In my case, the availability of the Internet has not reduced my reading of long well-written novels or long well-written nonfictions books. What it *has* done is to greatly reduce my patience with mediocre writing and even more with mediocre video. There is stuff that I might previously might have read or watched that I now find just not worth the time.

Re the addition of video to books, I think there are certain kinds of books in which this might make sense, like the example of the exercise book and also in various science & technology-related books (animation has a lot of unexploited potential for explaining how things work.) I doubt if it will be very successful with fiction.

Re the comment "It really makes a story more real if you know what the characters look like"..somewhere I read something a young child said during the early days of television, when it still overlapped with radio in the presentation of drama. The kid said he liked radio more than TV, because the pictures were so much better.

I just want to make the probably obvious point that there is no reason why video *must* be less meditative or intellectually demanding than great literature. The films of the great directors ask for and reward the same attention as a James or Eliot novel.

The pictures are better. I love that.

I do read fewer books than I used to, but I just finished James's The American. It bothered me b/c I think Wharton must have been a little bit derivative - well, more than a little bit - with her Madame de Treymes. And I read that first, so it was hard to shove it aside in my mind. But I did.

Can't say I cared for The American nearly as much as I do Portrait of a Lady and even Daisy Miller.

Of course great literature contains much more than even great movies and thus deserves greater attention than movies. Added to this is the ability of the reader to refer much more easily to earlier or later parts of a literary piece for comparisons, foreshadowing, allusions, etc., all aids to a more meditative and intellectually demanding treatment. The claim that great movies are the equal of great literary works makes little sense. How many dramatized pieces of great literary works compete with the originals in depth and scope?

A big difference between books and films is the nature of *time*...in the film, the passage of time is paced by the technology, whereas in the book, it is controlled by the reader..you can stop and think about something, even go back a couple of pages and re-read it.

Digital Video Recorder technology can sort of simulate this process, but I don't think it's the same thing. Film as a medium assumes the continuous passage of time, or breaks it up in pre-planned ways, as with a TV serial.

My essay on "metaphors, interfaces, and thought processes," which draws on some ideas developed by Neal Stephenson, may be of interest..best found via Google since search at my blog is still broken.

David: Of course. As Poe wrote, time is also the key element of the short story, and it was why he chose that mode over the novel. But differences between modes does not equal a difference in intellectual demand and reward. (And more and more movies are not meant to be watched in a theater in a single sitting. David Lynch's *Inland Empire* is a great example.) Let's remember that theater, too, is a technology that shares the temporality of film.

Mavprof, there's probably no point to the argument, but I'll just reassert that film can be just as demanding and rewarding as literature. For examples of films that are better than their book sources: *The Ice Storm* and *The Sweet Hereafter*. I'd continue with: *Solaris*, *The Maltese Falcom*, *Kiss Me Deadly*.

Literature, of course, does not have a monopoly on allusion, foreshadowing, or juxtaposition. Shakespeare's plays were not written to be read. They were written to be performed. And they use these techniques. Likewise, Homer's *Odyssey* or the Beowulf narratives were originally oral tales, but they had plenty of allusion, foreshadowing, etc.

There are differences among all the modes of artistic expression. But differences do not make one mode naturally "easier" than another.

The eminent philosopher of aesthetics Roger Scruton makes a convincing case that photography and thus film (a sub-genre of photography) are not true arts (in the sense that painting, sculpture, music, opera, drama, and poetry are) in his essay "Photography and Representation" (in "The Aesthetic Understanding" [London: Methuen, 1983, pp 119-43]).

As Scruton argues elsewhere, cinema tends strongly to pursue effect at the cost of meaning, as opposed to genuine art, which entertains us as well, "but it does so by creating distance between us and the scenes that it portrays: a distance sufficient to engender disinterested sympathy for the characters, rather than vicarious emotions of our own" ("Beauty" [Oxford U P, 2009, pp 102]).

This is not to say there aren't interesting or entertaining movies, but the grandiose claim of Luther Blisset that films of great directors deserve equal attention beside the novels of Henry James or George Eliot rings pretty hollow.

Scrunton's argument about film and photography gets so much wrong it's silly. He is to film as Plato was to theater; and an Aristotelean retort works in both cases. Film and photography are representations of the world, as much as theater, poetry, or sculpture are.

And yes, I'd put the work of Kobayashi, such as *The Human Condition*, against the novels of Eliot or James any day.

Don't think that Luther Blisset's anti-"Scrunton" [sic] retort that falsely claims "Aristotelean" [sic] support for rendering the aesthetician Roger Scruton's interesting arguments "silly," [enfin, quelle surprise!--no sic!] quite telling.

Since he seems to have abandoned the theoretical plane, the Marxist historian of art Arnold Hauser presents the social situation of popular receptivity to art--as opposed to entertainment--quite apropos: "The cinema takes the final step on the road to profanation, for even to attend the modern metropolitan theatre showing some popular play or other still demands a certain internal and external preparation . . ."

Thanks, mavprof. Argument ad typo is certainly the most convincing.

It's been a while since I read Scruton on film, but my sense was that he made a fairly simple Platonic argument: photography and film are presentations of the world as is, not re-presentations. As such, they do not constitute true art. They do not provide the aesthetic distance necessary to overcome sentimental or emotional responses by the viewer. I write that it's Platonist because it reminds me an awful lot of Plato's objection to theater, and it seems as susceptible to Aristotle's counter-argument re theater, that it is an imitation of an act and not an act itself, and that the audience is fully aware of the distance between art and world. (It also seems odd that Scruton, a conservative aesthetician, essentially agrees with Marxist radicals like Brecht here regarding art and absorption.)

In any case, I see no reason why one could say that even a popular film, like *The Wizard of Oz*, lacks the aesthetic distancing necessary to provoke a truly aesthetic response from the viewer. Or consider the remarkable opening tracking shot from *A Touch of Evil*, or Lang's powerful montages in *M.*, or Lynch's hallucinatory narrative patchworks in *Inland Empire*. In each case, we have a film forcing us to be aware of itself as a creating, framing, and re-presenting medium.

(And too many scholars have made the same argument regarding journalistic photography: the artist's choice of framing -- as in those famous Vietnam photographs of burning civilians that conveniently left out the American soldiers running to their aid -- is a creative act, an act of choosing and selecting, equal to the sculptor's decisions about what rock to chip away and what rock to leave.)

However, mavprof, once you're done with the heavy intellectual labor of correcting my hasty typing, you might deign to provide something more than an appeal to authority without any argumentative weight. Just naming "Scruton" does not work.

Luther Blisset:

Your sarcastic "ad typo" I'll generously assume to be another typo meaning "ad typographicum" or "ad erratum" (accusative).

Leaving aside your free association with Plato on theater, Scruton's argument (much more sophisticated than a brief summary could do justice to, which is why I pointed to the whole article) elaborates on the point that photography and its later spawn, film, (qua film) primarily conveys surrogates or simulacra (mediated by a causal photochemical or mechanical processes) of objects or subjects rather than representations of those objects or subjects and thus don't engage the aesthetic interest as true arts do (thus a film of a play or symphony or opera is useful if it adequately presents the dramatic, musical, or both elements of an artistic production, not for some presumed aesthetic value of the filming process itself). And in photography--and even more in film--there are incidentals unintentionally caught by the mechanical processes inherent in these media (they don't have to be as obvious as jet trails in the sky above in some scene of a filmed Roman pseudo-epic or American Western). Following Croce and Collingwood (and succeeded by Dominic Lopes et al), Scruton devalues photography and film for their focus on the perceived objects or subjects at the expense of imaginative representation of those objects or subjects.

And of course this ignores your earlier hyperbolical claims that great movie directors deserve equal critical attention with great writers.

strike "a" before "causal"

I'll take your word that it's a really complicated argument. Kant, for one, would have serious problems with the notion that nothing real -- or an image of something real -- can be considered beautiful (or sublime, for that matter), and so unworthy of true aesthetic appreciation. A garden is an object of beauty, however much something "incidental," like a bee or a breeze, might "get in the way."

In any case, it's an argument filmmakers like Fritz Lang addressed well before Scruton made it. I'll quote Lang: "Nothing in my films is an accident." I find it ridiculous to assert that the highly stylized sets, costumes, makeup, physiques, etc. of a film are mere simulacra. In a great film, every image is framed and artfully arranged. But I suppose Scruton would be forced to prefer a Donald Duck cartoon over *A Touch of Evil*, given that Donald is the product of a "real" art like drawing and painting.