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 ---- To sign off SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]