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234 III. COMPOSITION
differ from each other: their formal properties are anything but identical. And the worlds to which they reach out do not coincide either. What exactly is the nature of these differences? And are they strong enough to neutralize the existing similarities?
DIFFERENCES
Formal properties
SOURIATj's PROPOSITION
The difficulties confronting the adapter of novels are frequently traced not to the kind of universe which the novel renders but to the specific ways in which it shapes any world it encompasses. In order to find out whether this school of thought gets at the core of the matter, let me discuss the proposition of one of its exponents. In his paper, Filmologie et esthetique comparee, Etienne Souriau, the French aesthetician, submits that the novel has four formal (or structural) properties which resist stubbornly translation into cinematic language; and from all that he says, it is evident that he believes them to be the main source of trouble.12 These properties show in the novel's dealings with the elements of (1) time, (2) tempo, (3) space, and (4) the angle of approach (point de vue). I shall comment only on the first and last elements, which the author himself considers particularly important.
TIME
Souriau contrasts the novel's flexibility in handling all imaginable modes of time with the rigidity of films. Thus the novelist may characterize some action as a customary one, be deliberately vague about the moment of its emergence, interrelate things present and past whenever he wants to, etc. All this film cannot do. What appears on the screen has inevitably the earmarks of an actual event. The only means by which film can evoke the past is the flashbackâ which Souriau calls a pretty clumsy device.
Yet even though the cinema lacks the possibility of exploring time with the sovereignty of the novel, it is nevertheless much more flexible than he is prepared to admit. The manner in which one of the gunmen in Scarface tosses a quarter suggests that he plays with the coin also when we are not looking at him; we immediately identify his present action as a compulsive habit. Pather Panchali presents a chronologically ordered sequence of episodes in such a way that the spectator feels continually