The artistic gulf between cinematic works and literary ones is so vast, I sometimes marvel that anyone is courageous enough to attempt to marry the two. Aside from the occasionally successful (if often bland) A&E or BBC miniseries, cinematic adaptations are forced by time constraints to simplify so drastically that there is little chance of accurately reflecting the topics and themes addressed in their source material. The necessity of using “cinematic shorthand” to compress story lines and distill dramatic elements... Read more

There are few writers who have written so clearly or so well about the art of cinematic interpretation as has that charmingly blunt hillbilly Thomist, Flannery O’Connor. It might seem counter-intuitive to search for insights on understanding film among the essays and lectures of a fiction writer — and a short-story writer, at that. But in her essay, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” O’Connor reminds her fellow authors (and storytelling artists of any stripe) of an incredibly important insight regarding... Read more