A long time ago (I still was a schoolboy) one of our teachers told us that it was better to read books than to watch movies… because a movie is just a book made into a movie by someone else, and so we just see the result of someone else’s imagination. So we should, according to him, read books as our imagination was better than other people’s imagination.I disagree with it for 2 reasons:
- it is somehow pretentious to say that our imagination is better than the imagination of great cineast like Fellini, Pasolini, Wenders, Angelopoulos, Egoyan &c
- if our imagination is better… we should stop reading books which are simply stories imagined by other people: we should write our own books that nobody else would read…
The Italian radio-TV RAI does it: it broadcast on its radio channels the “soundtrack” of the TV series shown at the same moment on their TV channels (as if we were watching TV without the image…) but it also adds to it an off-voice describing what we need to understand the story.
I often listen to the Commissario Montalbano like this: the laws of physics are strange enough to allow me to listen to RAI Radio 1 in medium waves during the evening/night, but not during the day… And it is indeed half way between reading a book and watching a movie: one has in mind Montalbano’s face, one hears his voice but one still has to imagine the action, what he and other characters of the story do. One just has to close one’s eyes and one sees the movie! No need to wonder what he looks like, what his voices sounds like &c. It just as if a friend of mine tells me what some other friend has done. And it makes Montalbano even closer to me…
Radio is really better than TV!
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