Film Education -

Film and English

Despite its debt to other forms and especially the novel, film tells its story with its own grammar, its own syntax. Camera movement, camera position, framing, lighting, sound, and editing are some of the main vocabulary by which a director or screenwriter may express a narrative. A film of a novel therefore is far from being a mechanical copy of the source - it is rather a transposition or translation from one set of conventions for representing the world to another. Why this should be so, what is the nature of this transposition and for whom is it done, what is 'gained' and what 'lost' - these are some of the questions necessarily addressed when the 'film of the book' is introduced to a class.