"Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that"
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Russo is drawing a clean line between two kinds of storytelling that people love to flatten into “adaptation.” Film, he argues, is an engine built to compress: its native unit is the scene, and its tyranny is forward motion. A movie can imply years with a haircut, a dissolve, a single lingering look. It must. The audience sits in real time, and the medium’s power depends on the illusion that everything is happening now, even when it’s not. “Stringing scenes together in the present” is Russo’s quietly sharp phrasing for cinema’s enforced momentum: you don’t get to pause and live inside a sentence.
The subtext is a defense of the novel’s supposed “inefficiency,” which Russo treats as a feature, not a bug. Novels can afford to loiter in thought, to double back, to contradict themselves, to let a character’s memory invade the action and reorder what we thought we knew. Where film tends to externalize (show us what happened), prose can internalize (show us how it felt, then how that feeling changes in retrospect). That’s why books can be “about” time in a more porous sense: the experience of duration, regret, obsession, the slow accrual of meaning.
Contextually, Russo is speaking from a career steeped in everyday lives and long consequences, the kind of material movies often shave down into plot. He’s warning readers to stop expecting novels to behave like screenplays - and reminding screen-obsessed culture that speed isn’t the same as depth.
The subtext is a defense of the novel’s supposed “inefficiency,” which Russo treats as a feature, not a bug. Novels can afford to loiter in thought, to double back, to contradict themselves, to let a character’s memory invade the action and reorder what we thought we knew. Where film tends to externalize (show us what happened), prose can internalize (show us how it felt, then how that feeling changes in retrospect). That’s why books can be “about” time in a more porous sense: the experience of duration, regret, obsession, the slow accrual of meaning.
Contextually, Russo is speaking from a career steeped in everyday lives and long consequences, the kind of material movies often shave down into plot. He’s warning readers to stop expecting novels to behave like screenplays - and reminding screen-obsessed culture that speed isn’t the same as depth.
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| Topic | Movie |
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