Films are (generally) less "deep" than books

[belboid]

But books do use 'words' - which are useful for helping the reader to create a world. By the logic you are using an hour long radio version of something would by definition have a deeper meaning than a film, and that is, surely, clearly nonsense.

Furthermore you are ignoring the way the visual medium has different tools and a different grammar that allows the creation of meaning.

 

[belboid]

FFS. we're not talking about whether it's possible films can be deep. Not sene the right films. Talking about the mean. General, etc.

I am aware of that, but it makes no odds. Someone can read 'deep' books and only watch 'shallow' films, and another person could do just the opposite. the latter person might well say that in their experience films are 'deeper' than books, and they wouldn't be wrong. My point is that one cannot really make such generalisations.

 

[alef]

Radio is best

 

[belboid]

both the OP & the last post by xenon make, i belatedly realise, the same mistake/error/confusion. Which is to equate 'use of imagination' with 'deep'. the two don't really have any bearing upon one another. The fact that we have )often) to imagine what a character looks like, or the intonation in their voice when speaking a particular line (important tho that can be) does not make something any more or less 'deep', it just means we have to use our imagination more. If one had bugger all imagination then what one imagines will not be particularly deep, if one has the imagination of salman rushdie & the bible authors combined, then it will probably be a tad deeper, but the mere fact of imagination itself makes no intrinsic difference.

 

[laptop]

100 minutes of film speech =~ 10,000 words = 200 pages. Tops.



Sure, there can, in exceptional films, be depth in the cinematography.

But that sort of depth can also be conveyed in 20 words by a decent writer.

 

[belboid]

bollocks it can. Whatever happened to 'a picture is worth a thousand words'?. 26 pictures a second, 60 seconds a minute, 100 minutes, thats 156 million words!

Okay, some of them might be slightly repetitive....

Depth in cinematography exists in all films, its simply that it is taken for granted in the majority of them. The idea that it can be represented in twenty words is complete balderdash. Someone as talentless as Archer or Rowling couldn't do convey the cinematography of a Welles or a Hitchcock in less than twenty thousand words.

 

[laptop]

decent writer

Archer or Rowling

(The little Rowling I've read is craftspersonlike - but entirely stolen.)

 

[belboid]

most books are written by the likes of Archer or Rowling tho, so if we are generalising.....(& yes I know most films are made by the likes of Winner).

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

The movie experience lasts 2 hours on average. The amount of time spent 'taking in' a book, is many hours longer.

A book takes longer to give detailed descriptions, complex information, that you then roll around in your head to create the book's alternate world there.

There are definitely good, and 'deep' movies out there, but a movie can't compete with a book wrt the depth of the composition and exposition.

 

[belboid]

Yes they can, and frequently do.