In regard to Rene's comments on film directors being given
"credit" for scenes and techniques that come straight from
the source novels: This is a real plague on film studies.
Directors' reputations are so over-inflated that it is as if
the writers
(screenwriters and source writers both) simply didn't exist.
The auteurist manner of speaking of film attributes *all* the
film's effects to the director, even when it may have been
the writer, or the cinematographer, or the editor, or an
actor who contributed a particular bit of brilliance. (Check
out film editor Ralph Rosenblum's When the Shooting Stops,
the Cutting Begins for amusing accounts of how he fashioned
coherent films out of incoherent masses of celluloid dumped
on him by "name" directors.)
These failures of attribution are exacerbated by the fact
that film aficionados, living in their highly insulated
world, simply don't bother to familiarize themselves with the
constituent elements of the films they profess to adore,
including those source novels. For every hundred Orson Welles
scholars and fans who weep over the destruction of the
original version of The Magnificent Ambersons, there may be
one who has read Booth Tarkington's first-rate novel and
realized that all the most moving passages in the
film-as-we-have-it come straight from the book virtually
without adaptive alteration. This doesn't lessen the
brilliance of Welles's direction, but it does spread the
glory a bit. Similarly, as good as William Wyler's The Best
Years of Our Lives is, it is less complex and challenging
than the neglected Mackinlay Kantor novel-in-verse, Glory for
Me, that it is based on. I could go on.
Mark Harris
===== Mark Harris Educational Consulting College Admissions
Strategies 773-914-3472 http://admissionsplus.blogspot.com/
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