On the filming Pynchon thread

[Mark Kohut]

An ontology of "film" remark--probably formed while reading Cavell's THE
WORLD VIEWED back in the day:
Good directors w right crew inclu script writers can film any work well
IF....
Great directors can film even great works of literature.
Screen sense is made by the artist(s):  *My Dinner with Andre* is a very
good movie, IMHO, filmed partly to refute certain concepts of plot scenes
and camera shots and camera movement and more.
Pinter and whoever directed turned a part of the quite unscenic--words,
words, words--but very drawing room theatrical PROUST into a good movie.
Bresson has so much silence in his films --some adapted from novels--that
one might say it is as if Tristram Shandy had tens upon tens of blank pages
(not just one).
And the unfilmable Tristram Shandy was and decently, even creatively well,
I suggest
I think V could be filmed, and even more easily than the more major ones
we're talking about. I think Paul Thomas Anderson found and reimagined some
key thematic scenes from V--Phoenix yo-yoing In that room; masturbating
into the sea--the end of V. Film has a whole set of spy tropes to use and
invert re V. That scene with V and what happens to her?!.....Still visually
unforgettable.
If *Nicholas Nickleby* was made, *GR* could be and, yes, to Eisenstein for
this or AtD; 26 TV episodes to DO AtD; and, yes, *Mason & Dixon*
By the Coen Bros, however much they had to leave out--but the humor, the
interplay of the two --and the other characters, all told by Cherry Coke as
the O Brother movie sorta is. (I think that narration might have been
inspired by M & D myself. That Sirens scene from O Brother...like the
sisters in M & D ....like that.