/lit/ - Literature

>>19354756
not true, but the director has to step
above the book for it to be a good movie

and all movies are unbookable

>>19354756
a bad book, however is.
Midnight cowboy, trainspotting, filth, arguably American Psycho.

>>19354769
>filth
it was pretty good for a film adaptation.

Both adaptions of Catch-22 are so bad, it bothers me so much.
I firmly believe if you just stuck with original broken narrative it would turn out amazing. But it would probably have to be like 4 hours long which no producer would allow.

>>19354764
Film is an inherently shallow visual medium that's easily converted to the literary form. It only works one way.

No, it just takes skill. If you can imagine a sweet adaptation of it in your head, it can be done. Most books already create imagery in your head so thinking that film translation is impossible only shows your lack of belief in human success.

>>19354756
lotr

>>19354806
bait

Slaughterhouse-Five is undeniable proof of this

>>19354985
Cope.

>>19354756
Any book is filmable, just not practical to do so. With a large enough budget and no concern for length, you can film anything.

>>19354783
Miniseries?

>>19354769
American Psycho was a good book. not great, not mediocre. Just good. Film was good too, though the book was funnier

>>19354985
No, he’s right anon, unfortunately, even the best film ever made (Andrei Rublev) can’t match up to entry level /lit/core like Stoner, Catch 22… and kinda 1984

>>19354756
I mean, a good first-person book is unfilmable because the narrator's personality/reliability will always clash with your headcanon, or else won't capture the full picture. Third-person book who cares, that shit is basically a movie already.

>>19355299
ok it wasn't bad. I did enjoy it. but they changed some stuff and ruined some characters. i would really like to a see a movie adaption that stays true to the story and tone as much as possible

>>19354934
>Most books already create imagery in your head so thinking that film translation is impossible only shows your lack of belief in human success.

Not him, but some books are impossible to be filmed because most of the really interesting stuff happens on a mental level. Take Anna Karenina or War and Peace. Even if you take your time and adapt the books as a TV series, you still would be incapable of mentioning all the thousands of details of small mental action that Tolstoy writes about (how one person thinks about other person, what some gesture of one character means and how that gesture is perceived by other characters, what this characters feels when that other characters says or do something, etc). What I’m trying to say is: it’s impossible to portray in film what is happening inside the minds of the characters. It would be only possible to do that as voice over narration. Many of the greatest novels are constantly mentioning mental action, the thoughts and perceptions that happen inside of characters, and there’s no way to film it. So it’s impossible to create a film that will go beyond working with the plot and the dialogue, a film that also doves inside the mind. That’s the main fault that makes even the best adaptations of psychological novels fell flat in comparison with the original book.

>>19354806
Technique has nothing to do with the amount of information delivered if the temporal dimension is neglected, symbols tossed on an animal skin or dead vegetables carry no more value than a light emitting device when it comes to crude transmission of information, if the last is of bad quality, I doubt it has anything to do with the medium. One interesting fact nonetheless, video captation requires less initiation than reading a semantically coherent set of symbols, in fine anyone can comment on the subject of a video, or a movie, close to no one before the translation of Snowhite in demotic.

OKAY IM GOING TO SAY IT!

FILM IS A BETTER POETIC MEDIUM THAN THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE

>>19355982
I bet you did not actually say it, but rather stroked erotically the symbols on the keyboard. Don't tell me if i'm wrong it'd kill my boner.

>>19356001
I ALWAYS DICTATE MY COMMENTS.

I'd make mine unfilmable by stipulating that the abrupt chapter totally unrelated to the plot where mickey mouse is violently raped in the ass must be included in full and have a runtime of no less than 15 minutes.

>>19354756
A good book is a film

>>19355330
Andrei Rublev is entry level /film/core kek.

>>19356308
I don’t really care, it’s a film, it’s fucking ass compared to literature, theater or music, and purely a middlebrow form of art, no matter how “entry” or “exit” level it is

>>19355982
Visual medium offers a different set of experiences and emotions than a book. For example, describing a drawn out action scene in a book is terrible and usually confusing but in a movie it can be both exhilarating and hilarious:
https://youtu.be/Nlyai-wfZLw
(ignore the dub, although it is funny in its own right)

Another benefit is the emotions of an actor's face can truly say a thousand words. The right emotional display with the right amount of sympathy at the right time in a plot can be devastating.

Another thing is it's just impressive to see something like an army of soldiers battling each other, which is something a book CANNOT describe adequately, along with many other large scale things.

>>19356381
>that whole post to say a visual medium is better than a non-visual medium at being a visual medium

>>19356523
I was countering visual brainlets like
>>19354806
>>19355330
you anime watching degenerate.

