
Standing up for cinema - prismatic
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/film-making-martin-scorsese/
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jasode
More of the Adam Mars-Jones quote from cited January 4 review[1]:

 _> Even the most relentless book filters diffusely into the life of the
reader, while a film suspends that life for its duration. The transposition of
a novel like Endo’s Silence into film, however “faithful”, can only amount to
a distortion, an exaggeration overall however many elements of the book are
represented. [...] In a book, too, reader and writer collaborate to produce
images, while a film director hands them down._

AMJ repeats the common criticism that books are superior to movie adaptations.
He also repeats the claim that books are "active" and movies are "passive"
entertainment. Those dismissals have been so common for decades since the
invention of "moving pictures" that I'm surprised Scorsese even responded to
it.

[1] [http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/subtle-
absolutisms/](http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/subtle-absolutisms/)

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abritinthebay
While wrong, they _are_ based on a very real set of differences to the
relationship of the media to the consumer.

That should be celebrated however. Neither is _better_. You can argue the
merits and effectiveness of an adaptation but the media it's communicated on
has very little to do with that (usually).

I don't know why people treat it as a team sport.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Why "wrong"?

Certainly the idea of a book as active and film as passive dovetails with my
own experience. Reading a book, well a story at least, to me is a creative
process: I create the world the characters live in using the elements the
author offers up. Watching a film I get absorbed, hopefully, in to a world
that is a _fait accompli_.

Edit: I should say "more active", etc.. I'd agree with the OP that watching a
film is still collaborative but in a markedly different way to reading a
story.

~~~
ghostly_s
Cinema entirely possesses the capacity to suggest elements of the world which
are not defined explicitly, just as books do. In fact I think it's a
fundamental misunderstanding of perception to think a film can possibly be a '
_fait accompli_ '. As an easy example, I just watched Tarkovsky's Stalker this
past week. The film revolves around the exploration of a physical supernatural
phenomenon called 'The Zone'. Yet there is not a single thing on screen to
demonstrate the supernatural characteristics of this place, aside from the
protagonist's reactions to it.

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jonny_eh
This reminds me of when Roger Ebert dismissed video games of being incapable
of becoming art. Anything that requires creativity to make is art. Different
mediums offer different avenues for creative expression as well as different
ways of interacting with an audience.

~~~
khedoros1
> Anything that requires creativity to make is art.

I strongly disagree with this statement, in the context of the definition of
"art" that Ebert was using. His definition also excludes the vast majority of
movies, paintings, and other things that are generally acknowledged as "art".
Ebert was talking about sublime art. It's easy for something to be creative
without being sublime.

~~~
cholantesh
Ebert ultimately had to invent that definition of art when he found himself
unable to defend his original premise. Or, really, unwilling,because he didn't
want to spend time playing video games so as to bolster his argument.

