I've been thinking about the concept of time a lot lately. Perhaps it is because the paper I'm writing on Alfred Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps has led me to do some research on the discourse between what makes a novel and a film different. One writer believes it is time and how time is portrayed. I won't go into his very long and very dry paper, but it is an interesting suggestion.
On a different note, I've been watching some of Mad Men, a tv show that premiered on AMC awhile back. It is promoted as a recreation of the world of Mad Men, or advertising on Madison Avenue in 1960. Watching the show, which I enjoy a lot, I wonder at what point is this supposed to include some sort of accurate portrayal of the time or is it more a unbelievable fiction set in a past era? None the less, I think it captures some sort of zeitgeist, although who actually lived in that world still makes me question the plausibility of it. That brings me to another comment: for all the fictional tv shows, novels, and movies, if they are set in a contemporary setting, we do not assume that this is the one and only portrayal of life. But how often is our perceptive of history based on the one film we ever saw about the court of Louis XIV? Then again, I think with any specific time period, we can apply the general philosophical question of what is reality? And what is an individual's reality compared to another's? That just brings us back in a full circle.
And of course, I am only writing this to waste time and not work on my paper.
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1 comment:
one way a novel and a film are different: the film uses every artform--literary, audio, visual, etc.
on the other hand, you are free to create your own film in your head while reading a novel.
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