Literature and Cinema (A Writer's Plight)

This might be a very cynical thread, but anyways:

Is the era of literature gone? Cinema has come, and now the television has replaced the novel. Casually reading literature is seen as some perplexing act. And those who do continue to read literature ""casually"" are either 12 year olds reading the Hunger Games or white women reading shit like Fifty Shades of Grey.

With that being said, there is and always will be a plethora of knowledge that is espoused from literature. However, those who wish to create new, original pieces of literature in our era will have little success unless they cater to the aforementioned groups. Thus, writers wishing to put their originality on the market might be doomed.

What is a writer supposed to do in this situation if they wish to influence the minds of the masses with their works? As we have already stated, the literature market is extremely unfavorable to original thought and has a limited audience. However, television often times welcomes original thought and has a nearly unlimited audience. Television shows have the possibility of influencing the minds of millions, and leaving a lasting effect.

Therefore, should aspiring writers turn to television? Sure, there won't be engaging prose or poetic imagery. However, writers could channel their ideas to a much larger crowd more efficiently than doing so with a novel.

TL;DR Should novelists ditch their rough drafts for a screenplay for the sake of influence?

> Cinema has come, and now the television has replaced the novel.

True, I think. Not just because TV has replaced it, but directors like Ozu, Tarr, Kiarostami have really pushed the form as far as it (appears) it can go.

Chris Marker was the one who said cinema would last only one century.

>What is a writer supposed to do in this situation if they wish to influence the minds of the masses with their works? As we have already stated, the literature market is extremely unfavorable to original thought and has a limited audience.

Read Delillo's Mao II. It's about a writer who gives up on publishing his novel because of this.

> However, television often times welcomes original thought

Absolutely false.

> Television shows have the possibility of influencing the minds of millions, and leaving a lasting effect.

You're delusional.

> Therefore, should aspiring writers turn to television?

Absolutely not. Read Mao II.

“The novel’s not dead, it’s not even seriously injured, but I do think we’re working in the margins, working in the shadows of the novel’s greatness and influence. There’s plenty of impressive talent around, and there’s strong evidence that younger writers are moving into history, finding broader themes. But when we talk about the novel we have to consider the culture in which it operates. Everything in the culture argues against the novel, particularly the novel that tries to be equal to the complexities and excesses of the culture. This is why books such as JR and Harlot’s Ghost and Gravity’s Rainbow and The Public Burning are important—to name just four. They offer many pleasures without making concessions to the middle-range reader, and they absorb and incorporate the culture instead of catering to it....


These books and writers show us that the novel is still spacious enough and brave enough to encompass enormous areas of experience. We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.”

>Absolutely false.
Why?

And thanks for the recommendation.

>This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation
I heavily agree this.

However, l believe people have killed their imaginations so to speak. Figurative language is seen as some crazy, mystical idea that only few can understand. Society has become too literal, begging that you tell them your message in plain words rather than in prose and metaphors.

Leo Tolstoy or even Jose Rizal wouldn't get the light of day if they were writers of today. People no longer look to novels or essays to find meaning or calls to action. As previously stated, they demand you give it to them in plain words and pure speech. Thus if a writer has a point he wishes to make, he either has to severely dumb it down or have a minute scope of readers.

But if a writer's message is on the TV, which almost everyone watches, then the message will have much more clarity and effect.

Ayy who else has seen "la chinoise"?

>Ozu, Tarr, Kiarostami have really pushed the form as far as it (appears) it can go.
How so?

>>Absolutely false.
>Why?

Come on, man. Tons of money is poured into TV. It has to go through so many filters before it reaches the audience. No HBO show will have lasting change, no matter which US president sez it's his favorite show ever.

Godard was the one who said cinema begins with Griffith and ends with Kiarostami.

You're right, maybe Hollywood has more of an impact than novelists. But do you like it? Mainstream will always be safe, easy to digest and change nothing.

Think outside twitter trends.

Godard's a pseud though

All you have to offer is some speculation built on top of your own superiority complex.

It's easy for anyone with a bit of critical thought to come to the conclusion that TV is running the risk of replacing television.

