A Filmmaker's Guide to: Metafiction

In this chapter of ‘the filmmaker’s guide’ we’re actually going to be learning about literature and film together. I understand that many of you are sitting in university during difficult times and finding it increasingly hard to study and I understand that many of you who are not at university or not planning on it are possibly stuck of what to do, need a break or even need to catch up on learning film before you get to the next level. This guide will be brief but will also contain: new vocabulary, concepts and theories, films to watch and we will be exploring something taboo until now in the ‘filmmaker’s guide’ - academia (abyss opens). Each article will explore a different concept of film, philosophy, literature or bibliography/filmography etc. in order to give you something new to learn each time we see each other. You can use some of the words amongst family and friends to sound clever or you can get back to me (email in bio) and tell me how you’re doing. So, strap in and prepare for the filmmaker’s guide to film studies because it is going to be one wild ride.

Metafiction

What is it?

As a combination of two words 'meta-' and 'fiction', this literally means 'almost fiction'. It is a piece of art that draws attention to itself as a piece of art, as if the narrator knows that this is a story and therefore, some parts of it have been embellished for effect.

In literature, metafiction is not overly common but there are works that you would probably want to look at first and foremost in order to understand the genre more. The work everyone reads first when investigating metafiction is "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne.

In this book, we can see that Tristram Shandy - both protagonist and narrator - starts his life with events and opinions he had from before he was born and therefore, through the satire, is noticing himself that some of these facts have been exaggerated and embellished for the effect of being more entertaining and slightly funnier than a regular memoir/biography.

Other texts include:

1. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
2. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
3. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
4. The British Museum is Falling Down by David Lodge
5. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
6. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
7. The War of the Worlds by H.G Wells
8. Money by Martin Amis
9. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
10. Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
11. 2666 by Roberto Bolano
12. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
13. If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
14. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
15. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
16. Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis
17. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
18. Ulysses by James Joyce
19. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
20. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

What about film?

Films adapted from metafiction can go one of two ways: they are either successfully adapted with the cutting of certain small pieces that are not needed or they are adapted with full intent and go down like a lead balloon, the audience is therefore left confused.

If we want to adapt metafiction correctly, we want to first establish the timeline of what happens first in terms of time and how time plays out in the novel. Then, arrange this in the way it happens in the novel and notice whether it will or will not work on screen. If it will not work, rearrange it so that it does or additionally, add in bridging scenes between two times and places done in order to make the time lapse clearer to the audience. For example: if this is a flashback of some kind, frame it in a narrative of two characters talking to each other: one character could say something along the lines of 'it happened [insert time here] ago...' and then your next scene, an analepsis, takes place with the audience knowing what is going on.

Good adaptations of metafiction and original pieces include:

• Cloud Atlas
• Fight Club
• The Handmaid's Tale
• The Man in the High Castle
• The Princess Bride
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Atonement
• Hamlet
• Midnight in Paris
• The Seventh Seal
• Videodrome
• Synecdoche, New York
• Eraserhead
• The Truman Show
• Deadpool
• The Cabin in the Woods
• Hot Fuzz

Now, let's have a look at some further reading that you can partake in at your pleasure to create your perfect metafiction film, sometimes known as metafilm.

Further Reading:

• Currie, M (1995). Metafiction. UK: Longman Critical Readers
• Macrae, A (2020). Discourse Deixis in Metafiction: The Language of Metanarration, Metalepsis and Disnarration. UK: Routledge.
• Roche, D (2018). Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction. 2nd ed. USA: University of Mississippi Press.