Film is a visual medium , judging it like how you judge a novel is wrongheaded.

Yeah, films don't have covers. How am I supposed to judge them?

But videos do .

What's better - books, or the plot summaries on video boxes?

Book blurbs vs video plot descriptions? I'm intrigued. Do people judge films like they judge novels? Certainly over its 100 year history more than enough film theory has sprung up, and much of this is similar to literary theory in as much as they are both (on the whole) discussing narratives. But as the experience and shape of a film is very different to that of reading a novel the two will obviously diverge in important aspects.

Note I use the term film here (as in the question). I think video/DVD/home viewing blurs the esperience even further. I was wondering the other day - if authors expect people to read their novels in one sitting. If its Pynchon I doubt it - but certain types of genre fiction (crime and romance) seem to demand this approach. Of course film is certainly designed to be seen in one go, but then video and TV showings (especially round the 10 O'Clock News) change that too.

No, not book BLURBS - I meant actual BOOKS! In terms of conciseness and ability to consistently hold one's interest, video-box blurbs are far better than huge piles of dead trees that people display on shelves to impress visitors. Besides, books give away their own endings - video box blurbs leave it ambiguous, thus 'engaging' the reader.

Also, video-box blurbs are often juxtaposed with critical notices - giving the 'reader' a chance to see the material through another set of eyes, so to speak. One can be a diverse multiple audience all on one's own.

Book blurbs do that too. I think its a touch spurious to compare video box blubs to books in themselves - one is a form of advertsing and enticement to some work, the other is the work in itself (sorry if I am insulting people who write video box blurbs - but you call that a job?)

One of my favourite films of all time features an unknown serial killer, and part of the fun of the film is guessing who the killer is. But the writing on the back of the video box tells you! If I could find the writer of that I'd shoot him/her.

Better still: the one-sentence synopses in Halliwell (while Leslie hisself still lived).
INTERIORS (dir.Woody Allen): A New York family has problems.
Fuck books. That takes one second to read, if that.

Yes, but aren't books just advertisements for their authors? Whereas video-box blurbs are not tainted by 'authorship', so they can be considered on their own.

Well, I don't know if it's so much wrongheaded as impossible. Films, especially Brit and Yank films, are very much driven by narrative, whereas novels provide a bit more scope for things like character development, internal monologues and descriptive flights of fancy. In a movie, you've only got the visuals and the dialogue, and you've got to judge it on those terms. After seeing a crappy adaption of a book we love, to refrain from saying "it wasn't as good as the book" is difficult, but we shouldn't. Actually, I'd almost say that films (and plays) are never as good as books because of these limitations. But that sounds poncy, so maybe I wouldn't.

"character development, internal monologues, descriptive flights of fancy" = boring, played-out 19th-century hangover tat
"visuals, dialogue" (plus sound, plus editing etc) = exciting 20th-century possibilities still under-explored "smell" = sadly absent from both, despite huxley's desolate plea...

Films are never as good as books because of these limitations. Not only does this sound like another one of these threads (Film better than the book) which I think dispells some of these myths. Books and films do different things, end o'story. I like them both.

Roger Corman and John Waters have done sterling work in the 'smell' area. Scratch-n-sniff video boxes = the future?

Well, possibly Mark, but essentially you agree that they can't be judged on the same merits? Anyway, what the fuck does "played out" mean? I can't argue that popcorn doesn't smell better than books though...

And I should stop starting my posts with "Well". How annoying.

Well Sam, if we want to constarin our view of both media then there are points of comparison between narrative film and narrative fiction. After all there is internal monolgue in films with voice over - and not all books are that interested in either characterisation beyond the stock and complex internalization. Romance fiction is strongly narrative led, as is much crime and police procedural.

So if I was to compare say the book of say Fletch with the film of Fletch (a good example as the book is very dialogue heavy) I could certainly compare the narrative pacing - which the film drops for Chevy's basketball mugging. However the film improves on the book in the structure of its own mystery, which in its realization is made all the more plausible from the books relatively hokey premise. And both get tot he same place via a diferent route. I prefer the book because it presents Fletch as more selfish and tricky - and cos it doesn't have Chevy Chase in it. But I can compare and contrast the way they try to do the same thing.

