The topic for today is “The difference between writing for books and writing for a visual medium”. It is precisely the kind of debate that raised its head after the emergence of Cinema. I will come to that a little later. I would like to narrow it down in my deliberation to novel versus narrative film or more precisely word versus the image. Because I think it finally boils down to that. Since Hollywood mainstream cinema is the archetype/prototype of all narrative films, it will feature prominently in my deliberation.
At the very outset let me state that these two are very different forms of writing and stand no comparison, for the simple reason that the book is a finished product and the screenplay, all said and done, is only an intermediate stage, a blueprint which has no independent existence. Some one may even go to the extent of saying – if you want to write a screenplay, then write a screenplay! But if you want to make a film simply make one.
John Luc Godard used to say some of his best films had no script at all: just notes on paper napkins at whatever café he stopped at for coffee on the way to shoot. But he is an iconoclast bent upon breaking all rules in the rulebook. In one of his famous quotes he had said: “A film must have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order”. The truth however, is that most filmmakers don’t work that way. For reasons both artistic and commercial, they have a script in their hands before the process of actual shooting begins.
Before I get to the main topic of our discussion I feel it necessary to talk a little about the basic difference between literature and an audio-visual medium like cinema. All artistic activities strive to create perceptible forms expressive of human feeling in its broadest sense. But each one has its own sign system or language. Music for instance uses a sign system which has no apparent resemblance with 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 the 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 resembles physical reality in its minutest detail. In other words, the film image tends to be iconic or concrete and the word tends to be symbolic or abstract.
The materials for various arts – color, pigment, sound, words etc are found in reality and are organized to create something, which is virtual – an apparition or appearance for human perception only. Each art- form provides a special dimension of experience, a special kind of image of reality.
As compared to cinema, literature operates at a different level. Each reader forms his own corresponding image of the characters and settings and views it with a mental filter entirely his own. It is through his active mediation that the literary work comes alive. Cinema, on the other hand operates through concrete images and sounds and has a tendency to encourage passivity. Although, like literature cinema too, employs the same elements such as plot, character, setting, dialogue and also shares its tendency to manipulate time and space, the experience of the two are very different. The root difference, some believe, is that, in cinema, one extracts the thought from the image and in literature, the image from the thought.
The reason for my arriving at the main topic through this meandering path is because, to my mind, there lies the key to such a comparison. The screenplay as it is aptly called is only a cue sheet for the Director to work on. It is a collaborative effort and may undergo drastic changes in the process of making of the film. Anyway, the general public is more inclined to buy a book rather than a screenplay. On the other hand, a film based on a book may encourage the audience to go back to the original after viewing the film. Its on record that after ‘Wuthering Height’ was made into a film, more copies of the book were sold in one year than was done in the last 92 years of its publication. But think of the thousands and thousands of scripts which find no taker. It simply becomes junk.
Coming back to the topic of our discussion today, the first commandment you get in screenwriting is to think visually. Nothing that can be seen or heard, that is, nothing that can not be captured by the camera or the sound recorder should get into a script. Flowery language is forbidden in screenwriting. To the point. Non-distracting. Subservient to dialogue and action and plot. No long narrative passages. No detailed descriptions. Basic, cut-to-the-bone narrative. That’s a typical screenplay. No metaphors, similes or poetry. In other words, no artistry. (Unless of course you are a celebrated French novelist like Marguerite Duras writing for a great director like Alain Resnais.) In that way, then, I feel that screenwriting is far more of a craft than an art.
Let me quote from the screenplay of Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” to illustrate my point. This is how it reads “A pretty Manhattan street, with sidewalk trees, brown stones, a school; people mill about, some strolling and carrying bundles, others hurried. The screen shows the whole length of the sidewalk, a street, and part of the sidewalk and beyond.” Nothing could be more prosaic.
Another one – “Alvy stands in front of glass doors of theatre, the ticket taker behind him just inside the glass door. The sounds of city traffic, car horns honking can be heard, while he looks around waiting for Annie.” These passages should give you an idea of how the screenwriter thinks in terms of visuals and sound and writes it in a short-hand format without bothering about the quality of prose.
