I think the novel is at one end of the art-entertainment continuum - the play in the middle - while TV and cinema veer a bit more towards entertainment.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.
One of the nice things about books as opposed to television and movies to some extent is it's not a passive entertainment. People really do get involved, and they do create, and they do have their own visions of what different characters look like and what should happen. It's great - it means their brains are working.
Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.
The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.
A novel is a static thing that one moves through; a play is a dynamic thing that moves past one.
The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time.
The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.
I think cinema is linked to literature by a lot of social ways. Our brains are full of literature - my brain is.
I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.
Novels are nothing but evolution, but there does come a point when that stops, and the story is sealed within the pages of the book. That doesn't happen with a play. Even performances are different every night.