A Matter of Historical Record – Our Conferences

History of SRN Conferences recovered

Through meticulous research by SRN executive board members, led by Professor Jan Cernik, the history of keynote speakers at SRN conferences has been recovered. Below, you can read this precious and important work.

SRN_keynote speeches

Leeds 2008 Abstracts

Brussels 2011 Abstracts

Olomouc 2024 Kramer

Also, below find the main list where you can read the complete list of keynote speeches from all conferences.

List of keynote speeches from Screenwriting Research Network conferences

Keynote speakers at SRN conferences traditionally set topics for discussion, suggest research opportunities or bring inspiring insights from the audiovisual industry. They also often represent the region in which the conference is held. These are the main reasons why we have decided to compile a list of keynote speakers as part of our organisation’s history mapping activity.

This list was created thanks to the SRN community in January 2025. Following the call, many of our members responded and each contributed a piece to the puzzle.

But the list is not complete. If you have information about missing speakers, titles of their presentations, abstracts, full texts or follow-up publications, please send it to: jan.cernik@upol.cz.

Leeds (2008, UK)

  • Abstracts of all papers (link)

Helsinki (2009, Finland)

  • Torben Grodal: Biology and Culture in Storytelling
  • Ian Macdonald: Thin air and solid ground: rethinking screenwriting research
  • David Howard: Beginning, Middle and End – Not Necessarily in that Order

Copenhagen (2010)

Brussels (2011, Belgium)

  • David Bordwell: I Love a Mystery: Screenwriting and Storytelling in 1940s Hollywood
  • Jean-Claude Carrière: L’enseignement du scénario
  • Steven Price: The Screenplay: An Accelerated Critical History
  • Marida di Crosta: From Scriptwriting to Community Story-Telling

Sydney (2012, Australia)

  • Adrian Martin: Where Do Cinematic Ideas Come From?
    • Later published as an article in Journal of Screenwriting: https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/josc.5.1.9_1
  • Helen Grace: Moving Image on the Other Side of History
  • JJ Murphy: Where are you from? Place as an Alternative Form of Scripting
    • Keynote on the importance and value of treating location as another `character’ in independent cinema.

Madison, Wisconsin (2013, USA)

  • Larry Gross
  • Jon Raymond
  • Kristin Thompson

Potsdam-Babelsberg (2014, Germany)

  • Milcho Manchevski: Why I Like Writing and Hate Directing: Notes of a Recovering Writer-Director
  • Jutta Brückner: (Auto)biographic Storytelling
  • Brian Winston: Screenwriting in Documentary Filmmaking

London (2015, UK)

  • Hossein Amini
  • Kathryn Millard
    • In her keynote address she explored the relationship between improvisation and composition in creative practice and its particular relevance to the role of the writer in contemporary screen media and digital ecologies.
  • Jonathan Powell: Sculptors and plumbers: The writer and television
    • In his Keynote Address ‘Sculptors and Plumbers’ (from Billy Wilder’s famous comment that asking Scott Fitzgerald to write a screenplay was like hiring a great sculptor to do a plumbing job), Jonathan Powell looked at the intersection between inspiration and industry as it affects the writer’s place in the world of television fiction. He used his experience gained as a producer, commissioner and executive working with some of the leading British TV writers of the 20th Century and reflected on the position of the writer as the primary forcebehind the creation of drama for the smaller screen.
    • Full text: https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/27787478/1_Powell_AAM.pdf
    • Keynote was subsequently published in the Journal of Screenwriting: https://doi.org/10.1386/josc.7.3.255_3
  • Ronald Harwood (interviewed by Christine Geraghty)
  • Anamaria Marinca

Leeds (2016, UK)

  • Soni Jorgensen
    • In her keynote address she talked about developing unique screenplays by exploring the relationship between Character, Plot and the Human Experience.
  • Peter Bowker
  • Kristyn Gorton
    • Her talk will consider the role of emotion and affect within television. Drawing on examples from contemporary television and her work from Media Audiences, she will consider the ways in which emotion is constructed and valued in television.
  • Tony Garnett: What exactly is a screenplay? What is the place of a screenwriter? Individualism in a collaborative creative act
  • Liz Rosenthal
    • Liz will talk about taking a new approach to concept and story development, helping creatives and producers develop cross-platform, and interactive formats. At PttP’s Labs they have been creating methods to incubate projects in a new way where they get storytellers to approach development in a platform agnostic way, going back to core story concepts, thinking carefully about how to engage users on appropriate platforms and organically growing projects.

