Alright, I've been thinking about this for a while. It's time I lay it on you... Everybody knows the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words." Richard Yates, in his masterpiece Revolutionary Road, dedicates paragraph upon paragraph to describing Shep Campbell's secret love for April Wheeler. His envy of her husband, his contempt for his own wife... In the movie however, it's more or less summed up in the eyebrows...
There are cinematic tricks to compensate for the lack of narration. Camera angles, music options... implications... but what if there weren't? What if it was just the actor - like in a play? Or just a still frame of Shep Campbell and his jealous, anguished eyebrows? What is the feeling in there? If we had 1,000 empirically accurate words to sum up every frame of film from our own memories of our own lives then this would be a very different world, but of course that is not the way it is. As it stands our lives are confusing messes full of misunderstandings and contradictions. We don't have Richard Yates whispering at 5,000 words per second precisely what is going on and why.
Here's what we're gonna do. We will pick a photograph, or a painting or something -- anything contained, complete and 2D. Then everybody independently sums it up in 1,000 words. Maybe we could compile the results and make a compilation. Does this sound fun?
There are cinematic tricks to compensate for the lack of narration. Camera angles, music options... implications... but what if there weren't? What if it was just the actor - like in a play? Or just a still frame of Shep Campbell and his jealous, anguished eyebrows? What is the feeling in there? If we had 1,000 empirically accurate words to sum up every frame of film from our own memories of our own lives then this would be a very different world, but of course that is not the way it is. As it stands our lives are confusing messes full of misunderstandings and contradictions. We don't have Richard Yates whispering at 5,000 words per second precisely what is going on and why.
Here's what we're gonna do. We will pick a photograph, or a painting or something -- anything contained, complete and 2D. Then everybody independently sums it up in 1,000 words. Maybe we could compile the results and make a compilation. Does this sound fun?