Novels, Films, Time Sense

Susan Sontag in "A note on novels and films" collected in Against Interpretation remarks

The cinema has its own methods and logic of representation, which one does not exhaust by saying that they are primarily visual. The cinema presents us with a new language, a way of talking about emotion through the direct experience of the language of faces and gestures. Nevertheless, there are useful analogies which may be drawn between the cinema and the novel — far more, it seems to me, than between the cinema and the theater. [...] When the camera moves we move, when it remains still we are still. In a similar way the novel presents a selection of the thoughts and descriptions which are relevant t the writer's conception, and we must follow these serially, as the author leads us; they are not spread out, as a background, for us to contemplate in the order we choose, as in painting or the theater.

Makes one think of the remote control as a camera. Rewind.

And so for day 872
03.05.2009