print or screen???

You can't play with time in films as you can play with it in novels/stories. Things which haven't happened yet can be aligned with a past that has been. A writer can craft a story which does not follow logical movements in sequence, time, place. There's montage in film, but then, just cutting images from one time frame to another or one place frame to another, would not make sense to a viewer. In the way, it can still make sense to a reader. Writing is definitely more fluid than movie making, which is itself a very segmented project.

But film is multi-sensory. And it involves a deeper kind of immersion than reading a book. Which can be a very distracted activity. Water boils, telephone rings, the book will be put down. The mind will wander. Words may lose their draw on a reader's attention. It's harder for that to happen in films. Yes, there is the mediated eye in the camera, but I think all it takes is for new film techniques to challenge that. To make it such that the eyes can be exposed to a juxtaposition of various images simultaneously and still process the information in ways that still makes sense. If not to make sense at least still meaningful.

But films are reliant on the human as a central figure/prop, in a way that novels don't. Stories can still flow in the absence of people. Grass grows, papers decay, stones get worn down, oceans move. But you can't have all that without the presence of some actor to give these inanimate elements some meaning in terms of film narrative. It has to do with the way people watch movies and the way books are read. I think it really is high time some new film technique break the grounds and disrupt the conventional way people watch movies. LIke Virginia woolf's books, readers actualy have to learn to acquire a new way of reading. And often it means forsaking a clear, linear understanding of the story/plot movement.

I think movie-goers tend to have an expectation on the way the movie will play itself out. Even 'memento' which is supposed to be quite ground breaking it still follow the conventions which has become the typical way people watch films. I wonder if confusion in films is not sometmies a very good thing. Other than symbolic images and sublimal stuff. I think some kind of disjuncture should take place soon. Afterall film is so mature an industry already, but the stuff they have been producing is still always more or less the same... A real challenge to people in terms of the way movies are watch should be coming around the corner.

Although, thinking about it 'eternal sunshine of the spotless mind' has been quite experimental, giving psychical spaces a cinematic space. And yes, it is definitely confusing. I don't think it got as far as to challenge a more fundamental way, people watch films... Problem problem..BUt an interesting one. And I wait and wonder..