards learning what it is she, herself, might desire. Thomas follows them and helps them. Lore sees his Jewish papers and the tattoo on his arm. There is a growing sexual subtext between them, but the conflict between her desire for him and the ideologies of hatred she has grown up with is too much for her and she gets sick, and so he must look after her. When she gets well she makes him eat separately because he is a Jew. She will not let him touch the children and she treats him with all the superiority of her Nazi upbringing, but her desire for him is still there.

1. Jouissance, and the corresponding verb, jouir, refer to an extreme pleasure. It is not possible to translate this French word, jouissance, precisely. Sometimes it is translated as ‘enjoyment’, but enjoyment has a reference to pleasure and jouissance is an enjoyment that always has a deadly reference, a paradoxical pleasure, reaching an almost intolerable level of excitation. Due to the specificity of the French term, it is usually left untranslated. No Subject − An Encyclopedia of Lacanian Psychoanalysis http:// nosubject.com/index. php?title=Jouissance, accessed 10 November 2013.

(5) What do you want? In this key scene Lore approaches Thomas and stands disdainfully over him. ‘What do you want’? he asks. She takes his hand and places it under her dress pushing his fingers inside her, forcing him to pleasure her. But as soon as he crumbles and shows his weakness, his desire, she treats him with the same contempt her mother treated her father. She hits Thomas the way her father hit her mother. Here her unspoken desire for him surfaces as a symptom in all its messy confusion, masking the true nature of her desire. It is the desire of the Other to dominate, to control, to crush. But is it also the obscene jouissance1 of the discourse of fascism? In the book Lore is cruel to Thomas, but in a more subtle and confused way. 349

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(6) Child, you smell like death In the sixth key scene Lore uses her newly found sexual power to entrap a fisherman so that they can steal his boat and cross the river. Thomas seizes the opportunity and brutally kills the fisherman. In this moment Lore realizes that she is complicit in the violence, that her sexuality has been responsible for a death. Like Oedipus she realizes that she is the murderer and she tries to drown both herself and the baby. Thomas saves her and in the aftermath we see tenderness between them that is almost unbearable. They rest in the forest and Thomas goes looking for food. One of the twins, Günter, thinking he hears Thomas returning, runs into the open and is shot dead. Thomas, ever the survivor, takes Gunter’s boots, and makes them flee, leaving the boy’s body behind. He blames them for not obeying him to stay hidden. He wants to leave them, but Lore wants him to stay. Grief stricken, she struggles with both hatred and desire. She rails against him, saying how much she hates him, but she is really saying ‘I love you. Don’t leave me’. They board a train and Thomas discovers that his papers are missing. When the soldiers start to check people’s papers he gets off the train, leaving them forever.

(7) Do you promise not to tell? The seventh key scene is when they are crossing the mud to Hamburg and Jürgen reveals that he stole Thomas’s wallet so that he could not leave them. Lore opens the wallet and sees that the photograph is not Thomas. Jürgen explains that Thomas had stolen the wallet from a dead Jew and pretended to be a Jew as the Americans like Jews. It is a shocking moment for Lore, who must now revisit her past actions and reimagine his story. Mukherjee, during the interview, filled in the thinking behind Thomas’ backstory: The clues are all there. He says that he was in prison for being a thief so he was one of the people in the penal system in Germany because of criminality and there was room in the concentration camps for those people. Assuming that he is not lying and why should he, let’s take his story. He could have been in a concentration camp, he would have had special privileges and in fact he would have been a defacto member of staff and he would have had better rations and he might even have had supervisory responsibilities such as keeping an eye on Jewish work parties so in a sense the question of Thomas’ complicity in the great crime is very interesting. […] He got the papers, he got a suit, easy enough for him to get a tattoo as well, and passing himself off as Jewish would allow him to get favours from the occupying forces. (Mukherjee 2013) Now that Lore knows that Thomas is not Jewish, she must accept that she has wronged someone who helped her and the children, someone she loved and desired, whom she has now lost forever. When they get to their grandmother’s house she cannot pretend to be happy. She has behaved cruelly (like her parents) and she is angry with herself. But there is also the question of the innocence or the guilt of her parents. When she looks at the photographs of the dead Jewish man’s family, they become real people, not ‘actors’.

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(8) A good boy waits until he is served The eighth key scene begins at the dinner table in Hamburg. The grandmother wants everything to resume the way it was before the war when life was idealized and children were obedient. Therefore when Jürgen reaches for a slice of bread she pounces and slaps his hand. ‘A good boy waits until he is served. Where did you learn such a thing’? But Lore has learnt many new things during the cold and hungry journey to her grandmother’s house and one of these things is the ability to disobey. She acts out her rebellion by tearing the bread apart with her hands and stuffing it into her mouth and then knocking the jug of water over and drinking through cupped hands. Her grandmother is appalled. ‘What are you doing’? But Lore is not finished. She smashes her grandmother’s collection of china animals, including the little deer. Mukherjee commented in the interview: It is both a kind of negative act in the sense that it’s saying goodbye idealism, naivety, childhood innocence but it’s also the kind of statement that has a rationale too which is goodbye bullshit, goodbye idealist. Goodbye fascistic attempts to create a world into a shape that’s suits it. (Mukherjee 2013) In the first key scene Lore’s belief in the inevitability of ‘the glorious victory’ is shaken by her father’s lie about the dog. This gets the shadow narrative going, for it is the beginning of her questioning the infallibility of the Other; it is the beginning of her struggle to think for herself. This desire to question remains unspoken, just as her desire to be sexual and a wife only surfaces when she is alone in the third key scene. In each of the eight key scenes Lore’s unspoken desires rise up and ‘speak’ through her actions. She rejects the authoritarianism of the old Nazi woman and removes the children, but in her confusion about her sexual desire for Thomas she wields all the authority and sadism of her Nazi upbringing. This conflicted desire for Thomas becomes the central conflict lying beneath the surface of the film, for Lore desires what the Other hates and this along with the unfolding reality of the present fuels her silent questioning. This questioning breaks its silence in each of the key scenes, but it lives on under the surface of the film in the gaps and spaces that the audience must fill in, and it this process that finally unfolds the powerful shadow narrative of Lore’s individuation. The book as a whole leaves the reader with the possibility of reconciliation, but the film leaves its audience with the ‘shock of the real’, for Lore has journeyed ‘to a place that no longer exists’ (Mukherjee 2013) and in the final silence the ‘real’ challenges any belief in the existence of an Other who holds all the answers.

