At two hours, a movie is an efficient way to absorb a story, while having a unique physiological experience in the process. I don't mean here to compare movies with books or the theater. Each art form has its own merits. DVDs have made movies even more efficient, unless you watch the special features and replay the movie with commentary. I do watch special features and always check the DVD first to see what they are (usually to the consternation of my viewing companions who fear I will play a special that spoils the plot -so I usually hold the special viewing until after the movie). If I really like a show, I may play it again with commentary, but now that I am watching more movies, I am less inclined to do so.
I remember in my school days, sometimes they had a morning movie on TV, and I always wished I could watch it before taking off for school. Our local TV station (KING) got access to scads of MGM movies from the 1930s and 1940s and I watched those all the time. When I discovered foreign films in college I fantasized about a career in movies, maybe as a director, or less ambitiously as an editor or script writer. Those fantasies long ago faded out, but now that I am retired and DVDs of thousands of movies are so readily available, I can indulge that desire to watch a movie whenever I want.
A couple years ago I lost some central vision clarity in my right eye. Fortunately, my brain works with my left eye to compensate and I can see fine with both eyes working together. But, if something were to happen to my left eye, my movie viewing would be significantly impaired, so that is another excuse for me to watch a lot of movies now.
I choose movies for a myriad of reasons, perhaps for the director, a star or the story, subject matter or locale. Maybe in some of my mini movie reviews I can include the reason I chose that film to watch.
It would be interesting to read why you watch movies and what kind of reasons lead you to particular films.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so the adage goes. But what is 100,000 words in a movie worth? In my mind, not much compared to the written word.
ReplyDeleteSome movies are better or equal to the book they were based on. John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is a great example. Is the novel better than the movie or vice versa? Who cares? They are both good literature and good entertainment.
Movies are entertaining because they can present primal emotions with great effect: lust, revenge, hate, fear, pathos, etc. But, for the most part, movies are inferior to the witten word. Novels, histories, biographies, and essays have the time to explore a subject in depth and portray combinations of the above emotions and ambiguities about them.
There is another media you have not discussed. That is TV serials such as Roots and Lonesome Dove. This type of entertainment, in my mind, may combine the strengths of the visual that we have in movies with the in depth look that printed media provide.
Movies have a place in our world of entertainment, but it will always tend toward the frivolous. I think the real future of intellectual visual entertainment is in series TV shows that has been unfortunately captured by the soaps.
Meanwhile I'll concentrate on the written word.
[This comment to John is a little too long for the comment box, so is being posted in two parts]
ReplyDeleteWell John, I tried to head you off at the pass when I wrote above, "I don't mean here to compare movies with books or the theater. " It didn't work; you made the comparison anyway, but went in several directions, leaving me a little unclear what you are saying about movies. I know where you stand on books - you love them, especially when well done in audio book form. But this being a movie blog, I want to concentrate on understanding what you are saying about movies.
I think your reference to 100,000 words in a movie was not literal, but rather figurative like the picture being equal to 1,000 words. Movie scripts, including all the dialogue, scene settings and action and mood descriptions are actually fairly sparse. Movie scripts, like written plays, can be read as literature, but that is not their intended purpose. They are meant to be produced and performed, rather than just read.
The depth and breadth of movies varies, as it does with the various forms of literature. There are movie shorts, one hour shows, mainstream movies from 90 to 180 minutes, and even longer films and, as you point out, mini-series. My lists to watch include some movies and series that are so long I keep avoiding them, such as the over eight hour Holocaust documentary Shoah and the original five hour Ingmar Bergman Scenes from a Marriage.
Literature, non-fiction and fiction, has forms as short as the essay and short story, the novella, and longer pieces such as a standard length novel and all the way out to War and Peace at almost 1,500 pages, as well as multi volume sets like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Comment to John - Part Two
ReplyDeleteYou are right about the difficulty in a standard length movie of having the time to explore a subject in depth and portray combinations of primal emotions and ambiguities about them. Some shortcuts can be used, such as voice over narration relating the emotional state and conflict a character is experiencing (this technique is sometimes employed in adaptations, using direct quotes from the literary source). Another device is combining characters and events from a literary source into composites.
