 Susan Sontag
"Film and Theatre" |
. . .cinematic virtue does not reside in the fluidity of the positioning of the camera nor in the mere frequency of the change of shot. It consists in the arrangement of screen images and (now) of sounds. . . . editing offered an equivalent to the magician's sleight of hand--thereby suggesting that one of the features of film (as distinct from theatre) is that anything can happen, that there is nothing that can't be represented convincingly. (367)
Cf. "Film has no equivalent to syntax-- no ordering system which would determine how shots should be combined in sequence." (Turner 50)
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Leo Braudy
From The World in a Frame |
Acting: Stage vs. Screen
-- Filmmaking is a discontinuous process, in which the order of filming is influenced more by economics than by aesthetics. Film actors must therefore either have stronger personalities than stage actors or draw upon the resources of personality much more than stage actors. (389)
--Film acting deposits a residual self that snowballs from film to film, creating an image with which the actor, the scriptwriter, and the director can play as they wish. (392)
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Seymour Chatman
"What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (And Vice Versa)"
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1.[novelistic description: selective vs. film's "plenitude of visual details]
[the author's -- selective] "Thus the reader learns only those three and can only expand the picture imaginatively. But in the film representation, the number of details is indeterminate. . . " (408).
2. depict (present) vs. describe
"That the camera depicts but does not describe seems confirmed by a term often used by literary critics to characterize neutral, 'non-narrated' Hemingwayesque fiction -- the camera eye style.
questions: "What about the telling chose-up? What about establishing shots?" (408) |
Dudley Andrew
From Concepts in Film Theory
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Adaptation -- 3 modes
borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of transformation. (421) |
