Books and movies: "On the depth of study, the finale (V. 4)" and about narrative art as such.

This will be a transitional article.

She will complete a series of conversations about the world in books - and at the same time begin a new chapter of our literary research. Today we will talk about cinematography in books.

This very word - cinematography - is very ambiguous. The characteristic described by him can be both a huge plus and a minus. At the same time? Or, rather, in parallel? And not this way or that way - but rather - depending on what kind of cinematography is meant. Let's not rush, perhaps, let's figure out why it even occurred to us to compare movies and books, moreover. that these are two generally different genres of narrative art. Cinema is mostly visual. And a Book - a book is still primarily a word. And yes, the visual image and the word-image have many similarities, it cannot be denied. Only here the subtle internal patterns of the work of these two types of narration are different.

And no, we will not now issue a sacred accusatory cry, following the example of the inhabitants of well-known literary associations ("the one whose name is not called", because the name is not so important). Yelling: "The laws of screenwriting don't work in books!"you won't wait. We do not suffer from a craving for incorrect generalizations, so still no. Sorry, but - they work. The laws of screenwriting, telling about the simplest and shortest way of revealing the hero and his individual path of becoming, work. They work in the cinema, they work in the theater, they work - with effort, but yes! - even in books. Otherwise, they would not be these most universally recognized laws. As George Lucas said - stamps work. That is why they have become stamps - because of their versatility and reliability. But - no, books cannot be written according to genre patterns and manuals while waiting for scripts to be created.

Why, if they work? But because their work is extremely specific. And this specificity - completely and completely sharpened for visual storytelling - is completely ignored by many fans of working on books based on scenario patterns. They forget that one frame of a movie can sometimes require five considerable paragraphs of text. They forget that emotion in the camera and emotion on paper require different visual means. Or-which is sometimes even worse-they don't remember it at all.

What will happen then at the exit? A sluggish and bland "flatbread", a kind of narrative semi-finished product. After all, the thing is - the script is always a semi-finished product. That's why it turns out that "scenario methods don't work," allegedly. And it's not about working or not. The point is rather that a semi-finished product is never equal to the finished product. In the cinema, this bland semi-finished cake of the script will be covered with bright colors of acting, camerawork, director's accents. The work of decorators, masters of special effects, costumes, makeup, music... God. We almost never think about who is the author of the script in the movie we are watching! Last names. those who will be interested are just directors and actors, artists and musicians.

So why then can the book be served with a bare bone, eh? This is also a narrative of a different genre. If you bring to the end the comparison with the filming process - the author himself becomes a voiceover crew. and actors - actors are your characters and the events described by you. You - if you are a novice author - can write yourself a script according to the manual - only this script should remain in your "drafts and plans" folder Because, of course, it will help you very, very much. Only it will not be a finished book - rather a detailed and detailed synopsis. And based on this synopsis scenario, you, as a writer, will play your own movie: with vivid artistic techniques. deep details, creating an atmosphere.... with all that wealth of visual means that are specific specifically for the text, for literature, for the book. Here lies the main wisdom of using patterns, stamps and manuals - they are able to give only general touches. remember this - and take working and useful techniques from any toolkit. Do not hang blinders on your eyes voluntarily - they say some editor there said that the "Thousand-faced Hero" of J. Campbell * "does not work" or, even worse, is morally outdated. No, no, and no again. Just remember - a bare skeletal construction on the site of a future drawing should never be given out as a finished work. That's all. A writer needs to study stamps. Know them. Understand their internal structure. There is no need to climb out of the skin, inventing a fundamentally new one - there is an opinion that this is technically impossible, because the laws (purely medical) of the functioning of the human brain and psyche are the same for all of us. to create your own, it's enough just not to be afraid to move away from the patterns. Details and details, the individuality of the presentation and different angles of view on the same eternal figures and motives - that's what will make the narrative alive.

So what's with the cinematography then? At its best, this characteristic will mean that the reader has everything described as alive, played before the inner eye. This, by the way, is in many ways also a specific skill of the reader: so immerse yourself in the text. Cinematography for a book in this case is the potential ability to draw the reader into a fictional world and fictional events, to present them in such a way that an enthusiastic reader will want to see it all with his own eyes - in imagination, in drawings or in a movie.

In a negative way, "cinematography" will mean the template of the presentation, the clipness of the cutting of the narrative itself and the bones of the supporting structure sticking out here and there-the plan, that is, the "script" that is underprocessed. This clipped clumsy cutting also cuts the eye in the cinema, interfering with normal perception, so here we have taken cinematography in quotation marks, and not by chance. By clipping , we propose to understand this - the presentation of information in short .often in isolated chunks .without a clear internal connection between them. Actually, it harms any type of narrative, to be honest.

Well, the third - neutral - part of the concept of cinematography will probably be like this: this is the potential possibility of staging the plot of the book on stage or on the big screen.

A good book can be built on the basis of a speculative "scenario" - such, for example, is Stephen King's "It". This is inevitably evident, because the author spent his entire youth at various seminars of the scenario-book kind - and by the way, from our point of view, the screenwriters very much unwound the two time lines of the narrative in vain, placing them in different parts of the film: initially they were woven together, their separation did not benefit the depth of presentation of both characters, and plot.

A good book can spit from a high bell tower on scenicality and cinematography as the goal and at the same time the basis of construction - and be perfectly written out from a visual point of view, giving rich material for film adaptations, like almost any classic book, from Dostoevsky and Dumas to Dickens and Bulgakov.

And what does this have to do with, you ask, a topic with a depth of study of the world. if everything we said above refers specifically to narrative as a process?

And here's what: from the above, the conclusion follows: before you break the rules, and therefore create freely, talk about the world and heroes like this. as the soul asks, these very rules should be studied. Carefully, meticulously and with all the immersion. It's like stylization in drawing - before you stylize anything, distort proportions, colors, etc., you have to learn classical techniques. Natural living proportions and laws of chiaroscuro, volume and shapes. You can only break and change to suit your artistic needs what you know very well: then you will be able to control the effects and set their direction. to achieve from the work exactly the effect on the viewer / reader that you wanted.

This is where we will conclude the conversations about the depth of the study of the world - and summarize with this:

remember that classical techniques are therefore classical. that are time-tested, and work. Love and appreciate this experience - and do not hesitate to resort to it. This, by the way, will be consistent with the same Far Eastern philosophical principles of beauty that we mentioned once: there is no need to artificially complicate the simple and trouble-free. Being critical of Eastern (Japanese) thought and in many ways not sharing it, we will say this for ourselves: it is not always necessary. And only sometimes it is still possible: let it be like an addition of a tart seasoning, which requires only a couple of grains. Don't overdo it, the main thing. Generosity without waste, courage without dash, freedom with an understanding of the basics and principles of construction - this is our motto in creativity. That's how we work on describing our worlds - and if our experience helps you, well... let everything work out!

Meanwhile, a PDF document with the same Thousand-strong Hero is waiting for you at the link with an asterisk "*". This is our little gift to you, and have fun reading!