Society is not becoming too literal. Popular books and TV shows and movies use literal language because their end goal is either to entertain or inform. That's why people watch TV and movies, to be entertained. People seek out literature, however, for any number of reasons. This hasnt changed and it never will. We'll always have this section of the population searching for something beyond simple information and entertainment; and they will always turn to literature if they truly believe in their search.

Television and movies have to fight censors. Literature doesn't. Fuck markets. Which one is the purer form?

I meant

>TV is running the risk of replacing literature

Obviously

>Mainstream will always be safe, easy to digest and change nothing.
Mainstream media (television, film, music) is explicitly designed to protect the status quo by influencing the largest group of consumers possible, or slowly reshape it in favor of the ruling class (hooray for liberalism and globalism).

A lot of people

Literature should challenge, but fiction is not generally a call to action, even to those of us it deeply affects.

Also, what no one is mentioning about Mao II is that delillo's essential thesis there is the fact that the terrorist has come to replace the novelist as an instigator of the masses in modern times.

Film and television are so immensely saturated with marketing that they can never be demonstrative of pure message, there will always be dissonance in the presentation, unless someone creates something like Mr Robot and releases it free on a torrent site or somesuch. Mr Robot itself is an interesting example because it seems to be a call to action yet its bogged down by commercials and subtle product placement like every modern work.

I suppose it can be a case by case thing, but I think that creator's want the proper audience, and not the proper influence, unless they're wannabe revolutionaries or SJWs, which the case very well may be.

At the end of Stanley Elkin's The Living End, God destroys everything. The souls around him are insisting that they get it, throwing different explanations for creation at him. He dismisses everything they say and tells them he never found the right audience as he ends all of existence.

Then is literature still the best way to influence with figurative languages?

Have you forgotten that most films are based on novels ? That's because cinema is an art form that can only be done with a substantial amount of capital, and investors don't want to put that capital into something that hasn't proven itself to be successful. Cinema is a medium that can't be done by one person and it discourages creativity. Out of all artistic media, literature is the one that welcomes experimentation the most and it's the one that has the most possibilities.

Hahaha

You could say the same thing about music.

Music does welcome experimentation, but it always remains in the underground and, as a musician, I believe that literature has much more potential for experimentation than music since it isn't inhibited by the constraints of primarily sensory appreciation.

>With that being said, there is and always will be a plethora of knowledge that is espoused from literature.

Your pseudo-intellectual writing style tells me that you don't spend that much time reading literature either.

Also what OP is describing is a massive sellout to the consumerist crowd which takes away from the true spirit of writing. A true genius doesn't write to please anyone nor does he write for material gain.

>literature
>more unfavorable to original thought than the movies
Cinema is only ever radically different from other cinema when it begins to cover what literature did 50+ years ago. Right now the big trend in art-ish cinema that reaches the broad audience you so crave is "look, gay people and minorities are people too!" which hasn't been cutting edge since the 19th century and early 20th century.
This is hugely oversimplified:
If it is truly unique and and presents truly original thought, it will not be funded. At the very least, a book only takes one person to write, and then a publisher to push out a certain number of copies. For a decently sized release, a publisher could spend under $500k. That size budget is unheard of for a movie that gets any kind of distribution. Even most art films with poor breadth of release need budgets in the low millions these days. Where does that money come from? Not a single source, but getting it together from the studio and producers and such. There are too many people needed just to make the funding for a movie to happen, let alone provide theaters for screening. A book takes a single like minded publisher and the book stores to put it on the shelves, which is more likely because a couple inches of shelf space is a lot less of a risk than not playing the latest rom-com or superhero movie on one of your screens.
Television is even worse with having to sell ads and not get cancelled.

Why can't you do both? Faulkner did it, Fitzgerald did it, West did it, plenty others have too I'm sure. There's no shame in the screenplay except that arbitrarily placed there by the same kind of person who posts what they're reading all over the internet.

>How could you even write a screenplay, it's not real literature!
The mark of an idiot. Hypothetically, a screenplay has as much potential to be a fully realized work of fiction as a novel. But the novel has a much longer history behind it with a clearer evolution in appropriate subject matters, styles, techniques, etc.