Conclusion This article began as an investigation into the structure of a shadow narrative. On the way it also uncovered a unique process of adaptation, in which essential themes woven through the three stories in the book were used to heighten the story of Lore as a single narrative and the unspoken desires of the protagonist were made clear through the development of key scenes. The methodology of analysing eight key emotional scenes within the framework of sequence structure revealed the development of a subterranean

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narrative of unspoken desires that finally speak. Subtext may well be present in a scene or a moment, and yet not be part of the emotional through-line narrative that develops under the surface, resulting in character transformation and change. However, if, as Laura Jones claims, the structure of a shadow narrative can only be seen after it is written, then this implies a more mysterious creative process. … what one attempts to solicit in any project is the activation of that mysterious process. So that one’s done the thinking, and one’s done the sort of instinctive apportionment of narrative and character and perhaps articulated things like central themes or how one is to relate to these characters … then you throw the doors the open for that more mysterious process to occur. […] I don’t know what it is, a sort of shamanistic ambition where you evoke and you live things rather than recite or explain. (Mukherjee 2013) When Mukherjee and Shortland first met in Berlin they began to discuss a working methodology. She asked him whether he worked according to structure like inciting incidents and turning points. I said no I’m sorry … And she said ‘Oh right well so how do you go about it?’ and I said ‘Well … I write and if the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up I know it must be pretty much spot on and if they are not I know that something is not quite working and I need to look a bit closer’ and she said ‘Well that’s fantastic cause that’s how I like to work. (Mukherjee 2013) To conclude, I suggest that it is us (the audience) who, in the final analysis, do the instinctive shamanistic work of building the shadow narrative − for this narrative lives in the gaps and spaces that the filmmakers have crafted that pose questions rather than answers, and it is within these spaces that we too might be activated to think for ourselves and, in the process, journey to a place that challenges belief in the existence of an Other who holds all the answers.

References Angela’s Ashes (1999), Wrs: Laura Jones and Alan Parker, Dir: Alan Parker, USA, Ireland, 145 min. Freud, S. (1896), ‘Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defense’, in J. Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, London: Hogarth, pp. 159−85. Hunter, G. (2013), ‘Britflicks interview with Lore writer Robin Mukherjee’, http://www.britflicks.com/blog.aspx?blogid=297. Accessed 8 November 2013. Jones, L. (2009), personal communication, 24 March, Sydney. —— (2011), personal communication, 29 July, Sydney. Lacan, J. ([1964, 1973] 1977), Seminar XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse/The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (trans. A. Sheridan), Paris: Seuil and London: Hogarth, p. 235.

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Lore (2012), Wrs: Robin Mukherjee and Cate Shortland, Dir: Cate Shortland, Australia, Germany and UK, 105 min. Mukherjee, R. (2013), ‘Skype interview’, Sydney 19 June. Nash, M. (2013), ‘Unknown spaces and uncertainty in film development’, Journal of Screenwriting, 4: 2, pp. 149–62. Oscar and Lucinda (1997), Wr: Laura Jones, Dir: Gillian Armstrong, USA, Australia, UK, 132 mins. Gulino, P. (2004), Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, New York: Continuum, p. 2. Seiffert, R. (2002), The Dark Room, London: Vintage Books. Shortland, Cate (2012), ‘Interview’, The Making of Lore, DVD extra, Lore Holdings, Original interview: Sydney, SBSTV. —— (2013), ‘Directors notes’, http://www.deckchaircinema.com.au/blog/ item/4-directors-notes-lore-by-cate-shortland.html. Accessed 29 October 2013. Somersault (2004), Wr/Dir: Cate Shortland, Australia, 106 mins. Soutland, F. (2012), ‘“Lore” by Cate Shortland (Director)’, The Monthly, no. 83, 5 October, p. 88. Tatz, Colin (2013), ‘Genocide in Australia’, http://www.kooriweb.org/gst/ genocide/tatz.html. Accessed 30 October 2013.

suggested citatioN Nash, M. (2014), ‘Unspoken Desires: Lore as case study on shadow narrative’, Journal of Screenwriting 5: 3, pp. 343–353, doi: 10.1386/josc.5.3.343_1

Contributor details Margot Nash is a filmmaker and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, where she teaches in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her areas of research include the theory and practice of screenwriting, developing subtext and Australian alternative film history. Her films have all won awards and been selected for both national and international festivals. They include the experimental shorts We Aim to Please (1976) (co-filmmaker), Shadow Panic (1989), the documentary feature For Love Or Money 1982 (cofilmmaker) and the feature dramas Vacant Possession (1994) and Call Me Mum (2005). In 2012 she was Filmmaker in Residence at Zürich University of The Arts, where she began developing a personal essay feature documentary about her family called The Silences. E-mail: [email protected] Margot Nash has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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