Dunedin (2017, New Zealand)

  • Ian W. Macdonald
  • Dave Gibson
  • Gaylene Preston
  • Fiona Samuel, Kathryn Burnett
  • Rachel Lang

Milan (2018, Italy)

  • Eleonora Andreatta: Public broadcasting in the global market era
    • Rai is a public service broadcaster whose identity is connected to the relationship it has with Italy, Italian values, history and culture. For this reason, Rai Fiction can’t be just a financier, but it is also a commissioning editor, with a complete vision of the product, and the clear challenge to deal with national and International audiences. Hence the need for an industrial studio-like structure, suitable for the production of Tv series, in order to get top ratings in Italy and to compete on a global level, leveraging on Italian history, art and creativity. Rai’s breakthrough: not only being a leader in Italian television but also partnering with global TV players, -from cable TV to on demand platforms-, to produce great International content.
  • Paolo Braga: Different Industries, Different Screenwriting Schools. The Italian storytelling approach to TV seriality compared to the US method
    • Each industry has its own way of crafting stories for TV. Different organizational models in the task of breaking down stories; the influence of titles which have been successful in a particular market; the peculiar viewing attitudes of a domestic audience… all these factors make screenwriters adopt a combination of writing techniques peculiar to each country. Even if the US writing school has imposed itself as a universal standard — the “orthodoxy” (I.W. Macdonald, 2013) — deviations from its lessons — slight or significant, depending on the case — define the originality of an industry’s storytelling. In this perspective, I am going to consider the Italian school of screenwriting for TV, in order to highlight what is unique to it in comparison to the North American narrative method. For this purpose, I will focus on two cases of international remakes. I will compare a) Red Band Society (Fox, 2014), the unsuccessful US version of the Catalan series Polseres Vermelles, to Braccialetti Rossi (Rai 1, 2014-2017), the successful Italian version of the same medical teen-drama, and b) Parenthood (NBC, 2010-2015), the original US version of a network family drama, to its Italian remake Tutto può succedere (Rai 1, 2015-present). My analyses will show that differences in the degree of thematization and the level of drama characters have to face within each episode are key elements to define the Italian school of writing for TV.
  • Warren Buckland: “Mind our mouths and beware our talk”: Stylometric analysis of character dialogue in The Darjeeling Limited
    • Film dialogue has recently received detailed scholarly attention (“Realism in Screenplay Dialogue,” Jill Nelmes 2013; Film Dialogue, edited by Jeff Jaeckle, 2013, etc.). In this paper I build upon this scholarship via current developments in Humanities Computing – specifically, stylometric studies that employ statistics to quantify the language of texts. I aim to study the distinctive linguistic traits of the dialogue in Wes Anderson’s films, and attempt to identify and quantify the stylistic habits (the distinctive voice) of individual characters. Analysis of the dialogue of the three Whitman brothers in The Darjeeling Limited (screenplay by Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Jason Schwartzman, 2007) will serve as a case study.

This paper takes as its starting point J.F. Burrows’s seminal stylometric study of dialogue in Jane Austen’s novels (Burrows, Computation into Criticism, 1987), although it also draws upon more recent developments in computer-based stylometric studies (including Digital Literary Studies, by Hoover, Culpeper, and O’Halloran, 2014), plus the Voyant Tools software package. This paper forms part of a larger project that employs stylometric methods of authorship attribution to study the authorship of co-written screenplays.

  • Keynote speech was published by Journal of Screenwriting: https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/josc.10.2.131_1
  • Daniele Cesarano: The Pleasure of Storytelling. From Cinema to Television
    • I wrote my first script at 24, the last one at 54. The first was a film, which I also directed, full of unrealistic ambitions and quotes from other films. The last was the final episode of the first season of Suburra – The Series, full of unrealistic ambitions and self-citations. That’s why I decided to stop. I can not stay away from the ambitions. As a writer I went through the audiovisual revolution, the transition from cinema to television, which for me, but not only for me, was the transition from the duty of a story to the pleasure of the story-telling. It was the transition from having to mean something to the pleasure of entertaining. It was breathing. It was fun. It was the television series. At least as long as it lasted…
  • Luisa Cotta Ramosino: Medici. Masters of Florence. Challenges and compromises of an International coproduction: characters, storytelling and production issues.
    • Creating, writing and producing a period drama poses a series of challenges connected with the approach not only to the original historical materials, but also to the different traditions and practice of storytelling of the partners involved.

Deciding how far to go with creativity in interpreting the facts and how much faithful you want to be to the historical background is just the beginning of a process where finding a common language is the key.

Medici. Masters of Florence, a successful Tv series (Rai, Netflix, 2016- ; starring Dustin Hoffman and Richard Madden in its first season and Sean Bean and Daniel Sharman in the second one) created by two American screenwriters, produced by an Italian production company and an Italian public broadcaster with a London based writers room (where British and Italian authors shared their talent and practice) is an interesting case study of how and how much production preconditions can influence the storytelling both virtuously and negatively.

The evolution in the writing process along the now three seasons of the show (the third will be shot in the last months of 2018, when the second will be broadcasted) is the key to offer an insight on the difficult adventure of creating an International series starting from a country with a relatively small market and trying to get the best from different traditions both in terms of creativity and actual organization of work.