Shakespeare did

Dostoevsky did

This is top tier cringe OP

Please tell me you copy pasted this from reddit to troll us

Sure, writing plays or theatrical performances can be just as genius as anything else, but it should still be taken from the creativity and heart of the author and not from an attempt at fame or pandering to your idea of what people would pay for. Dostyoevsky was popular as was Shakespeare but they achieved a phenomenon where people embraced them for their genuine thoughts.

No. For fuck's sake everyone has always been into easily consumed shit and few have been into quality things.

It has been, and will always be, like that. Stop making threads.

Writers are not jack of all trades artists you tard

Writers are writers because they are good with words

>durr more people pay attention to moving images on a screen instead of words on paper

A lot of people are fucking stupid and just want entertainment. It doesn't mean that books as a medium are suddenly invalidated. I've read books that communicate more thought and feeling in a few pages than TV or movies could ever achieve.

I'm sick to death of 'story' itself. The conflict, plot, character development. There's probably a few novels and films a year that I can sit through. Last week I read Submission by Houllebeq which I enjoyed.

You seem to think a novel or film can cause a revolution in someone's head and forever change them. When you get older art just doesn't matter that much, it isn't very powerful. If you want political change become a revolutionary, don't write a whatever.

if you want political change write a treatise not a novel you dingus

It still sorta does, but there's more ways around it, especially stylistically (see: Gravity's Rainbow)

Plus no one pays attention to literature anymore (see: Mao II)

Delillo's "message" in Mao II is that the novel is still here and the novelist is still fighting the good fight.

Bill Gray was wrong.

psueds get out

>Cinema has come, and now the television has replaced the novel.
TV and cinema have come and gone, they are in dire straits compared to Veeky Forums.

>And those who do continue to read literature ""casually"" are either 12 year olds reading the Hunger Games or white women reading shit like Fifty Shades of Grey.
not true btw.

i hope you don't consider yourself a writer op because that is a poorly written post

>Figurative language is seen as some crazy, mystical idea that only few can understand. Society has become too literal, begging that you tell them your message in plain words rather than in prose and metaphors.
Are you insane? Literally the opposite is true, everything is hidden behind layers of irony and meta-irony to the point where being straightforward is considered novel.

>People no longer look to novels or essays to find meaning or calls to action.
Yes they do, it's just the culture of the time to find those meanings, ponder them and then ignore them. We're coming into the age of meta-modernism where people like sincerity but don't think it applies to them.

>Cinema is a medium that can't be done by one person

Yes it fucking can. You obviously know nothing about experimental cinema or documentary. Even with more people it's been proven that a great feature can be made with a crew of two or three with a single or few actors and on a small budget.

The problem is that every other form of entertainment other than reading doesn't really require anything of the person who consumes it.

But that doesn't mean that writing is defunct or from a bygone era or whatnot, it simply means that the market for it changes I guess to suit the people who actually bother reading.

>doesn't really require anything of the person who consumes it.

A reader can read the prose and enjoy the experimentation without getting much of anything out of it the same way as someone uncritically watching a Tscherkassky or Straub/hulliet.

I don't see how you can be this retarded to think something like film or music can't require anything of the consumer.

My favorite Godard desu

>A reader can read the prose and enjoy the experimentation without getting much of anything

In what sense are you reading if you don't get anything out of it?

If I watch Game of Thrones, the story and the narrative already have a fantasy world that appears before my eyes and I don't have to use my imagination, whereas if I read the books of Game of Thrones instead I would actually have to use my imagination.

The books in the series of Song of Ice and Fire, would never be as popular as they are now if the TV-show came to be, and that's because more people consume TV entertainment than books.

If the TV show never came to be*

>Ozu, Tarr, and Kiarostami
lol no

Try Tarkovsky (inb4 babbys first art director, he was very relevant in his time and hugely influential on the current greats), Benning, and Grandrieux

All a man has to do os pick up a pen and paper and he can turn his ideas into art. Maybe the novel has taken a back seat to movies and TV , but they are still HIGHLY influential. People read novels, are affected by them, and go on to create other media like movies under the influence of the novels they've read.

It's virtually impossible for one person alone to make a film, whereas the vast majority of literature ever written was made entirely by a single individual.

kys