Poetics of the screenplay as drama-text
Stapele, Pieter vanCitation
Stapele, P. van. (2005, September 8). Poetics of the screenplay as drama-text. W.V.O, Den Haag. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3758
Version: Corrected Publisher’s Version
License: Licence agreement concerning inclusion of doctoral thesis in theInstitutional Repository of the University of Leiden Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/3758
It has been a great pleasure and a most educational experience to work with M ike Katzberg, who corrected my English, not only by changing text-fragments or rectifying mistakes in the text, but also by making valuable suggestions concerning the improvement of some formulations of my arguments.
I would like to express my love and gratitude to Lida Dijkema for reading and then discussing with me vital parts of the text of my thesis. In particular I enjoyed our discussions about experiences in theatre and cinema and about concepts on which my writing is based. Her expert eye as an artist and her knowledge of the visual arts have substantially improved the way I look at performances.
It is not possible to mention all my other friends, former colleagues and students who had their share in how I enjoyed and still enjoy my life and work. I thank all of them for what they contributed to everything that I have learned and made, which among other things culminated in writing my thesis. Due to space limitations, I will only be able to mention a few.
I thank my friend Jan van Nieuwenhuijzen for our joyful and fascinating conversations about the necessity of the arts in education. And I thank him for sharing with me his experiences in projects of educational innovation and in his function as the first television director, between 1954 and 1964, of the VPRO, the liberal Protestant radio broadcasting service in the Netherlands. I thank Loek van Kesteren, a former colleague at Leiden University, for introducing me to the use of semiotics and communication theory in theatre study, and Dick Gilsing, at the Hogeschool Holland in Diemen, for sharing his knowledge and experience about his study of the screenplay. Also, I wish to thank the staff of Pallas, instituut voor historische, kunsthistorische en letterkundige studies (historical, art historical and literary studies) in Leiden for supporting me in preparing my thesis for publication.
I would like to express my thanks to my students by mentioning Hans van W illigenburg, who participated in one of the first groups of students when I began to teach drama in film at the university. I appreciate that he formulated basic questions and ideas during the lectures and when we discussed his texts in the period that he wrote his M .A. thesis. And above all I would like to express that I always enjoy our never-ending philosophical and political discussions along the beach that corroborate my experience that some of my students have been the best teachers I ever had.
To conclude, I want to express my love and gratitude to my wife Elly van den Noort and to my children, grandchildren and to Caio. Through the years, Elly has perused essential parts of my thesis and then offered her intelligent and elaborate comments on my writing. Thanks to her sharp and expert eye she made excellent judgements about what I wrote. Our discussions about her criticism of my writing surely have improved the text of my thesis. You know I love you, Elly, and I thank you for supporting my work through your profound criticism.
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University of Amsterdam. And I thank Saskia, her friends and colleagues for their work as actresses and actors in showing us, in cooperation with the writer Rosan Dieho, everything that happens during processes of transforming dramatic dialogues into performances on stage. I finally wish to thank Miriam, who created for me for the first time, a concrete and beautiful image of the necessity to distinguish between action in fiction, action in performance and action in daily life.
Pieter van Stapele was born on the 7th of May 1936 in the Netherlands, in Rotterdam. After obtaining two examination certificates (motor/bicycle repairer and car mechanic) at a vocational school in The Hague during 1951, he began to work in a garage. In 1952 he became stoker and later engineer in the Dutch navy. In 1958 he left the navy. Between 1958 and 1963 he studied in the evening in order to gain admission to a teacher training college. In 1966 he obtained the secondary teaching qualification for Dutch language and literature (M.O.-A) after which he worked in different secondary schools, in The Hague and in Rotterdam. Since 1971 he worked as a teacher of cultural education in the department of Community Work at the Social Academy in Rotterdam, engaged in different projects of educational innovation.
In 1976 he began to study again and in 1979 he graduated with a first degree (M.O.-B) from the School voor Taal en Letterkunde, the teacher-training college in The Hague where he had studied before. He then continued as a part-time student studying Dutch language and literature; combined with theatre study at the University of Leiden, where he passed his final examination in November 1980. In September 1980 he started to teach theatre study at the Faculty of Arts at Leiden University. After following different post-academic courses, he extended his work at the university to teaching film and television studies, and to organizing courses and workshops for students on the study of dramatic dialogue. He focused his work on analyzing the structure and content of drama-texts and on the question how these texts are intended to become transformed into performance in the theatre or on film.
He combined his work at the university with working for the WVO, a Dutch co-operative for educational reform, in projects for developing and implementing curricula that promote individual and group responsibility and involvement of students and teachers in creative education. At the request of the World Education Fellowship (WEF) and the World Council for Curriculum and Instruction (WCCI), he organized in 1983, 1989 and in 1993 international conferences on creative curriculum development, e.g. the need of the arts in education. Within this framework he trained students and teachers in workshops, in the Netherlands and abroad, in moving toward understanding social problems in a global perspective. For this work and his publications in this field, the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York presented him in 1989 with the Project Milestone Recognition Award.
In 1990, besides his work at the university, he became a teacher at two colleges of the Hogeschool Holland in Diemen: the teacher-training college for Dutch language and literature and the writer-training college. Here he developed curricula and courses, especially in the field of writing screenplays and the study of text and image, based on semiotics. In the final years before his retirement, in co-operation with Peter Schmitz, he taught courses that were organized for students of the Hogeschool Holland and students at Leiden University simultaneously.
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