  • Neil Landau: Global TV On Demand: Authenticity and Empathy Across the Cultural Divide
    • How our need for human connection has expanded the global television marketplace from conventional, formulaic program genres into more localized, specific, authentic “native content”. This talk will explore the digital television revolution that’s disrupted the once dominant linear, broadcast network business models that once cast the broadest net in order to generate the highest possible overnight ratings into diverse, niche content with an emphasis on authenticity. Niche is the new mainstream, and the mandates at streaming (SVOD) behemoths like Netflix are variety and exclusivity. With Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Facebook, and YouTube all producing their own programs, there has never been a higher demand for fresh, non formulaic content, or a better time to showcase your unique, original voice as writer, producer, director and/or showrunner. The more specific you make a story, the more universal it becomes.

 

Porto (2019, Portugese)

  • Thomas Elsaesser – The (Re-)Turn to Non-Linear Storytelling: Time Travel and Looped Narratives
    • Why has there been such a comeback of looped narratives and time travel films since the 1990s? Answers to this question should take us beyond seeing films such as Groundhog Day, Deja Vu, Donnie Darko, Inception or Source Code as the implementation of the new possibilities of story-telling opened up by digital media, with non-linear editing and random access as the ‘new normal’. The reasons we can give should also take us beyond the evident analogies with interactive video games: In the age of ‘post truth’, when perception of reality itself has become malleable, the term ‘non-linear’ has taken on political, philosophical as well as narratological meaning. My talk will argue that there are also specifically historical circumstances that favour time travel as a mode that highlights not – as one might expect – new forms of agency and empowerment, but instead epistemological deadlocks, traumatic events as well as ethical dilemmas.
  • Christoph Bode – Opening Up Spaces of Possibility: How Future Narratives Impact Story-telling in the Movies
    • Future Narratives, unlike Past Narratives, are not about events(that have already occurred or can be imagined to have occurred). Rather, their smallest narrative unit is not an event, but a node. A node is a situation that can be continued in more than just one way, possibly in a multiplicity of ways. If a narrative contains at least one node, it qualifies as a Future Narrative, though many Future Narratives contain many more than just one node. If you don’t like the terminology, you could also call Future Narratives ‘Nodal Narratives’ instead. The most basic difference between Past Narratives and Future Narratives is that Past Narratives are uni-linear, whereas Future Narratives are by definition multi-linear. Past Narratives give you a uni-linear trajectory, but multi-linear Future Narratives open up spaces of possibility instead.

The exciting thing about Future Narratives is that they can be found in print, in film, in video games, in scenarios of world climate change, and in other simulations of future trends – they are all over the place. Cutting across all media and genre classifications and even straddling the fiction-non-fiction divide, the multifarious corpus of Future Narratives lacked a theory and a poetics until the publication of the 5-volume set of ERC-funded research in 2013, Narrating Futures(published with Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, all in the same year).

In my talk, I will try and explain how narrative in general negotiates the poles of order and chaos, or of meaning and contingency, and produces such a thing as the semblance of narrative necessity, before I zoom in on how Future Narratives prove a game-changer to this existential play and how, in particular, movies that operate according to the Future Narrative paradigm open up new spaces of possibility for the viewer as well: although not all relevant movies (e.g., Run Lola Run, Sliding Doors) invite active intervention from the spectators, others certainly do: they not only invite, they necessitate agency. Evidently, the move from relatively inflexible media like the book, the movie etc. to more inter-active media (DVD, online gaming …) is a decisive one. The advent of more and more Future Narrative-based offers in the second half of the twentieth century is therefore read as a shift of media-historical importance that is bound to radically re-define our ideas about what story-telling is for and who it is that ultimately produces the meaning we live by.

  • Maria Poulaki – Reflections on narrative complexity
    • This talk will reflect on the interplay between chaos and order as characteristic of the complexity of narrative. It will do so by adopting a complex systems perspective, which allows to approach at once complex textual structures and the complexity of our cognitive encounter with them. Concepts already established in narratology and traditionally associated with anti-narrative devices, such as self-reflexivity, loose causality, and description, can be linked to equivalent dynamic or ‘chaotic’ processes of systems’ emergence, such as self-reference, nonlinearity, and emergence. These can in turn be highlighted as properties of the cognitive dynamics of narrative, driven by ambiguity and uncertainty. Thus narrative complexity lies ‘before’ narrative (the latter traditionally conceived as a set ordered schema or structure), and in the chaotic process of its formation.

 

Oxford (2021, online)

  • Elizabeth Kilgarriff: Pushing the boundaries between industry and academia (in conversation with Paolo Russo)
  • Murray Smith: The portability of character

 

Vienna (2022, Austria)

  • Eleftheria Thanouli: Complexity and/ or agency? character, agency and plot structures in post-classical narration
  • Dina Iordinova: Bridging platforms and continents: the normative narrator

 

Columbia, Missouri (2023, USA)

  • Meg LeFauve, Lorien McKenna
  • Phil Lazebnik
  • Jeff Melvoin

 

Olomouc (2024, Czech Republic)

  • Peter Krämer: Auteurism, Adaptations and Beyond: Reflections on 40 Years of Studying Production Histories and Story Development
    • Full text
  • Kamila Zlatušková: Education as a way to dialogue between new creators and major broadcasters
  • Donat F. Keutsch, Gabriele C. Sindler: PROCLAMATION ON BREAKING THE RULES! Insights into the skills and the practical art of story & script development.