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Films

Films and Plays

What happens when a playwright and a theater director make a movie? Our film critic Thomas Wartenberg recently found out, and it led him to ponder the less obvious differences between films and plays.

One of the mistakes now generally recognized to have been made by film theorists during much of the twentieth century was the attempt to deduce an appropriate style for filmmaking from features of the medium that they held were distinctive of it, that differentiated it from other art forms. For example, even if it were true that film’s basis in photography meant that it was the quintessentially realistic art form, it would not follow that the filmmaking style known as realism, a style that features long takes and deep focus, was somehow more appropriate than others, such as montage (although influential critics like André Bazin argued for just such a position). But even if we give up the project of linking film style to the nature of the medium, the philosophical question of whether there are distinctive features of film as an art form remains interesting.

I was reminded of this last week while taking part in a panel discussion with Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright Wendy Wasserstein. The subject of our discussion was her role as the screenwriter for The Object of My Affection, the 1998 film directed by Nicholas Hytner.

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