6 - Film: Alternate Performances, Shifting Genres

Summary

A lot has been said on the schism that exists between live theatre and film/television performance: that the natural affinity of film is with the narrative art of the novel/epic rather than drama/theatre. The film reaches the audience only after active tampering of mise en scène by the omniscient director through the eyes of the cinematographer and severely ‘mutilated’ by the editor. The audience-actor interaction and its dynamic life is lost, and so is the immediacy of the stage. On the other hand; theatrical performance would consist of the explosively there, the presence before one's eyes. The ‘vibe’ as it is called colloquially works wonders if the audience-actor communication gets ignited And again, there is no predictability about a play in performance: if an actor happens to sneeze, she/he would radically alter the entire play.

Critics like Bernard F. Dukore have shown that there are advantages to the situation wherein drama/film provide helpful alternatives, and says that the affinities are seen to far outweigh the differences, and that all the major living playwrights have written for the medium, not having remained exclusively attached to theatre (Dukore: 171- 79). Adaptations, and televised versions of major dramatic works are a genre on their own. Pinter, Beckett, Albee, Stoppard, Karnad, Tendulkar have all written for both media.

Film screenplays (Dukore cites Pinter's The Proust Screenplay) can also be read like drama scripts, once one is accustomed to the jargon. While language, or ‘wordiness’ is often cited as a theatrical medium – non-verbal images as its counterpart in film – we may easily substitute the one for the other (the dialogue in film; the stage movements, props and so on in theatre).