On a terrace, two girls look at their mobile phones and talk about going to the cinema. They consult the screen and review various synopses, which they discard based on the first few words of the movie synopsis. The gesture is reminiscent of expeditiously removing candidates from a dating application. The bait that will make them decide, I deduce, is the synopsis, which someone defined as the brain of the script. By accumulation, it is easy to deduce that, due to the infinite expansion of the audiovisual offer, so many synopses had never been published. I know that streaming platforms relied on the seductive power of synopses to attract potential users and on the ability of true virtuosos to condense an argument in a short, effective and attractive way. I imagine that artificial intelligence programs are already in charge of this job today.
In the literary field, the synopsis has also been very important as an element of dissemination and commercial contagion. In 1989, the magazine L’Home Invisible published a portable library with two hundred creative and recreational summaries of novels that they defined as “literary concentrates”. The experiment contained some pearls. Synopsis of La Bíblia by Pere Calders: “An extraordinary global bestseller that does not pay royalties. It explains where we come from and where we are going, with an inspired description of the journey”. Synopsis of La plaça del Diamant by Joan Brossa: “Lo que el viento se lévão, but de barriada”. The magazine also included an article by Quim Monzó on the art of summarizing, with a reference to Woody Allen’s well-known phrase applying the principle of speed reading to Tolstoy’s War and Peace: “It’s about Russia.”
The girls on the terrace is undecided, perhaps because many films are difficult to summarize because they use the plot as a pretext to develop other values. The synopsis of Cerrar los ojos (by Víctor Erice), for example, seems to summarize a police plot when, in reality, the intrigue is a pretext to reflect on memory and the passage of time. There are scenes that are impossible to summarize and dialogues written with a risky desire for transcendence, such as when one of the protagonists states that, after a certain age, you must live “without fear and without hope”. Back to the synopses. A thousand years ago I had the privilege of interviewing the great screenwriter and writer Jean-Claude Carrière. We met in the lobby of an impersonal hotel on La Rambla and Carrière began to leave memorable phrases about the craft, Buñuel, alcohol, sex, the role of film critics (he remembered when François Truffaut lamented that only serve to put stars or settle for the recommendation to go there or not to go there) and the sense of the script. “The fetus is the man’s script,” he said. But who is the director?”
