FILM AND THE NOVEL

James Monaco says that films and novels have strong relations. They are both narratives and
they tell long stories with details. Whatever is told in a novel can be told in a film. But there are
differences between then. He mentions a pictorial narration and a linguistic narration. But
there are other less obvious. For instance, the film operates in a real fixed time and the novel
only ends when the author wants.

The article mentions that there are commercial novels practically written to become a movie.
But even in these cases it is impossible to perform all actions described in the novels in the
short time of a movie. For example, the author says that an average screenplay has 125 to 150
typescript pages and the novels usually have three times more. Many details are lost in the
transposition from the novel to the book. Maybe the television serial can try to reproduce the
sense of duration that exists in the novel.

James Monaco mentions a television serial made in the 1970 by BBC from the book War and
Peace. He considers it the best adaptation from the book not because of acting or direction ,
but because only this format could reproduce the essential of the saga: the time and its
duration.

Even though, films can reproduce, in just one scene, many pages of description and this
pictorial possibility only accentuate the big difference between movies and novels. In the
novels only the narrator can guide the reader through the story, on the other hand, In the
movies the same scene can be watched in many ways by different people.

The author punctuates that the drive tension in the novel is the relation between the tale and
the teller, between the story and the narration in language. In the movies it is the story and
the objective nature of the image, as if the director was in continuous conflict between the
story and what should be “showed”. There are many possible ways to the observer watch the
same scene and what the director wanted to show can be different from what the observer
sees.

In the novels this is not possible, there is only one the way: the narrator’s way.

It is said that the ironies in the text of a novel are hard to be translated into movie because the
narrator’s figure is not strong enough in the films.

The author then shows two categories of novels in the 20 th century: the popular ones and the
experimental or artistic ones.

Monaco says that the movies changed novels. The modern novels are short as if they were
written to be a film. One of the greatest things about novels is the possibility to handle the
words, to use them in more than one meaning. The author also says that in this way modern
novels are approaching to poetry, celebrating the language.