Thinking about Complex Media
By Walt Crawford
American Libraries Columnist
Senior analyst, Research Libraries Group
Column for November 2003
Why should a public library collect videos when there are all those books? It makes no more sense for a public library to circulate movies on DVD than it does to circulate popular fiction. It makes no more sense to have selected TV series in the collection than it does to have novels in series, particularly genre series. But it also makes no less sense.
I still don’t buy assertions about the “post-literate generation” or Gregory Ulmer’s comment in Teletheory (Routledge, 1989), “Everything wants to be television.” Books are the heart of every good public library collection and the core of the liberal arts and humanities in academic libraries. TV and movies do not and will not replace books. But video tells some stories better than books, and frequently does so in ways that serve library missions.
Snobbery and misunderstanding
If you’re even more of a book snob than I am, consider this: Offering the works of William Shakespeare and not offering DVDs of his plays (and such related works as Kiss Me Kate, West Side Story, and a certain episode of Moonlighting) serves the Bard and your patrons badly. The plays were written to be performed, not read in quiet contemplation. Regarding the printed plays as more worthy of library treatment than the filmed plays isn’t just snobbery; it misunderstands the works themselves.
Very few public libraries would house part scores for Beethoven’s symphonies and deny space to recorded performances. Why would Shakespeare be any different?
When Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle covered the Sundance Festival, he called high-definition video the best trend of 2003. His final sentence: “In the future, anyone with talent will be able to make films.” Anyone with talent translates realistically into anyone with talent and the resources to gather other people with the other talents you need to make a movie work. This stuff is hard—and that applies to most nonprint media, including video, sound recordings, the theater, and hypermedia.
Have you wondered why there haven’t been any best-selling hypertext e-books? It’s not just because hypertext tends to break down linear narration, although that’s one good reason. It’s because creating a network of fictional elements and making them work together is much harder than writing a linear book. Creating a believable story in the visual media is more complex than writing any book, linear or otherwise.
Point a webcam out a window: It’s easy but visually uninteresting. Write a screenplay, find a cast, scout locations (and build the ones you can’t find), assemble the crew, film it all, edit the results (and add music), and revise it after test screenings—oh, and pay for the whole thing. That’s moviemaking, and it’s a complex way to tell a story.
Movies are hard
If I had a talent for fiction, I could write a novel by myself, with just a computer and enough time to put it together. The gap between that process and making an effective movie is enormous. Even a small indie feature involves dozens of people; most movies involve hundreds. The subversive medium of DVD can remind you of that complexity, if the storytellers choose to use its extensions—deleted scenes with explanations of why they were not used, a director’s commentary unveiling tricks of the trade, and all the other extras that make good DVDs a unique medium.
Another way to be reminded how hard it is to make good movies is to watch a bad independent movie—one where the filmmaker had the urge, but lacked the talent. I sat through such a movie recently. I’ll spare you the title; suffice it to say it was a struggle to sit through 80 minutes of enthusiastic mediocrity.
Appreciating the differences
A two-hour movie can accurately depict a long short story but not a novel (unless the novel was intentionally written to be adapted as a screenplay). Two hours of an unwatchably talky movie represents no more than 15,000 to 20,000 words, while even a short book is likely to be 45,000 words or more. Many novels run an unfilmable 100,000 to 200,000 words.
Video tells stories differently than books, which tell stories differently than songs; all have their roles. It’s a lot more complicated to make a good video or film than to write a good book. Fortunately, in a world of many media, we—librarians and users—can appreciate, collect, and preserve many different forms of storytelling.
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