What does literature do better than movies? why should one not just watch movies or theatre or listen to music?

what does literature do better than movies? why should one not just watch movies or theatre or listen to music?

Clarity, structure, artifice.

what do movies do better than literature? why should one not just read books or watch theatre or listen to music?

thats the question... i'm not trying to be snarky and say don't read books, i want to know what you guys think about how they contrast or are unique

literally nothing

reading in 2016 is like shitting in the streets instead of doing it in the loo

Cause rhetoric.But then again, fuck remains a beautiful word. You don't need it, but you should be able to give one just in case you can't get free fish anymore and need to catch your own.

lol couldnt I just film a book?

you can do things in literature you can't do in film and that applys to all mediums. Language is flawed, perhaps more than visual language, but what does that matter.

Books allow for deeper characters.

Interior monologues, memories, non-visual sensory experiences are all easier to portray with words.

For cinema to be great, it requires different people all performing at their creative peak. Directors, editors, actors. Not to mention cinematographers and all that shit.

not costing X million to make and relying on X thousand of people to do it for you

film is a dead medium now anyway, ozu, kiarostami, tarr, chris marker...they all took the medium as far as it could go

documentaries > film

i was thinking along the same lines as you, in terms of documentaries being 'better,' but probably for the wrong reasons. can you recommend me some docs? i'm just beginning to become very interested in film.

thanks for the reply.

>Books allow for deeper characters.

Thats bullshit

Because literature is more interactive then theatre or music. You're creating an idea of a world in your mind when you read, a world that's already been created for you when you watch movies or listen to music. That's why readers rarely enjoy movie adaptations of books. Because it doesn't fit with their perception, the idea of a world they'd already created when reading the book.

these points are too arguable imo, what do words and sounds on a piece of paper do better than people in front of a camera?

i think the best argument is that film requires much too much collaboration.

Sorry, I felt the op was baiting (I've seen many similar baits, and reacted as if it was one).

Books simply can do things other art forms cannot. They are freer than movies and theatre when it comes to their length. They can, unlike music, philosophize, but can still have musical elements (I'm talking about lyric and epic poetry). They can be abstract or figurative, they can show a character's stream of thought (the only movie that does something similar to this that I know of is 8 1/2, and I doubt a movie could ever truly replicate a real stream of consciousness novel), they can be like Proust/Melville and stop the plot to talk about something completely different, they aren't performed, so you can go back anytime and reread a sentence you didn't understand etc etc etc

No art form is better or worse, they all simply have different tools and paradigms that may or may not be used well.

If you want to be pragmatic, the density of infomation. There's a reason why movie adaptation tend to simplify its source material.
You receive wastly more relevant information from 2 hours of reading than 2 hours of watching any kind of film, be it fiction or documentary

That is such a basic response

But when it, rarely does, they say that this is my top shelf movie

>what do words and sounds on a piece of paper do better than people in front of a camera?
Engage you. There's a difference between seeing a thing and envisioning one, one is a passive act and another is active

caress the detail,
the divine detail.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Books allow a more detached and objective view of content. It is best for character development, narrative, "making points",...It is a more logical medium. Movies is better for imagism, but less for connectedness of narrative and the option of detachment. Music is good for propaganda, and making "points" in the energetic, instant sense, instead of the argumentative, linear sense of literature. Theatre in the context of classical literate western societies can be seen as subsidiary to the literate form, but with a compensatory stress on the concrete and situational that the book omits, or is less efficient at in its favouring of the abstract.

>being this Naive

All of Kubrick's works were adaptations of literature