Film Versus Book

However, about time we got back to Brazil. I'm not going to give away the plot, because it revolves around a central mystery (why are a group of Brazil-based Nazis killing off 94 male civil servants all over the world, on or around their 65th birthdays?). One thing in the handling of the plot, though, is interesting — and leads to the rather obvious statement that films and books are different things.

Self-evident, sure. A piece of writing has vocabulary and grammar. Film also has its language, but its vocabulary consists of images and sounds, and its grammar is the arrangement of those images and sounds. Some books and films are very close, despite the difference in language: books primarily are concerned with telling a story (look at the bestseller lists) and like-minded films (eg The Boys From Brazil), often discard those features unique to their own language and produce something that's somewhere between the two. I didn't say that very well. What it amounts to is that some books (usually those with the stress on action, conveyed in a simple straightforward style) are easily translated into films, others aren't. Right. So on with the example.

This film is based on a book of the same name by Ira Levin, of Rosemary's Baby fame (actually both stories have the same basic theme and structure, but Rosemary's Baby is more effective, both as a book and film). And the book was kept direct and "unliterary", just asking to be turned into a Major Motion Picture. It was practically a screenplay already, and you can bet your bursary that was Ira's idea all along. What does "bestseller" mean after all? But there was a crucial difference, that highlights some of the advantages each of the two media has over the other. In the written word, a description may withhold a vital piece of information without unduly arousing our suspicions, thus preventing the game from being given away too soon. But in a film, the parallel of such a description requires us to see the object (or whatever) and spot what we can.

The result in The Boys From Brazil is that we can, simply by a little light exercise of the grey matter, work out the key to the plot quite some time before the denouement, and long before we could in the book. But it cuts both ways in this particular case. The book had to resort to a fairly explicit (that is, obvious) image for its chilling finale, but the film has the upper hand here in that, by its very nature, it can use a simple visual symbol to do the same thing. And Schaffner develops this symbol (a bracelet of some kind) very cleverly, lighting it in such a way as to create a subtle but provocative final image.

But enough. I'm even starting to bore myself.