Half Blast

Just sticking it to the RIAA.

terrorism

The Book Lovers

Digg had a link to this website which has a list of novels that are more resistant than others to film adaptation. There aren't a lot of surprises in the list; it includes works by Joyce, Proust, Becket and Pynchon. I, of course, would probably add any or all of Stein's novels to the list.

Also not a surprise is the fact that most of the novels on the list are 20th century novels. Much like their artistic counterparts in painting and sculpture, novelists in the 20th century less concerned with representing "reality" than were most of the novelists of the 20th century. In fact, it seems to me like movies--especially mainstream, Hollywood-style movies--share a lot in common with 19th century novels, in terms of narrative creation. They tend to follow a coherent, chronological narrative set in more-or-less realistic and recognizable locations with characters that the reader or audience can relate to on some level. 20th century novels might have some of these characteristics too, but often they are missing at least one of them, and the novels on that website's list are missing most of them, if not all.

This leads me to wonder if film is not a somewhat conservative form of art. To be sure, there are some filmmakers that also eschew the conventions and cliches of popular cinema, and which are more interested in "art" than in "entertainment", but for most of the history of filmmaking, the process of making a movie is obviously so much more expensive than the act of writing a novel, that in order for the filmmaker to continue doing what he or she loves--making movies, there must a return on that investment. Thus, the conventions of storytelling on the big screen must be adhered to.

I suppose the growing ubiquity of video cameras and websites like YouTube will mean that the 21st century might finally see some radical experiments of filmmaking, and this century-old form of art might at last come into its own as "art".