Kinematograph.
Then, what do we mean when we say “this is so cinematic!” There is of course the implication of the visual rendered in prose, but there is also, anecdotally, sometimes a level at which cinematic fiction also implies something about pacing or narrative rhythm or narrative composition—things that for my convenience I’ll group and condense into the term narrative depth. To be clear, I do not mean depth in the modern sense of a value judgement. I mean it in the sense of the distance between what is occurring in the narrative foreground and what is occurring in the narrative background, giving a sense of relief or contrast. In cinema, this contrast seems diminished. That is, in cinema, things are happening and there is less ostensible commentary upon the events or the psychology of the narrative. This is due to the nature of film as a medium. In prose fiction, there is a greater potential for contrast between event or incident and commentary, and one might say that cinematic fiction is fiction that emulates this lessened narrative contrast: the flattened narrative relief of cinema.
That’s from Brandon Taylor’s Miserly Eye, which makes some interesting points in the matter of cinematic fiction, and in a manner that doesn’t make me twitchy. I’ll continue to maintain, myself, that the primary distinctions ultimately stem from their respective mediums—that cinema’s dependence on images fixes it on specificities that prose’s narrow channel of one word after another can only approach with great effort—but I’ll spend some time thinking with this notion of depth of field, and Bellardi’s notion of foreground and background tenses, maybe.
In the meanwhile, it’s an excuse to index a number of old posts hereabouts on the matter: a couple of extended quotes from John Fowles; a brief divagation on why it is I might tend to twitch when the subject comes up; a disquisition on, well, it has more to do with comics and serialization, but it’s still pertinent to the work of translating the techniques of one medium into another; some consideration of less-than-obvious implications of a cinematic mode; and what I might maybe call the keystone piece. —So there’s that.
