Cinema has it’s own symbolic language. As does music, dance, painting, etc. They are all different languages with different capabilities. Translation from book to movie is always incomplete, just as The Divine Comedy does not move into English without significant compromise. Adaptation is the best to hope for. And even that is often too difficult to accomplish well.
Translation from book to movie is always incomplete
I wouldn’t say ‘always’, since plenty of books don’t have anything besides what would be shown on the screen.
But also, conversely, cinema allows for things that can’t be put in a book. Lynch’s films can’t be turned into books with a semblance of the same effect — even though literature has its own surreal tradition, and Ballard, Kobo Abe or Murakami don’t quite work in film. And the notion of novelizing ‘Man With a Movie Camera’ doesn’t even make sense.
Cinema has it’s own symbolic language. As does music, dance, painting, etc. They are all different languages with different capabilities. Translation from book to movie is always incomplete, just as The Divine Comedy does not move into English without significant compromise. Adaptation is the best to hope for. And even that is often too difficult to accomplish well.
I wouldn’t say ‘always’, since plenty of books don’t have anything besides what would be shown on the screen.
But also, conversely, cinema allows for things that can’t be put in a book. Lynch’s films can’t be turned into books with a semblance of the same effect — even though literature has its own surreal tradition, and Ballard, Kobo Abe or Murakami don’t quite work in film. And the notion of novelizing ‘Man With a Movie Camera’ doesn’t even make sense.