DeadTrees said:
Movies? Really? Moviemaking has evolved to the point where the overwhelming majority of movies in the world are conceived as, and appreciated as...reproducable performances of plays.
I disagree with Opiate but I also completely disagree with this. How would the full impact of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings be reproducible as a play? (Yeah I know there was that failed LotR musical, but let's not pretend it was able to capture the imagination of anyone over the age of 10 for a second as well as the films did.) Transformers? Inception? Fight Club? Alien? (How would you even do effective horror in a play?) Or even Let the Right One In (just saw it last night). What you're saying was true at the beginning of film (when movies basically
were filmed plays) but you can't deny that the medium has progressed light-years since then with advances in the use of editing, cinematography, sound, special effects and all the other movie-only things that facilitate telling stories in ways you just can't do on a stage, where everything is revealed through dialogue and the set can't change that often and everything in the scene is always visible. You can't do a montage in a play. You can't do selective framing in a play. You can't do slow-motion in a play (not well anyway). You can't have anything larger than the theater in a play. You can't have anything so small as to be invisible from 100 feet away in a play. You can't kill somebody in a remotely convincing way in a play (magicians notwithstanding).
Take any random movie review from Ebert or whomever, and see how many of the observations could just as well have been made of a play. You have The 100 Greatest Movie Quotes and The 100 Greatest Characters, but strangely no one's come up with The 100 Greatest Crossfades or The 100 Greatest Pans.
That's because you're being needlessly reductionist. No one's come up with the 100 Greatest Stage Directions or the 100 Greatest Set Designs in the history of theater either even those things are elemental to plays. But what people remember and write about plays are the sums of those things and, yes, characters and quotes, just like they remember characters and quotes from all fiction any form. Quotes and Characters are not specific to the theater, and the theater does not have a monopoly on the best of them.
(If you insist on being so reductionist, however, there are most certainly discussions of the Greatest Camera Shots however. Try doing any of
these or
these on a stage.)