Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

24.1 Institutional differences: literature versus cinema
Unit 24 Film and prose fiction
Section 6 Media: from text to performance

Narratives take many shapes. Both opera and soap opera depend upon narrative, as do theatre, ballet, news and documentary. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, there are two particularly dominant forms of fictional narrative: the visual narrative forms of cinema (and television); and the prose forms of the novel (and short story). Not infrequently, the same stories circulate between the different media, so reinforcing the distinction developed in previous units between story (narrative content) and discourse (narrative form). One of the underlying justifications for making this distinction is the observation that the same story may be told in different forms and in different media - in a novel, for instance, or as film. In this unit we explore this distinction further, by looking at some of the similarities and differences between narration in film and in prose fiction.

The early development of film as a medium is marked by the effort to capture movement photographically - as the name ’movie’ of course implies. Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), for instance, is credited with ’The Horse in Motion’, which dates from the 1870s. And many early attempts at cinematography were devoted to capturing the movements of animals or humans with an emphasis on documentary record. It is some time before film as a medium for fiction or for narrative begins to be established with The Burglar in the Roof (1896) and The Life of an American Fireman (1903). One of the curiosities of cinema’s early history is the way in which, from this point onwards, film quickly became devoted primarily not just to narrative, but to fictional narrative - rather than, say, simply to song, spectacle or documentary record; so that, by the 1920s, ’movies’ or ’films’ showing in ’picture palaces’, ’film theatres’ or ’cinemas’ had became established as a rival to the novel, short story or drama as a major source of narrative fiction.

Since that time, novels - and prose fiction more generally - have remained a constant source of inspiration to film-makers. Almost from inception film has drawn freely on available narratives that already existed in prose form: films such as Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939), The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996), Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999) and Bridget Jones’ Diary (Sharon Maguire, 2001) were all adapted from novels. Since the first Academy Awards, more than three-quarters of the awards for best film went to films based on novels. Some novelists have proved particularly popular. There were, for instance, nearly sixty filmic adaptations of work by Dickens between the years of 1898 and 1915 alone (on average more than three a year), including eight versions of Oliver Twist. It has even been argued (see Wagner, 1975; and Spiegel, 1976) that certain film techniques (close focus, the flashback) were themselves anticipated in the writing of novelists such as Dickens, Conrad and James and contributed in formal terms to cinema’s rapid development as a narrative medium. Yet, despite this history of interconnection, techniques of film narration and prose narration are in many ways quite different from each other; and these differences can be identified at various levels, from differences at the level of the institutions of literature and cinema to differences at the more formal level of the contrasting media themselves.

24.1 Institutional differences: literature versus cinema

Fictional narrative in prose and film has become institutionalized in quite different ways. Studio-based commercial film-making for general release is a highly capitalized institution; the cost of making a commercial film for film (and DVD, TV, etc.) can run to millions of dollars, using equipment that is costly and capital intensive. Cinema is also a highly specialized industry, requiring a large number of skilled workers (camera operators, script-writers, editors, sound and lighting technicians, etc.); so the production process can only be understood as a highly collective one involving a large range of people in different capacities. An analogous perspective applies to the process of consumption. Although videoCD and videocassette sales and rental for home viewing have complicated the picture, a major source of income for film studios remains ’box-office’ receipts from public viewing in cinemas. Publicity and distribution networks provide for the screening of films in public auditoria, where they are viewed by an audience that has assembled expressly for the purpose at advertised times.

By comparison, the novel, as an institution of cultural production, is not nearly so capital intensive or industrialized. Publishing houses may be large- scale commercial enterprises, but they often depend upon more than fiction for their commercial viability. Nor is the production process so heavily centralized, as is the case with the film industry: printing, for example, is routinely subcontracted. In addition, the production of the text of a novel is much more individualistic than the production of a film. Novels are ’authored’ (see Unit 14, Authorship and intention) and, as such, they derive mostly from a single person. Responsibility for the words on the page is always assumed to lie with the individual author. (There is nothing in the novel corresponding to the credit sequence in a film.) Authors are also much cheaper as a production entity than a film crew: millions of dollars do not have to be raised in advance in order to begin production of a novel. Significantly, consumption of the prose text mirrors its conditions of production. Again it is highly individualistic, performed independently by discrete readers operating as autonomous entities.