Literature and Film: A Brief Overview of Theory and Criticism

Abstract

The close relationship between literature and film has existed since the advent of cinema due to the strong visual characteristics of both media. D. W. Griffith wanted to film in the same way as Charles Dickens wrote novels. Similarly, Tolstoy wanted to write like a camera films (Paech, 1988, pp. 122–3). George Bluestone, in establishing the limits of both the novel and the film, argues that novelist and film director meet in the attempt “to make you see”, the former through the mind; the latter through the eye. For him, the root difference between the two media “lies between the percept of the visual image and the concept of the mental image” (1957, p. 137). He considers the end products of novel and film as representing different aesthetic genera, since each is autonomous and each is characterized by unique and specific properties (p. 139). Bluestone states that “a film is not thought; it is perceived” (p. 141). Therefore, film cannot have direct access to the power of discursive forms because it is a presentational medium (except for its use of dialogues). Whereas “the novel discourses, the film must picture” (p. 140).