It is easy to look at a movie, as simple as gazing at a picture or listening to music. The surface of a film is its story. It is this and this alone which most people consciously comprehend when they look at a film. Most people say they do not understand music but nonetheless like it. Curiously enough people do not admit this about a film. The reason is simple – cinema is concrete.
All art forms use a symbolic process that aims at the expression and knowledge of something quite concrete – facets of human “feeling”. But each one has its own sign system or language. Music, for instance uses a sign system which has no apparent correspondence with the physical reality. Literature too is quite abstract. Though, we do not quite realize this. For example, when I say “tree”, immediately the idea or the image of the corresponding real tree is evoked in your mind. But these four alphabets constituting that word “tree” have no apparent resemblance with the real, physical tree. At the other end of the spectrum is cinema which stems from photography and approximates physical reality in its minutest detail.
The fact that all artistic activities strive to create perceptible forms expressive of “human feeling” (in its broadest sense) is as apparent as their distinctive methods and materials. The plastic arts create a purely visual space, music a purely audible time and cinema an amalgam of both. The materials for various arts – colour, pigment, sound, words etc. are found in reality and are organized to create something which is “virtual”. We may call this an “apparition”, an appearance for human perception only. Each art-form provides a special dimension of experience, a special kind of image of reality.
While analogies are deceptive and may not lead us anywhere, it may be necessary to do so at times for theoretical understanding. One such is the relationship of cinema with literature. Cinema, in its infancy, marveled at its power of duplicating physical reality almost in its entirety and did not feel the need for a story. But soon the novelty started to wear off and the toddler needed the help of a big brother to get steady. To gain respectability and popularity, it leaned heavily on theatre and literature. It may sound ridiculous today that some of the Shakespearean plays were presented in ten minutes capsule in the silent version of cinema.The film historians dismiss it as “canned theatre” and treat it as as a necessary evil or aberration. However, narrating a story with all its dramatic frills has continued to be the main preoccupation of movies. Any number of known works of literature has been adapted to cinema. But a great literary creation does not necessarily ensure a great or even a good cinematic work. Actually, many of these exercises have been quite a frustrating experience for the audience and understandably so because each art provides a special dimension to its experience.
As compared to cinema, literature operates at a different level. Each reader forms his own corresponding image of the characters and situations and views it with a mental filter, entirely his own. It is through his active mediation that the literary work comes alive. Cinema operates through concrete images and sounds and has a tendency to encourage passivity. “The written word is read and assimilated by a conscious act of the will in alliance with the intellect; little by little it affects the imagination and the emotions. The process is different with a motion picture….. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings” wrote Ingmar Bergman, an all time great film director. The root difference, many believe, is that in the cinema, one extracts the thought from the image; in literature, the image from the thought. In other words, the visual imagery tends to be iconic (concrete) and the words tend to be symbolic (abstract). Some art aim at directly arousing feelings; some art appeals to the feeling through the route of intelligence. Film naturally addresses the feelings more immediately, directly and powerfully than does literature.
As Susan Sontag puts it “Cinema is a pan-art.” It can make use of, even absorb, just about every other art. Film shares its visual aspect with painting, its ability to produce emotional effects with music, its reliance on performance and spectacle with theatre. But the art with which film (the narrative film) shares the most – beginning from its use of plot, characters, setting, dialogue and its tendency to manipulate space and time – is literature. Unlike music, architecture and dance, both film and literature have a natural tendency to reflect on the world-out-there. Both share the distinction of being narrative arts and organize their materials in a logically determined sequence or in other words they develop “plot”.
Plot is generally considered a higher form of narrative than story. The shortest and the most succinct manner in which it has been formulated by E.M. Forster states: “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. Film and literature do provide such “cause and effect” connection between events although it may not always be an essential part of narration. But what is essential to both is character. For though we don’t need to know why the king or queen died to have a story, we at least need the king and the queen – character being essential to narrative as event, whether man or animal. However, a medium like cinema which expresses through the exterior is hard put to create the kind of psychological complexity necessary to illustrate the tension between the inner self and the social mask. The inner monologue that goes on in a man’s mind, the interiority is best expressed in an abstract medium like literature. Still another element of narrative is setting, which, once again, serves similar functions whatever be the medium. In both the media, setting gives us a sense of mood and atmosphere. It can add to a story’s believability and it can also help serve as a clue to characterization – a room or a house can tell us a great deal about the characters that inhabit it.
As in almost all proper narratives, there are also in almost all films and works of literature two different time frames at work: the time of telling the story itself (90 minutes of film or 200 pages of the novel) and the time of the story. The later may be 24 hours or 24 years, whichever, it usually is a longer span of time than that involved in the telling of a story. Both literature and film, then, by necessity are capable of ellipsis.
Film and fiction thus share not only the same narrative forms and many storytelling techniques, they also share the very same basic appeal. Most of us have gone to the movies for the same reason we read fiction: for escape, for fantasy, for the opportunity to identify with – even to transform ourselves into – other human beings for a time and vicariously participate in them.