A film "of a book" is a REVIEW of that book, an ARGUMENT WITH IT, a [wankword alert] CRITIQUE. If books do things which film refuses to do, then film-as-a-whole is DECLARING THE POINTLESSNESS of these things, their expressive irrelevence. No good to say, well FILM IS WRONG abt this, unless you yourself are just declaring ALL FILM = INTRINSICALLY RUBBISH. Many films of books, it is true, make very timid weedy wussy feeble arguments— are themselves inclined to believe that film is secondary (something no one who wants to make a film ought to be allowed to believe) — and can thus be dismissed.

Books written now which behave as if this argument is not raging out in the world are books which to be about the world. Books written as if writing is secondary should also not be allowed. Pokémon swapcards designed as if PS were not the world's finest, cap-to-it-all medium will be worthless (luckily, poké-milieu currectly believes itself the ZENITH OF HUMAN ARTY CULTURE and thus delivers the goods, swapcards-wise...)

Hang on, I'm not saying all films are rubbish. I'm saying that they can't be judged on the same terms which I think in general we seem to agree about. However, I think the reason for this is that although their are things which movies can do and books can't and there are things which books can do and movies can't, the narrative possibilities that books can and do present to the author and the reader are more numerous and more interesting. I think this is just a function of the medium - the rules are looser. (and much much looser in the sphere of music, incidentally, which is why music's been called "deepest of the arts"). So all I'm saying is that I wouldn't apply the same standards. I can enjoy (say) a middle-of-the-road teen sex movie or a horror movie as long as it moved along nicely, was well acted and the jokes were good and (as Mark said) done with a conviction that it was the best thing ever done. I just would be bored if I had to read it.

What intersts me here - since I think we all kind of are agreeing with the terms of reference - is that you say you can enjoy a horror movie, or a teen sex comedy movie. Would you ever read horror fiction or even teen sex fiction. Whilst its true that the possibilities may be looser in written fiction (special effect budget is much cheaper) it often seems that published literature is often extremely constrained to certain fields and certain narrative styles. You'd be lucky to find Tristram Shandy say being published now. After all publishing is a business too, as much as film, and one where the margins are a lot tighter.

Tristram Shandy today = Dave Eggars? (Ignoring relative quality...)
J.H.Prynne's Complete Poems was published two years ago,m which is as DIFFICULT as anything ever written. (Admittedly not in his favoured private-press format, ie not difft types and colours and SIZES of paper for each page!!)

Sam, Anthony, whoever. The most interesting ILM thread I never contributed to because it was too hard was PLEASE CONSIDER: MUSIC Vs. FILM Vs. LITERATURE. There's quite a lot of relevant stuff there, especially to what you're saying Sam. Also, there's Film Criticism vs Music Criticism, where Mark Richardson opines "I don't know shit about cultural crit. so bear with me." I like that.

Nick, Thanks for that link. As so often happens, anything one thinks of contributing to these forums has been said more intelligently elsewhere...

"character development, internal monologues, descriptive flights of fancy" = boring, played-out 19th-century hangover tat "visuals, dialogue" (plus sound, plus editing etc) = exciting 20th- century possibilities still under-explored "smell" = sadly absent from both, despite huxley's desolate plea...

Wow, B S Johnson is alive and well and living on ILE

Tristam Shandy today = The Tunnel.

To say that the striking immediacy with which cinema can evoke action, mood and milieu is somehow inadequate if comparatively little attention is paid to the narrative/analytical methods used by the novel* seems a bit ridiculous when the whole aim of that older artform is to trace the course of, reflect upon, and strive to make sense of those very life situations cinema at its best so powerfully portrays.

I.E. If it's worth writing a book about then it's worth presenting in raw form too - art's potency is not diminished the more lifelike it becomes. As Pete said, it's just different.

*Which isn't nec the case, anymore than it's the case that novels are nec less immediate.

Re: Tristram Shandy - good 5.5 hour Penguin Classic Audiotape version recently released (though you do miss out on the blacked out pages and upside-down text).

Tristram Shandy I have never read but it provided me with the most eloquent thing I ever learned doing English Lit - our teacher was a world expert on TS and owned something like fifty different editions, and one day brought about 20 in, all opened up to the marbled page, to show I suppose the different ways printers had approached the problem. But for me this was a sudden (though it took me a long time to get it) locking-into-place of the twin ideas that the text is presentation as well as words and that there is no central text, neither of which you run into much otherwise in A-Level Eng Lit.

Sorry for the digression, I've been sighing over what-might-have- beens in which I went and did English at University and not Ancient History.

Tom: English Literature is ancient history these days, we all do meeja studies.

Of course Ancient History is also Ancient History.

Tristam Shandy is god like !

"meeja studies": I suspect not when Nick Tate is around ...