>>19356381
>muh faces
You could write an entire novel meaningfully conveying what goes through a character's head in one instant. Good fucking luck conveying that in something as juvenile and inferior and a movie. Film a dogshit medium for brainlets who never grew out of picture books.

>>19356551
You weren't countering anybody, anon. No one is denying film is a different medium from literature. That's the entire point of the thread: that it's a different and intrinsically inferior medium.
>but muh EPIC Oscar acting by Satanist pedophiles!
>but muh EPIC CGI explosion scenes!
See what I mean? Midwits.

>a film is a text

nothing is unfilmable. A good book should become a good arthouse film.

>>19354756
Wrong. But a good poem is unfilmable.

>>19356597
I don't have a 1 INT pic on hand so you'll just have to imagine one, though considering you're a filmpleb I sincerely doubt you can.

>>19356606
There is fundamentally no difference between a poem and a novel.

>>19354756
i am about to make a film out of critique of pure reason using my chink phone.

>>19354756
>The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. It will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment of the story. And from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book's psychological content, will accurately dramatise this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning.
>It's sometimes said that a great novel makes a less promising basis for a film than a novel which is merely good. I don't think that adapting great novels presents any special problems which are not involved in adapting good novels or mediocre novels; except that you will be more heavily criticised if the film is bad, and you may be even if it's good.
Stanley Kubrick

>>19354934
I don’t know how you could adapt Moby-Dick in a way that does the book justice unless it was ten hours long and was mostly the protagonist soliloquising with visuals completely apart from the Pequod narrative

>>19356339
Insanely based.

>>19357402
But Lolita, which was adapted from a great novel, is perhaps Kubrick’s least interesting film and all his great films are adaptations of mediocre or at best fairly good books. Kubrick’s body of work proves that it’s much easier and more possible to adapt a mediocre-good book into a great movie than a great book into a great movie.
Barry Lyndon, Red Alert (Dr Strangelove), Dream Story (eyes wide shut), The Shining, and 2001 are not great works of literature but they are great works of film. Lolita is a great work of literature but Kubrick’s adaptation is only a good film. Kubrick cannot claim to be an expert on adapting great books because he only did it once and it’s not one of his best films.

>>19354756
Crime and Punishment 1970 is good.

>>19357649
you only say that because it's easier to criticize an adaptation of a great work than a inferior one.
Besides, everyone knows Lolita isn't even the film Kubrick wanted to make of the book. If it had of been made 10 years later by Kubrick, it'd be a different film, and not because of artistic development but looser restrictions.

>>19356339
Watch Stalker (1979) then tell me literature ranks above the golden standard of film, (hint: you will not)

>>19357607
To add on to this I would say that you can, and people have, adapt “Moby-Dick”; the narrative of the crippled whaling captain driven by vengeance and the desire to truly have power of himself even if it means defying God and nature. However, you cannot adapt “The Whale”; the story of a young American man discovering the incomprehensible plurality of perspective possible on the universe and God through his time on a doomed whaling ship.

>>19354756
>Films a library
How does it feel to be corrected in such a forthcoming blow?

>>19354756
Explain Hunger Games Trilogy then?

>>19357746
>a good book

>>19356604
film this jackass

>>19357730
>>19357772
Dangerously based.

>>19357882
Dangerously cringe.

>>19356339
Well, you were the one that brought up "levels" in the first place, but really your claim that Andrei Rublev cannot match up to 1984 shows how shallow your understanding of the medium is. You can experience and interpret films on different levels of depth, much like literature or any other form of art. Obviously people on a literature forum will be more deep into literature, and thus more likely to dismiss the potential depth of film, that's expectable, so I'm not gonna argue further, threads like these are pretty pointless anyway.

>>19358612
That being said, I have to add that most great books don't have and probably won't ever have an adaptation that matches up to them, but mostly not because they are unfilmable (they might actually be in some cases), but because it haven't been done by the right director and crew with a sufficient budget.

>>19355287
>duuh Brakhage films can easily be converted to the literary form!
stop baiting or kill yourself
>>19355330
that's not what he said. read his post again

>>19355342
Retard.

>>19357882
>golden standard of vidya
FTFY

>>19357607
You absolutely could make a great Moby Dick movie. But they should have done it 5-10 years ago, with Daniel Day-Lewis in Daniel Plainview mode to play Ahab. He's a bit too old (and retired) now. Such a missed opportunity.

It wouldn't need to be ten hours long. Just a good solid three or four. (And yes you would still have plenty of room for autistic digressions on the anatomy of the whale etc.)

>>19354756
wrong