Because film operates in real time, it is more limited. Novels end only when they feel like it. Film is, in general, restricted to... what Shakespeare called "the short two hours' traffic of our stage." Popular novels have been a vast reservoir of material for commercial films over the years.... But commercial film still can't reproduce the range of the novel in time. An average screenplay, for example, is 125 to 150 pages in length; the average novel twice that. Almost invariably, details of incident are lost in the translation from book to film.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today the average inhabitant of the western hemisphere knows a little of everything. He has the newspaper on his breakfast table a...nd wireless within reach. For the evening there is the film, cards, or a meeting to complete a day spent in the office or factory where nothing that is essential has been learnt. With slight variation this picture of a low cultural average holds good over the entire range from factory-hand of clerk to manager or director. Only the personal will to culture, in whatever field and however pursued raises modern man above this level.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It would seem that the film maker is able to exert a greater degree of control over his medium than the writer since the image of ...a farmhouse is much more explicit than the word itself. That is, it is not necessary to translate a picture into an image--film is literal, concrete, and explicit. The film maker is able to show precisely the farmhouse he has in mind--he doesn't have to trust that the reader will "see" the same farmhouse. And yet, despite his superior technical ability to delineate the concrete, the film maker gives up some of his power of suggestion by insisting on explicitness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film--you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two ...rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"In the cinema, one extracts the thought from the image," Andre Levinson observed over forty years ago, "in literature, the image ...from the thought." Inasmuch as the image comes first on the screen, the film is a more economical medium than the page. Whereas a film-maker can encompass an entire business office in a single frame, a novelist is limited to the piecemeal notation of each person and object in that office. "On paper all you can do is say something happened, and if you say it well enough the reader believes you," John Huston remarked once. "In pictures, if you do it right, the thing happens, right there on the screen."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Analogies between the stage and the screen assume that they deal with the same material. But they don't. The material of the scree...n is not actual objects but images fixed on the film. And the very fact that they have their being on film endows these images with properties which are never found in actual objects. For instance, on the stage the actor moves in real space and time. He cannot even cross the room without performing a definite number of movements. On the screen an action may be shown only in terminal points with all its intervening moments left out. Similarly, in watching a performance on the stage the spectator is governed by the actual conditions of space and time. Not so in the case of the movie spectator. Thanks to the moving camera he is able to view the scene from all kinds of angles, leaping from a long-distance view to a close-range inspection of every detail. It is obvious that with this extraordinary power of handling space and time--by elimination and emphasis, according to its dramatic needs--the motion picture can never be content with modeling itself after the stage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An honest appraisal of the respective pleasures derived from theater and cinema, at least as to what is less intellectual and more... direct about them, forces us to admit that the delight we experience at the end of a play has a more uplifting, a nobler, one might perhaps say a more moral, effect than the satisfaction which follows a good film. We seem to come away with a better conscience. In a certain sense it is as if for the man in the audience all theater is "Corneillian." From this point of view one could say that in the best films something is missing. It is as if a certain inevitable lowering of the voltage, some mysterious aesthetic short circuit, deprived us in the cinema of a certain tension which is a definite part of theater. No matter how slight this difference it undoubtedly exists, even between the worst charity production in the theater and the most brilliant of Olivier's film adaptations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into... the dark rooms of our souls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »