Sunday

A while ago a friend said to me that whilst there were many good films, cinema itself was essentially an empty art form. It didn't have the tradition or the richness of literature. I said that didn't matter, or if it did film borrows intertextuality from literature anyway. After seeing a play last night (containing perhaps a good example of a MacGuffin?), I think the difference my friend was hinting at was more correctly between novels/poems and plays/cinema. You cannot get a first person narrator in plays/cinema. You can have an voice-over, or a soliloquy, but it isn't the same. They are talking to you. When reading a book, you are the actor reading the soliloquy. It's in your voice that you hear the words, interpret and pronounce them. This is why my first ambition is to write a narrative novel in the first personal voice - it's what the medium is best at, I believe, and can't be rivalled in any other art form (poetry gives you the first person, but not narrative anymore). Cinema is always the third person, the camera. And, then, what art form best exploits the second person? I don't know.