Before we delve into the story telling styles of literature vs. cinema, there are a few caveats I would like to set in place. Normally, films show exactly what something looks like; simply put, we see what we see on the screen. Literature, however, describes what it looks like and the mental image is up to the subjective consciousness of the reader. Films are composed of Icons (a visual representation of something) and literature works are made of signs (arbitrary relationship between two things; the relationship between the word “flower” and an actual flower). Images in film tend to have a more direct and immediate relationship to what it’s describing. This tends to render films an easier understood medium due to visual imagery. However, when films delve into abstract relationships and a character’s interior space it gets a little more complicated and less obvious. That is to say that rhetorically, a film can convey meaning if it utilizes a known symbol with a well understood motif; such as a dove symbolizing purity, or bars symbolizing captivity.
Generally, in the case of classical Hollywood cinema, films give viewers an omniscient, objective view of the story world. Whereas prose can explicitly delve into the inner world of a character and state aspects about a situation that a film has a harder time expressing. For example: if a character, Fred, is seen as pretentious by the people around them, a novel might clearly state that the characters surrounding Fred think he is pretentious and want him to leave immediately. However, within the constraints of cinema, this concept has to be portrayed by a mere moving picture and the techniques used to show this character. A film maker has to make us feel how the surrounding characters do through visual means, rather than telling us that feeling. Let us continue with the previous example: Fred is seen as undesirable and pretentious. A film maker might use lighting, camera angle, and framing to portray this. In the lighting aspect, Fred may be lit by single top-down lighting which creates extremely harsh shadows under the eyes, nose, and mouth. This distorts humanistic features and visually he is a little more sinister and grotesque. Furthermore, a director may choose to film Fred’s POV (positioning the viewer within Fred’s consciousness and perception) towards the surrounding characters with a high camera angle (the camera is positioned above the surrounding characters eyes and which causes us, the viewer, to look down upon the characters), which visually and physically puts him above his counterparts; conveying how he sees himself as a ‘higher’ being than others. Finally, Fred’s position within the frame can portray how he sees himself as the center of attention. He could be shown center frame in the middle of two or a group of people or the back ground could have some defining feature such as an archway, creating a sort of halo around him. All of these are techniques of visual storytelling and how it conveys the inner world, or mind, of a character or characters.
Now, it is obvious that prose has a normative grammar. In respect to film, however, the normative grammar is the lack thereof. For example, Christian Metz, a respected French film theorist, believes that films speak in full sentences. That is to say, what is presented on screen is a complete thought process, rather than constructing it through individuals words that combine into a full sentence when grammar may change the entire meaning if done so correctly. So, the normative grammar of film is the lack thereof. There are no prepositional phrases or subordinate clauses, there are shots, scenes, and plot. Cinema builds its concepts through blocks, if you will, rather than sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. It is interesting to see the comparison between the two. Shots could be viewed as sentences and one could refer to a scene as a chapter in a novel.
Let’s move on to spatial and temporal clarity in regard to how it is constructed. Within spatial awareness, a novel may state that Fred and Velma are driving in the Mystery Machine. It might then decide to tell us where they are within the world of the van by saying; “Fred is driving and Velma is in the passenger seat.” On the other hand, when we watch films the viewer relies on what is shown, not necessarily what is told. Therefore, Hollywood narratives typically establish the space that they are in visually (a shot of the Mystery Machine) and show where Fred and Velma are within that space in relation to each other (a shot looking in through the front windshield could show Fred in the driver’s seat and Velma in the passenger seat). Following these establishing shots, which act as exposition and story world development much like prose would offer, imagine that we are now presented with a close up shot of Velma alone in frame. The viewer can therefore assume, since we are not explicitly shown where Fred is in relation to Velma anymore, it’s probable that Velma is looking at Fred when she looks to her left since the film has visually established the spatial relationship between the two characters. Temporally, the concept goes in a similar relation. Within a novel, we assume that a paragraph and chapter, unless stated otherwise, takes place within the same temporal space. Then after the chapter is finished, we accept that something is changing and we are in a place in time at the beginning of the next chapter. The same goes for a film. The viewer assumes that consecutive shots are a part of the same temporal space, and when we transition from one scene to another, we have moved through time.
While reading a novel, one can either choose to play his or her own music or listen to ambient sound around them. In films after 1927, the first of which being The Jazz Singer (1927), score and dialogue are present. Before consider how score and sound scape convey meaning within the film setting, soundscape alone is interesting to consider. Imagine there is a blank screen in front of you, but you hear the sound of waves crashing on the shore and seagulls squawking. I believe it would be safe to say that anyone listening will mentally conjure an image of the beach, or something associated with it. This imagery builds off of subjective memories built throughout our lives and each listener has their own experience of the presented sounds. This is true in novels as well. If the writer states that these sounds are happening, it is likely that the reader will start to build a story world based off of past experiences related to those sounds. However, the difference is within the experience of the stimuli at hand. This is to say that sound can immerse a viewer even further into a story world, causing an experience rather than an understanding that this or that is happening. Once visuals are introduced to a world it is even more distinct and absolute, as long as the soundscape and what is on screen coincides with the other. The score of a film, or background music, can also convey emotion instead of telling or even explicitly showing us. For example, if sad music is playing on top of a black screen, the viewer is likely to associate the next image with a negative emotion.
One final thing that we will consider is how films rely on the temporal progression of images, or montage editing, rather than just language, to convey ideas and emotion. This is called the Kuleshov Affect. During the 1910’s and 1920’s, Soviet film maker Lev Kuleshov demonstrated that a viewer derives more meaning between consecutive shots rather than a single one. Kuleshov did this by conducting an experiment beyond his time in which he showed a neutral face intermixed with sad or happy scenes. An example of a shot sequence that conveys this affect could go as follows: a neutral face, a crying infant, and a neutral face again. Today, research shows that viewers would have a negative valence towards this and perceive the second neutral face as looking sad even though the face did not change.
At the end of the day, a good story is a good story. No matter the medium, whether it be a podcast, conversing with a friend, a novel or a movie, the pleasure derived from immersing ourselves in another world is our own. It is simply worth taking a look at the how and why we feel what we do when we experience what we love.
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