Sunday at Balticon, Part 2

[drcpunk]

I also made the panel on novels and stories that can't be made into films. This was enjoyable, but we wandered on and off topic, and all over the map. I think this is partly because the phrase "can't be filmed" was not defined at the start. At various times, it was used to mean:

1. One simply cannot film the story. It is not possible.
2. One can do it, but one should not.
3. One can do it, but the movie would flop because most people just wouldn't get it.

I'm not sure how much falls into category #1 these days. Telepathy? You can do it with voice overs. Special effects? Anything we can't do live can probably be done via CGI or animation, I would think.

What literally cannot be filmed these days?

Comments

[jl8e]

I haven't read them, but from what I've heard, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake cannot be filmed, in the sense that, even if one were to try, one would invariably end up with something that's completely missing what makes the original work what it is. Nabokov's Pale Fire presents a similar problem IIRC.

On books I have read, A Fire Upon the Deep and perhaps Excession would be difficult -- too much of the plot takes place as discussions through a textual medium, and, especially in the former case, it is important that it does so.

So, one category of unfilmable works is those that make integral use of their nature as text.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

I'm a Joycean. Not only can Ulysses be filmed; it has been filmed. It's a good job, too. The film leaves out my favorite chapter, the one set in a library. This would be easy to film. It's a few guys sitting around and talking. But, alas, I quite understand why it was cut from the film.

I think it would be harder to film today, at least, if you wanted live action. Dublin just doesn't look the way it did in 1904.

Finnegans Wake has also been filmed, but I have not seen this, so I do not know how well the job was done.

I think A Fire Upon the Deep could be done. You'd need special effects, maybe some voiceover -- but maybe not. CGI and animation could cover a lot. You might need to do serious condensing, but that's true of any book that length. Yes, there's galactic email in it, but there's a lot of plot and action. The email could be replaced by:

-Voiceover
-Intergalactic broadcast, so you get visuals -- weird aliens saying the gist of what the email says
-Reports of what's being said

I don't know about Excession or Pale Fire.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I discussed this somewhat in a comment over on Howling Curmudgeons:

To borrow terms from Bakhtin (whom I'm probably misusing), there are two levels of a story. There are the events of the story (the sjuzet), and there is the telling of the story (the fabula). The sjuzet of Watchmen is extremely good and it is, to me, almost conceivable that a brilliant filmmaker could create a film which captures some of the dramatic effect of Watchmen on that level. However, the fabula of Watchmen is one of the most striking works ever created in comics, and is inseparable from the comics medium. No film could capture the panel-by-panel comicness of Watchmen--the juxtapositions, the background detail, the panel-by-panel and whole-issue structure of "Fearful Symmetry".

I'm not saying there couldn't be a film that is as good a film as Watchmen is a comic. I'm pretty sure there are some out there. What I'm saying is that what makes Watchmen such an accomplishment is inherent in the fact that it is a comic book. Trying to make a film of Watchmen is like trying to make a painting of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" or a short story of M. C. Escher's "Relativity". You can make a good short story about a world which violates the rules of perspective, but you can't make a short story which is "Relativity".

The fabula of Watchmen reinforces the sjuzet, and the sjuzet reinforces the fabula. Separating them might still leave you with a good film, but it won't be Watchmen, and, more importantly, it can't capture why Watchmen is the landmark that it is.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

True. And agrumer pointed out some issues of the Grendel comic book that did things that could only be done in a comic book.

That said, this is not the same thing as "unfilmable", I think. Just as a movie is not a comic book, even Unbreakable, which is filmed as if it were, a movie is not a novel or a short story. He who translates is a traitor, but translation from one media to another happens all the time.

When the translator understands this, the end results tend to be better. The movie version of Ulysses is not the book. It cannot capture what makes the book a landmark of English literature any more than a film can capture what makes Watchmen a landmark of comic books. (I have a theory that one could try, with some success, but that would take a lot of creativity and effort, and I don't know if it would be a good idea.)

When the translator doesn't understand this, one gets the animated Wyrd Sisters, utterly faithful, line by line, to the book, which even hardcore Pratchett fans dislike. mnemex showed me the movie of Hogfather, which I am sure I enjoyed more than I would have enjoyed the book, because of how the translation changes the story to remove or play down a lot of the elements I dislike in Pratchett's writing. The Harry Potter films do much the same for me. (One thing I really liked in the fourth Potter film is the way it coded Victor Krum as a good guy as subtly as the book did, but in a completely different way. This is a hint to the reader that all is not as it seems when Krum casts one of the Unforgivable Curses.)

[avram]

"Movies that can't be made into films"? You meant books, right?

I think most claims that such-and-such book couldn't be filmed rely on an overly-literal interpretation of what it means to adapt a book to film. I think it's possible to make a film based on any book, but whether that film would capture the things that made the book interesting is another question.

For A Fire Upon the Deep, I think the main obstacle to filming it would be its length. There's a whole lot going on in that book, enough for at least two movies.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Thanks -- I edited the entry.

I agree that length is the key obstacle in A Fire Upon the Deep, but I think the story could be condensed.

Possibly start with the woman who wants to rescue the children, having the audience learn what's going on as she does? Even if that's not the best way, there are several options. I remember discussing with someone how one could film Tim Powers' Last Call, and we thought that the place to start is with Scott approaching Las Vegas on his own, with a couple of flashbacks, but very minimal ones, and his adoptive father's voice talking about how you should never play cards when the water level shifts, the smoke does funny things -- then a quick explanation that Scott did all this and is in a heap of trouble. Do that, and you've condensed a couple hundred pages (if I recall correctly) into, say, ten minutes.