Why the book will never be better than the movie and vice versa

The cinema, since its inception, has gone hand in hand with literature, drinking countless times from its most characteristic works. Two different arts that share the ability to tell stories through a movie or a book. But, many people tend to mark one format or another as a higher qualitative level: criticism that lacks sense and arguments. There are opinions of all colors and clear examples that one product is not, per se, better than the other. Some adaptations, like ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (in its many occasions) left the cinema in evidence and raised the book as the clear winner; others, like ‘The Lord of the Rings’ or ‘Harry Potter’, satisfied the expectations of the fans and equaled the quality of both; While, in the case of films like ‘The Godfather’ or ‘Jaws’, the book was far surpassed upon its arrival in the big theaters. In this way, the qualitative diversity depends largely on the ability to write and the creative capacity of the filmmakers. Now, the mere fact of comparing both concepts is already an incoherence in itself, since we are talking about totally different artistic expressions. They may both tell stories; However, we find incompatibilities in the narrative proposals that generate an overwhelming plot void when defending one or the other. Because, no matter how much society insists on the contrary, cinema and literature keep miles distances. Incomparable narrative resources Literature uses the word to develop its story, taking its time – pages in this case – to make us delve into the plot and the characters they present to us.Any landscape, situation or internal conflict of the protagonists, has the means to investigate the narrative proposal, leaving all the images that are proposed in the hands of the reader’s imagination. Therefore, the resources are much more extensive and have no temporal limitations beyond the weight of the book in question. In the case of cinema, none of this happens like that. The average duration of a film oscillates around 90 minutes, having to lay the foundations of the story, as a general rule, in three differentiated acts. Although it is true that “an image is worth a thousand words”, the true challenge of audiovisual narrative lies in the creation of its characters. Knowing how to transmit the entire dramatic load, without abusing the dialogues, and giving each of the members of the work a plot path lacks the freedoms of literature, so it is impossible for the depth of a literary character to reach such levels in its film adaptation.With regard to the plot itself, if a screenwriter chose to incorporate all the elements that participate in the book, the duration of the film would become untenable. It must be synthesized, giving greater relevance to cinematographic coherence than to fidelity to its original source. Because what works in one format seems impossible in the other; Having to know how to prioritize the key points that will give the film quality, regardless of what the book has previously told us. The work of a screenwriter and that of a writer have little to do with each other. We find clear examples of the effects of playing with the laws of one gender on the other, as is the case with JKRowling in the writing of the films of ‘Fantastic animals and where to find them’, a franchise that in its second part seems confusing as a result of the narrative overload. With the book or the movie? Knowing that we are talking about completely distant works of art in form and substance, it makes no sense to continue asking this question. No one would dare to judge a painting by comparing it to a building; Nor does a dance with respect to its song: because of this, in the case of movies and books, we are faced with the same situation. To judge a film or, failing that, a book, we have to rely exclusively on the rules that support the qualitative level of each format. In other words, if a movie lacks dramatic power, the performances are poor, the photography or soundtrack poor, and the script lousy, the movie is most likely “bad.” Like a low-level writing and a story without meaning or interest, it will do the same with the literary proposal.This debate dates back to the beginnings of the seventh art and remains a point of conflict when a production company decides to adapt the film to the big screen. work of some writer. A criticism that must be stopped and replaced by the independent criteria that two of the most relevant arts in contemporary social structure deserve.