Writing for cinema. Writing for TV.

11th Screenwriting Research Network (SRN) International Conference

Thursday September 13th to Saturday September 15th, 2018
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Milan

Carmen Sofia Brenes

The dialogue between time and identity as cornerstone of the German TV-series
“Dark”

This paper studies the relationship between the identity of the characters, considered as
the set of stable features that define them, and narrative time, that is, the before and the
after in a plot. The work field is the first season of “Dark”, a German series produced in
2017 by Netflix, which presents a story whose characters intuit in a vague way that their
present identity is strongly marked by their past, and that affecting the past may involve
radical changes in who they are at present and in the future. Time travel makes the
characters doubt whether their actions are predetermined by something external or the
result of free will, and they experience temporality as a confinement, impossible to
break away from. The characters do not have a single or closed-ended answer to these
questions. However, the viewer notices that the protagonists’ decisions relate to their
position on these issues. This dialogue between time, which operates almost as a
character, and the identity of the characters is the cornerstone of the series.

To probe into the relationship between time and identity in “Dark”, I follow Paul
Ricoeur’s narrative theory when he argues that “time becomes human when it is
articulated in a narrative way”. In other words, there is a relation between the narration
of time and the understanding of oneself. The in-depth study of Ricoeur makes it
possible to see “Dark” as a good example of what happens in any narration in which the
verisimilitude of the characters is founded on the coherence between the actions of the
present and the identity that they have acquired as a result of the decisions of the past.

The study of this relationship in “Dark” is of use to screenwriters as it shows in a

specific case how the consistency of the plot depends on its capability to structure itself
in a way that mirrors the conformation of human identity in terms of actions undertaken
in the past and decisions made with a view to the future.

Affiliation
Dr Carmen Sofia Brenes
Professor of Poetics and Screenwriting
School of Communication
Universidad de los Andes, Chile
csbrenes@miuandes.cl
Carmen Sofia Brenes teaches poetics and screenwriting at Universidad de los Andes,
Chile. She is interested in the validity of Aristotle’s Poetics in current theory and
practice of screenwriting. Carmen Sofia has given seminars and worked as a script
consultant in various Latin American countries, Belgium, Finland, Italy and Spain. She
is the author of Tema e trama di un film (2001); ¿De qué tratan realmente las
películas? (2001); Fundamentos del guión audiovisual (2 ed.) (1992); and Recepción
poética del cine (2008). In 2017, she co-edited Transcultural Screenwriting. Telling
Stories for a Global World. She is the Treasurer of the Executive Council of the
Screenwriting Research Network (SRN) since 2016. She has served as a member of the
Council also from 2012 to 2015.
Social media:
@csbrenes
http://uandes.academia.edu/CarmenSofiaBrenes
Contact:
Universidad de los Andes
Av. Mons. Álvaro del Portillo, 12.455, Las Condes
Santiago, Chile
www.uandes.cl
Tel.: (56 2) 2618 1852
e-mail: csbrenes@miuandes.cl