Syd Field, a celebrated expert on this art, sums it up in his definition of a screenplay. He writes, “ a screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed within the context of dramatic structure.”
Without the tool of beautiful prose a screenwriter has to become a master of dialogue, action, structure and characterization and these present their own challenges. In fact a screenwriter might well throw this arguments back on my face by saying a screenwriter has to be a better writer because he or she can’t depend on the flow of language but has to create powerful characters, backstory, motivation, intent, emotion and point-of-view without the support of pretty narrative.
Screenwriting, therefore, is far more concerned with spectacle/image, movement and speech than with the art and beauty of language. And it is the beauty of language that is the biggest challenge facing a writer – to my mind, far more so than structure and spectacle.
I think the one major difference between writing screenplays and novels is pace. A novel can afford to weave at its own pace, as long as the quality of the prose, of the language, is sufficiently strong to maintain the reader’s interest. A screenwriter, on the other hand, can not simply rely on the mesmerizing quality of a story’s prose and has to keep the audience involved through pacing.
It is a fact that 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 is best expressed in an abstract medium like literature.
There are of course, those minor differences or rather limitations that the screenwriter has to face. He has to limit his screenplay to 100-120 pages, each page approximately corresponding to one minute of screen time. The writer of a novel however has the liberty to go on to an epic length if his material so demands. A screenwriter has to invariably write the description in the present tense because a film is always in the present tense, no matter whether it is talking about the past or the future. While in a novel you can write ‘he walked’, for a screenplay it has to be ‘he walks’. These are merely a matter of craft. The essential difference really boils down to word and image.
Now I would like to talk a little about the good old days of cinema when an ugly debate raised its head. Writers denigrated film as a hybrid art that was threatening the hierarchy of word over image, for films daily showcase dominance of images over words. Virginia Woolf in one of her essays called “Pictures” went to the extent of saying “We can say for certain that a writer whose writing appeals mainly to the eye is a bad writer …. He is incapable of using the medium for the purposes for which it is created, and is as a writer a man without legs.” Again in one of her essays called “Cinema”, she equates visual art as the eye functioning without the brain.
A lone voice was that of the great novelist Tolstoy who had made an interesting comment about the influence of cinema on literature. On his 80th birthday, in 1908, he said, and I quote, “You will see that the little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers. It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine…… But I rather like it. The swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience – it is much better than the heavy, long drawn out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life.”
In a way like photography redeemed western painting from its obsession with resemblance complex, cinema relieved prose from its fascination with vivid imagery. Blue stone aptly sums it up by saying that in the wake of film’s ability to so vividly and immediately represent visual and dramatic narrative, “the novel has tended to retreat more and more from external action to internal thought, from plot to character, from social to psychological reality.”
But in spite of all that controversy regarding the primacy of word over image, it’s a fact that cinema owes much to Victorian literature, particularly Dickens. The father of narrative cinema, D.W. Griffith learnt all his lessons from the writings of Charles Dickens. Most of his concepts like close-up, flashback, dissolve, parallel cutting et al is derived from his novels. There is an interesting anecdote that Sergei Eisenstein, the great intellectual of cinema, mentions in his essay called “Dickens, Griffith and the film today”. Griffith while discussing with his studio boss about parallel cutting in his film “Enoch Arden” was asked “How can you tell a story jumping about like that? The people won’t know what it’s about”
“Well” said Mr. Griffith, “Doesn’t Dickens write that way?”
“yes, but that’s Dickens, that’s novel writing; that’s different.”
Oh, not so much, these are picture stories, not so different.”
Griffith, summing up his intention of making films, in 1913, had said, “The task I am trying to achieve is above all to make you see.” Coincidentally some years earlier, in 1897, novelist Joseph Konrad in his preface to “The Nigger of the Narcissus” had written: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is before all, to make you see.
Apart from the resemblance in words, the coincidence is remarkable in suggesting the points at which the novel and the film meet and part company. One may see visually through the eye or imaginatively through the mind. And between the percept of the visual image and the concept of the mental image lies the root difference between the two media
(Delivered on Oct 07, 2012, in a symposium organized by the ‘New Indian Express’ newspaper group at Hotel Mayfair, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. )
