[Nogrod]

I'm afraid that this topic has been turned over a hundred times here at the BD, but still I think it worthwhile to bring forward a few points.

"A picture says more than a thousand words" they say. I believe this is quite a widely-spread idiom (with variations). I have been against it for a long time. On occasion a word tells more than any thousand pictures. It depends of the words and pictures involved in the comparison... Think of the words of ancient Greek, like: kalos/n, filia, sophia, logos, whatever - or just plain contemporary expressions like God, love, humanity...

I can't see a way to exhaust these concepts with any pictures, how artistic or highly valued they might be.

Neither could I see Picasso's Guernica (sorry about the trivial example) or any other major work of the "great modernists" I love (Marc, Beckmann, Kandinsky, Rothko...) to be explained away with a mere thousand words... with any words.

Or someone making a film about T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land...

They seem to be incompatible.

But even making a picture of a story, that's somehow tricky too.

A story, when read, takes place in your mind. You may have vivid ideas of how the things look like, but more often than not, they are vague feelings and emotions depicting you the things told in the story. When you take on to filming a story, you will have to take a stance on every detail: how many toes does a Balrog have? Is Frodo's sleeve just an inch or an inch and a half from his wrist? How did Boromir indeed look at lady Galadriel, what were the minute details on his expression (and someone has to act them in reality)? And so on.

Making a film kind of nails things down to something like a reality. Makes them look something actual or being.

I'm not sure what I think of the films by PJ. It was great to see them and there were many beautiful sceneries and finely wrought details that stirred my emotions and made the opus breathe in a new way *, but still... The imagery of PJ somehow shadows now my reading of the LotR, and I'm not sure how good it is...

I can relate to CT when he's being sceptical about transforming his father's world and stories into a film. Maybe the story and the world would be more varied and more personal without the films?

But was all this individuality something J.R.R. craved for? Probably not.


* That is not to say that I didn't disagree with many of the decisions the PJ-team made in adopting the story - or getting their own ideas over the original story... but that is another matter.