What I have been noticing lately is how much fluff and useless screen time some movies have, like traveling shots of cars and wandering cameras wasting time to no apparent purpose. Tight scripting and tight direction can improve the amount of time left for breadth and depth, but unless the overall scope of a movie is narrowed, it does probably need to be handled in a mini series format. Two that you mentioned, Lonesome Dove and Roots, I have watched again in the last couple years and found to be excellent. I have done lot of reading and seen a lot of excellent documentaries about the African-American experience since Roots was first broadcast, and I was pleasantly surprised to find how much Roots still seems quite an accurate portrayal through all the generations.
Sometimes I think movies have subplots and secondary characters as a way of hedging the box office bet. If there is at least something in a movie that appeals to every ticket buyer, then word of mouth will seem more favorable. Nevertheless, cleverly written stories can have subplots that tie into the main plot enough to enhance rather than distract, and can present diverse characters who invite us to make useful comparisons.
The comment about movies tending toward the frivolous is unfair. There are films targeted at less discriminating audiences, like slasher films and other drive-in fodder. But in the written area there are also comic books, cheap romances and the descendants of the old dime novels. This is reminding me of discussions you and I used to have back in our college days with our girl friends of the time, both English Lit majors, in which we took the egalitarian position that the less intellectual man who thoroughly enjoyed his comic book had just as much right to his pleasure as the sophisticated college graduate who read the great classics. Our lady friends argued that those comic readers were not having as worthwhile an experience as people who read the classics. I'm still an egalitarian in this area, though personally I won't waste time with slasher movies and haven't yet made it though War and Peace.
Nor have I had the stamina to get through Ulysses. I don't remember the discussions about literary plesasures, but your memory certainly rings true. The more life changes, the more it stays the same.
ReplyDeleteI read books and I watch movies. I like em both. Sometimes for the same reasons; sometimes for different reasons.
ReplyDeleteSome of what I am looking for in a movie watching experience is a transportive effect that comes primarily from the intelligence (both the analytic and the more emotional) of the visual elements of the film, perhaps co-mingling with the soundtrack or the actual spoken words. I readily accept the fact that in most movies, speech will be much more abbreviated than in books. But I don't automatically see this as a problem. Sometimes this opens up areas for creative exploration via the hybrid visual/auditory character of film that would not be available to an author. A tone might be struck or a nuance of feeling might be reached that is quite different in effect than anything that could be "argued" or "illustrated" through a strictly written narrative. Movies can be moving in ways totally different than books. Images can haunt, linger, suggest; music can reinforce actions, suggest hidden motives, complete a visual picture; carefully crafted dialogue can hold poetry-like resonances or effectively serve the plot by its very unremarkability – offering a paradoxically artful transparence. The aesthetics of a movie are just different from the aesthetics of a book.
Sometimes I am partial to the narrative voice being used in movies, especially when the thematic content could be enriched by having a more precise and verbally specific access to the interior thoughts of a character – of course in reality, there just may not be that many characters who have the degree of self-reflection and thoughtfulness that make them worthy candidates for such access.
I don't remember why, but for some reason I stopped reading Ulysses about 4 pages from the end. I think it may have been a misguided attempt to SAVOR the novel.
Well said, Anna. The motion picture form is a unique medium, which offers creative artists ways of expression not available in any other form. There is some overlap with literature, theater, painting, music and such, but the movie opportunity for combination, juxtaposition and flexibility is so wide open and immense, and the form so relatively young at 100 years, that no other medium can offer the same extent of artistic possibilities. Unfortunately, movie making is an expensive process and requires collaborative teamwork, which can compromise individual creativity. Still, there are many movies where individual creative accomplishments are apparent, either in the script, direction, acting, editing, cinematography, music or sometimes in several areas.
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