Quote:
SaucepanMan posted
But it seems to me that an important distinction between drama and cinema is that drama will often, due to the constraints of the medium, use symbolism to convey ideas, wheras cinema (mainstream cinema at least) leaves little to the imagination. There are, of course, films that work on a symbolic level. Perhaps LotR could be done successfully in that way, but it would be unlikely to have mass appeal.
As I said, the LotR films get about as close as a film can while still having that (important, to investors at least) mass appeal element.
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I take your point generally about the plodding condition of mainstream North American cinema,
SpM, but once again I want to stand back from the idea that the opposite is absolutely impossible. You could be right, of course, but I cannot help but think of, say,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or even
Hero or Kurusawa's films as films of substantial appeal which incorporate something of symbolism rather than a rank realism. Hitchcock's films, while thoroughly grounded in the particular, invoke an erie sense of something out there beyond our normal range of vision, whether it is
The Birds Psycho or
Vertigo--or at least this is my memory of them. Look too at what was possible with
American Beauty. Possibly the mix of
Star Wars with LotR is what doomed Jackson's movie to miss out on the numinous. In the end, it did not strive to achieve its own kind of imaginative vision but rather clumsily hooked its star onto Lucas' coattails. (now, how is that for a mixed metaphor?)
Quote:
davem posted:
There is now almost an assumption that books are effectively, as I said, 'first draft screenplays' Tolkien saw it differently. Some literary works are not dramatisable - by their nature. Its not a matter of how much money, or how good the effects or the director/writers are. And in a work like LotR, where so much of the power of the work is due to the language (It began with language, after all) that is especially the case.
How can one dramatically reproduce the effect of the 'drums in the deep', with their onomatopoeic 'boom- doom, doom-boom', or adequately reproduce a creature of 'shadow & flame'?
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I take your point that there is a difference between novel and script or screenplay. In fact, this is one reason why I have given up on reading John Le Carré; after
Little Drummer Girl ]\, all his books are essentially driven by the needs of a script. However, to my mind, this does not mean that in the hands of an artist of any medium, a true
interprčte would not be possible. As for sound effects, well, perhaps I should refer you to
Mr. Underhill for his understanding of how sound effects people can hear things newly and persuade us of that new vision. Think of what [i]Star Wars[/b] did for our sense of light sabres. It is the ear for sound and the eye for light which art/film-making can bring to us which is not possible in a novel unless the novelist himself or herself had that sense imagination. I also hesitate to assign to fantasy qualities or affects which make it radically unlike any other form of literature or set it aside as opperating under different conditions. This no doubt derives from your belief that fantasy comes from something other, but it is not a belief I share.