There are, however, crucial distinctions between film and drama. First, though drama uses such visual matters as gestures, tableaux effects, and scenery, the plays that we value most highly are literature: The word dominates, the visual component is subordinate. One need not be a film fanatic who believes that the invention of the sound track was an impediment to film in order to realize that a film is more a matter of pictures than of words. The camera usually roves, giving us crowded streets, empty skies, rainy nights, or close-ups of filled ashtrays and chipped coffee cups. A critic has aptly said that in Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) “the almost unbearably ornate crystal goblets, by their aspect and their positioning in the image, convey the oppressive luxuriousness of the diners’ lives in purely and uniquely filmic terms.” In the words of the Swiss director Eric Rohmer, “The cinema is the description of man and his surroundings.”

Some of the greatest sequences in cinema, such as the battle scene in Orson Welles’s Falstaff (1966; also titled Chimes at Midnight) or parts of the search for Anna in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), have no dialogue but concentrate on purely visual matters. In L’Avventura a group of rich and bored Italians goes on a yachting excursion and visits a volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, where one member of the party—Anna—disappears. Anna’s fiancé, Sandro, and Anna’s best friend, Claudia, search for her, but during the search they find that they are attracted to each other and they become lovers; Claudia later discovers that Sandro is unfaithful to her—but she and Sandro both were unfaithful to Anna, and the implication is that Claudia and Sandro will (in their way) remain weary partners. During the film’s two hours, long sequences occur when, in a conventional sense, little “happens”—for example, there are shots of the sea, or of a character far from the camera, walking on the island during bad weather. In this film the setting itself is an important part of the story, the barren and crumbling island being symbolic of the decadent people who walk on it and symbolic also of the vast inhospitable universe in which these figures—rendered small by their distance from the camera—aimlessly move. The long silences (episodes without dialogue or background music) are as important as what is said, and what is seen is more important than what is said.

In short, the speaker in a film does not usually dominate. In a play the speaker normally holds the spectator’s attention, but in a film when a character speaks, the camera often gives us a reaction shot, focusing not on the speaker but on the face or gestures of a character who is affected by the speech, thus giving the spectator a visual interpretation of the words. In François Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959), for example, we hear a reform school official verbally assault a boy, but we see the uncomfortable boy, not the official. Even when the camera does focus on the speaker, it is likely to offer an interpretation. An extreme example is a scene from David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945): A gossip is talking, and the camera gives us a close-up of her jabbering, mouth, which monstrously fills the screen.

This distance between film and drama can be put in another way: A film is more like a novel than a play, the action being presented not directly by actors but by a camera, which, like a novelist’s point of view, comments on the story while telling it. A novelist may, like a dramatist, convey information about a character through dialogue and gesture but may also simply tell us about the character’s state of mind. Similarly, a film maker may use the camera to inform us about unspoken thought. In F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), when the hotel doorman reads a note firing him, the camera blurs; when he gets drunk, the camera spins so that the room seems to revolve. Somewhat similarly, Antonioni’s The Red Desert (1964) occasionally uses out-of-focus shots to convey Giuliana’s view of the world; when she is more at ease—for example, with her husband—the shots are in proper focus. In Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1969), a shot of a chase through the woods is filmed with a hand-held camera whose shaky images convey to us the agitated emotions of the chase. At the end of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1968), when Clyde is riddled with bullets, because his collapse is shot in slow motion he seems endowed not only with unusual grace but also with almost superhuman powers of endurance.

Even the choice of film stock is part of the comment. A highly sensitive or “fast” film needs less light to catch an image than a “slow” film does, but it is usually grainier. Perhaps because black-and-white newsreels often used fast film, a grainy quality may suggest authenticity or realism. Moreover, fast film can be processed to show less subtle gradations from black to white than slow film does, and this high contrast makes it especially suitable for the harsh, unromantic The Battle of Algiers (1965). Different film stocks may be used within a single motion picture. In Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), for instance, Bergman uses high-contrast stock for the nightmare sequence, though elsewhere in the film the contrasts are subtle. Color film has its own methods of tone and texture control.

The medium, as everyone knows, is part of the message; Laurence Olivier made Shakespeare’s Henry V (1944) in color but Hamlet (1948) in black and white because these media say different things. Peter Brook’s film of King Lear (1970) is also in black and white, with an emphasis on an icy whiteness that catches the play’s spirit of old age and desolation; a Lear in color probably would have an opulence that would work against the lovelessness and desolation of much of the play. John Houseman said that he produced Julius Caesar (1953) in black and white because he wanted “intensity” rather than “grandeur” and because black and white evoked newsreels of Hitler and thus helped establish the connection between Shakespeare’s play and relatively recent politics. Peter Ustinov said that he made Billy Budd (1962) in black and white because he wanted it to seem real; and Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood (1967), also in black and white, tried to look like a documentary. Similarly, although by 1971 most fiction films were being made in color, Peter Bogdanovich made The Last Picture Show (1971) in black and white, partly to convey a sense of the unexciting life of a small town in America in the 1950s and partly to evoke the films of the fifties. When a film is made in color, however, the colors may be symbolic (or at least suggestive) as well as realistic. In A Clockwork Orange (1971), for example, hot colors (oranges and reds) conveying vitality and aggressiveness in the first half of the film are displaced in the second half by cool colors (blues and greens) when the emphasis turns to “clockwork”—to mechanization.

The kind of lens used also helps determine what the viewer sees. In Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967) Benjamin runs toward the camera (he is trying to reach a church before his girl marries another man), but he seems to make no progress because a telephoto lens was used and thus his size does not increase as it normally would. The lens, that is, helps communicate his desperate sense of frustration. Conversely, a wide-angle lens makes a character approach the camera with menacing rapidity; she or he quickly looms into the foreground. A filmmaker, though resembling a novelist in offering pervasive indirect comment, is not a novelist any more than he or she is a playwright or a director of a play; the medium has its own techniques, and the filmmaker works with them, not with the novel’s or the drama’s. The wife who came out of the movie theater saying to her husband, “What a disappointment; it was exactly like the book,” knew what a film ought to be.

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