Quote: (10-10-2015 04:47 PM)scorpion Wrote:
Out of curiosity, Lizard, do you feel there are any great classic movies that could not be turned into equally great plays?
Well, of course not. It's a strange question and you truly must not be a fan of the movies or even have thought about them for a moment to ask it in all seriousness.
Here is just a very brief list of the things that movies can do that have nothing whatsoever to do with the theater:
-- A movie can give you a closeup of the human face, the most meaningful and important thing in the world for the human mind and eye to look at. That is why a great movie star can have a screen presence without saying a word, and without even acting. You look at the face of a James Cagney, a Cary Grant, or an Al Pacino at a certain moment, and it says more than the most eloquent words.
-- A movie gives you the
textures of a world; the incredible alien hardscrabble landscape of the American West, or the streets of New York City in 1972; or the LA aqueduct in 1949. The narrative and story of the film are not separable from these textures; they form an artistic whole.
-- Editing and cutting allow the movie a narrative scope and continuity that is different in kind from what a play can do. Any transition in a play is infinitely clunky by comparison.
One can go on and on and on, and on, but maybe all that really needs to be said is this. "Jaws" is a
great movie; I'd really love to see someone try to turn it into a play. It might be the one play worth going to.
What you called "cheap gimmicks" are part of the heart and soul of the movies; and the fact that film is dead right now even though its technological capabilities are greater than ever does not mean that it did not have a peerless and beautiful heart and soul when it was at its height (which was not so long ago).
There is too much to say about this subject for a brief post, or even a long one, so I'll add just two things:
First, my point about film was not that its existence was enabled by technological advances (even though it was, of course). Forget about how or why it came to be -- all that matters is that it
happened, that this art flourished in the past century and produced countless masterpieces that are,
as great and permanent art, beyond anything mankind has created before. My point is not about the film as abstraction -- it is about the immense bounty, the unthinkably luxurious harvest of the hundreds and
thousands of beautiful movies that have been made; not just a few hoary classics, but an explosion of creation unlike any other.
Second, the most important way in which film is
different in kind from the art that precedes it is not, in fact, technological (though again these things cannot be separated). It is precisely the fact that film is not the creation of a single author; it is not the director's movie in the same way that it is the writer's book or even the playwright's play (and when it is, when film is too harshly directed and too constrained by a single artist's vision, it usually fails of greatness). It is that magical freedom -- the happy and profound felicities that can come about in a fundamentally collaborative art beyond the control of any single mind -- that gives film at its best its special companionable
warmth, that allows us to step into it and live alongside it as if we were at large in it, not driven forward by the necessarily limited and straitened conceptions of a single mind.
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I have seen hundreds and hundreds of movies, and yet I know
for a fact that I have hundreds more to see, some of which are as great or greater than any I've seen before. This is not some abstract consideration; it's like knowing that you have been granted an endless bounty of beauty, warmth, interest, texture, and truth -- enough for many lifetimes of the most pleasurable concentration that the human mind is privileged to enter into. The least I can do with such an embarrassment of riches is to acknowledge it, and that is why I mentioned the movies as a particular gift that was bequeathed to us by the last century.