I've been watching a lot of movie reviews recently and one criticism that is the most common is that "the director failed because he didn't understand the strengths of cinema".
I've been thinking about the strengths of literature for some time and can't come up with a satisfying answer even if have studied literature for some time now. So, r/askliterarystudies, what is your opinion?
Posted May 30, 2015, 2:24 AM UTC
It's very common to hear of authors having strengths and weaknesses in different elements of literature; plot, characterization, satire, dialogue and narration, but I've never heard it said that somebody didn't understand the strength of literature in general, but I haven't really heard that about film making in general either.
Well, let's take the opening of star wars, for example. https://youtu.be/yHfLyMAHrQE?t=131
Everything you need to know about the plot is in the visuals. We have a small, badly equipped, rebel force that is struggling against a vast, better equipped empire. This is implied by the low angle and the length of the spaceship. This is something I think only cinema would do. I might have asked the wrong question but I could rephrase it that way : What are the advantages of literature? What can it do that no other art form can do? And what parts of art is better done by other mediums?
(By the way, english is not my native language. Don't mind the shitty grammar please.)
It depends on the field, whether it's drama or prose work. In War and Peace, for example, the book opens with a Russian noblewoman making a long speech before a party to a distant relative, in rhetorically pitched French about the evil decadence of Napoleon. That opens up the ironies for the rest of the novel; that the nobility is kind of corrupt, sprawling, and near-sighted as it is long before the novel opens, and has such close ties with French culture, that it has little claim to be terribly distressed about a French invasion. Henry IV part 1 opens with Prince Hal making jokes at the elderly Falstaff's expense as he wakes up from a hangover, indicating a lot of what Falstaff has been doing up to this point with his life and will be doing for the rest of the play, as well as how his relationship with Prince Hal is already beginning to sour as the Prince wakes up to where he is in life. These are huge elements of plot indicated by the dialogue alone, similar to the "opening shot" or a lot of movies.
Now even on a level of pure description, it's difficult to get an exact equivalent to the visuals of film, since with books you're not only paying attention to what is being presented, but the language with which it is being presented. The opening of the Inferno is Dante wandering through a dark wood, but the description makes it out to be spiritual darkness, that through the rest of the poem he realizes he was in before the light of revelation (Beatrice) came back into his life.
What are the advantages of literature? What can it do that no other art form can do?
The advantage of prose literature is that it can indicate what a person is thinking instead of simply what they're saying, and how they're acting around others. You can hint at this in dialogue, but a narrator can swoop right in and summarize years of thoughts without as explicit as dialogue. With written drama that doesn't make it to the stage (like Faust or Paradise Lost), you're capable of evoking imagery far beyond what a theatre or a film can provide, where the only limits are your own ability for description and the reader's imagination. With drama in the theatre, the difference really has to be experienced to be believed. If a good actor performs well, they can make an audience deeply feel the conflicts going in the play far more urgently than a movie or a novel could.
EDIT: Je vois que tu t'appelles "villon"; est-ce qu'une explication en français aiderait?
Merci pour ta réponse. J'ai aussi cru remarquer que les jeux de narrateurs sont beaucoup plus fréquents dans les oeuvres littéraires que dans les autres arts. Par exemple, dans l'un des classiques québécois, l'auteur alterne fluidement entre six narrateurs. Je vais penser à tout ça. Merci encore.
Off the top of my head, a great strength of literature is that it can easily convey a character's psychological state and delve into a complex internal monologue. Even voiced-over sections in movies where the character reveals what's on his or her mind doesn't allow for the depth that a Murakami paragraph can convey. Since we know more about the psychological states of literature characters (and especially since there aren't actors to give the characters bodies, thereby othering them from the reader), we as readers can more intimately relate to the character and insert ourselves in the story.
Another strength of literature—poetry in particular—is that it can be abstract in what it conveys. Let's take a phrase like "itchy darkness." We have here a synesthesia-like effect: "itchy" is tactile and "darkness" is visual. A phrase like this can evoke a very specific feeling in us that's difficult to do in film. Music can certainly help to create the ambiance in a film to give darkness this effect, but poetry has far greater explicit implicitness, so to speak.
Of course, I'm biased, and I realize that film can do both of these things well too, but these were my first thoughts on the matter.
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This question is abysmally worded. I assume you are asking what makes literature different from other art forms.
In short, literature is written and read. That means we must express our content with language, and consider how that language influences our content. In my opinion, moreso than anywhere else, in literature we have a much closer, more meaningful marriage between content and style (in the formalist sense), which opens us up to the creation of new meanings. I suppose that happens because language is inherently an extremely abstract medium (unlike the visual and much like instrumental music or math), yet it is nonetheless heavily tied to and determined by the local, quotidian, or familiar (consider something like Shklovsky's skaz, and more generally the fact that we use language all day to refer to things that are close to us, a la Saussure).
This question is abysmally worded. I assume you are asking what makes literature different from other art forms.
He made clear English isn't his first language. You could be a little less awful about it if you're confused.
English is not my first language either.
Thank you for your answer.
That kind of dialogue about film stems from a bias thinkers of film have had since Munsterberg: Film is special! Film is visual! Directors who do not understand this are merely writing plays. WE MUST RESPECT THE VISUALITY AND BE AS VISUAL AS POSSIBLE.
Now, what this means is super dependent on historical context. For instance, sound and color were both treated as something that should NEVER touch the cinema if you read early film theory. Ditto more recently with computer-generated effects and/or 3D.
Take it with a grain of salt. This is not to say that there isn't some value to this approach to film criticism--it encourages filmmakers to think visually rather than through the script, or to think around constraints.
Edit: you also see it in video games criticism--e.g., when people complain that The Last of Us is too filmic.
Edit edit: This is all to say that moves like this are common in critical discourses are kind of meaningless. Is 12 Angry Men a worse film than The Network because the latter is more "filmic" than the former? Is there an objective standard of filmitude? Likewise, attempting to get at some measure of literatureness (as opposed to literariness, which I'll define as kind canon/art designation) is always gunna be a losing game. it's really hard to find the kind of bottom that these sorts of complaints are grounded on.
Than you for your answer. I think my question was too vague. I wasn't trying to find something that is necessary to literature but rather the potential that is unique to that medium.
I get that, but I think you'll have a real hard time actually coming up with an answer to that question. By literature, do you mean all genres of writing? And if so, okay, but what is essential to literature that you could claim is shared by both Kenneth Goldsmith and Dickens? Or Knausgaard and Marlowe? I think you'll find concerns and themes that link them, and maybe you can even identify some shared stylistic traits. But you'll be very, very hard-pressed to identify something that links these writers together in such a way that you won't also rope in another medium of art. What is necessary to literature depends on the work and the time period, and is maybe impossible to identify in a vacuum.