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Film must distinguish itself from literature. In many ways film has less to do with literature than with a number of other arts. It has more to do with music in the uninterruptability of its time and in the importance of its pacing, more to do with cartoons in its succession of blocks of information. If it is at all like literature it is probably most like poetry, in the spareness of its language, its need for each line to be polished cleanly, its need for hard, simple language; or perhaps the short story in its need to fit an abbreviated form and again be spare, simple, and swift. What it has very little to do with is the novel. A film does not have the time to squeeze in massive portraits of, or information about, its characters. This is the mistake of "message" and "pop-psychology" films such as Ordinary People or Four Seasons which try in vain to verbally give us "information" about their characters. There simply is not enough time. There is even less time in film than in drama (the seeming equivalent of film) because in film the script is vying with the real stuff of cinema: sounds and images. In drama language is much more the substance of the piece. Language in film serves a more adjunct or commentary purpose. Film lines have to be spare and suggestive. Like lines of poetry, film lines have to be packed with ambiguity and resonance because there are so few of them.
On the other hand, film lines distinguish themselves from poetry by their commonness. A great film line is not necessarily a beautiful, "high-art" metaphor. The best film lines are often those that taken out of the context of film would seem bland and anonymous. There are a number of such lines in Jonathen Demme's recent film, Something Wild. This film does not waste its time being philosophical or psychological. It does not load us down with a lot of "deep" information about its characters. Its script is swift, simple and austere. The most memorable lines in the film are simple ones that are repeated, as a line of peotry might be, or a phrase in a musical score, and which through this...