if, as recent coments on PILLOW BOOK and APOCALYPSE NOW /H.O.D. seem to hint,
we're embarking on a thread dealing explicitly wtih the problematic of
adaptation, let me foreground one of the critical [in both senses]
issues involved in thinking about the translation of words to moving
images . . . and let me do so by offering, for the sake of argument, a
no doubt controversial claim
 
i'm tempted to say that, at least within the parameters of the moving image as
we now imagine it,ther simply cannot be any first person texts . . . that is,
no film can be narrated/enunciated by one of its diegetic characters [although
a film may certainly have an "implied narrator," which is a very diffrent
kind of animal entirely] . . .
 
 
if this is true, or even partially true, it might explain why dan gribbin
 
>   was struck, upon viewing this time, with how much less I cared
>   about Willard as a character, compared to Marlow
 
and why so many others who actually liked/admired A.N. still found the
narrator/narration lacking in various ways . . . strange as it sounds it
may be true that the kind of sympathy [or empathy if you prefer] frequently
attributed to first person narratives requires that we see through the
narrator's eyes, something that paradoically we cannot do when there are
pictures to look at  . . .
 
 
[i would also speculate that, analogously, the power of kurtz, not over the
natives but over the reader, is to a great extent a function of his never being
seen, and that to show him on the screen in ANY incarnation is to reduce that
power . . . both of these claims seem to suggest that in some ways a word is
worth a thousand pictures, something that adaptations have to wrestle with]
 
 
mike frank
 
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