Dramatic approach revealing meaninglessness through everyday situations, broken dialogue, and illogical action — Ionesco, Beckett. Absurdity is the point.
You're sitting in the edit suite watching a scene where two actors talk about chairs for ten minutes — not metaphorically, just really about chairs. Nothing happens. No plot progression, no confrontation, no joke in the classic sense. But somehow, it works. That's Absurdism — not as a philosophical pose, but as a concrete dramaturgical weapon. Absurdism doesn't show the meaninglessness of human existence through grim monologues or moments of existential crisis, but through sheer everydayness itself: language that disintegrates, actions without logic, situations that lead to nothing.
On set, it works like this: The actor must play it with absolute seriousness — that's the central technique. If they know the scene is absurd, it loses its power. Instead, they treat the irrational events with the same attention as normal actions. A character might spend an entire page discussing the texture of paper while, literally, the world is falling apart in the background. The contrast between seriousness and meaninglessness creates the perception of absurdity — not the content alone.
In the edit, you need patience. Absurdist sequences thrive on durations that become uncomfortable — pauses between dialogue, slow camera movements over static scenes, repetitions. You mustn't fall into the trap of speeding things up and making everything "livelier." That would kill the message. A classic example from my own work: a scene where three people try to carry a table through a door. The door is big enough. No one speaks. After three minutes, you realize: they are pushing the table against the wall, not towards the door. No joke is made. It's simply wrong. And that's precisely the point — irrationality as a mirror of the human condition.
Absurdism differs from slapstick or black humor in that it offers no resolution. The viewer is stuck in discomfort. This is intentional. In collaboration with the director, it's important: not everything needs to be "understood." If you, as a DoP or editor, ask, "What does this scene mean?" you're on the wrong track. Instead, ask: "What feels wrong?" — that's the work.