However, the opportunities for subjective input in film, past their purely narrative concerns, are not at all the same as those found in books. Books continually, and almost passively, require a readers input to flesh out scenes and to sometimes even characters. Whereas film actively chooses when it wishes its audience to participate subjectively, though, more often than not only for narrative means, as seen in the examples you quote. However, French cinema is quite adept at playing with its audience and requiring input beyond their narrative. Take Jean-Luc Godards ‘Weekend’ or more recently Michael Hanekes ‘Code Unknown’.

Really this shows itself best in the problem of adaptation. For instance either of the above films I doubt could be sufficiently translated into book form. or at least a successful one, and in the same way, books like Bram Stokers Dracula or even J.M. Barries ‘Peter and Wendy’ are always going to give a wealth of re-interpretations for years to come due to the subjective interpretations required to fully immerse oneself in the books.

I wouldn’t try to suggest that either are entirely subjective or objective. Rather that I meant to imply that, generally, a books focal point can be seen as its subjective readings and films is its objective story. Both mediums, of course, contain both, but as you put it, they are on “different levels” indeed.

My point being that I find the debate about importance of one over the other, as well as trying to estimate their comparative necessity to exist in the same world, is not only wholly unhelpful, but utterly infuriating (as I’m sure you would agree).

Take for instance “Lost”, I realize it might seem like a strange one to bring up but consider this, throughout the series the watcher has been kept in constant suspense. I found an allusion to “Turn of the Screw” very revealing in the second season, as it is suggesting that what we see may or indeed may not be real - just as in the book it is left open ended to interpretation; Is the woman mad, is she really seeing apparitions? It’s left to the reader/viewer to decide.

I really don’t see a Director as being significantly different from an Author. They manage and direct their creations in different ways but with the same objectives. It’s up to the viewer or reader to act as an active participant or they end up being told what experiencing.

I think this is a fundamental difference between classical and modernist narrative - you can see this evolution in modern film too. If film theorists treat an audience as a single mass I see that as a mistake on their part - no one comes away from a film feeling exactly the same. The chances that a person interprets a film in exactly the same way as everyone depends on the openness of the narrative.

An extremely good example of that is the new film by Guillermo Del Toro, “Pan’s Labyrinth”. Watch that and then come back and tell me whether what she saw was real, or a figment of the imaginings of a child trying to deal with the trauma of her circumstance?

As you suggest film analysts interpret through looking for key identifiers, it’s easy to see when a director is trying to create tension in a film through the use of imagery and sound. However this is simply one layer of analysis, and can’t be taken by itself as the total truth. After all, an author has their own tools available to them to create tension in the text; Wouldn’t it be easier to say that both books and film contain objective and subjective content on different levels? A chair is a chair whether it is penned or projected on a silver screen.

As I said above books and film both convey a narrative, but what I left out above importantly is how active the participant is in either context. I will have to admit that a reader is on the whole a more active participant than a a cinema goer. However I think this is changing, and a sign of the relative infancy of Cinema compared to literature. In the future we can only hope to see much more open films where people find as much depth as we do these days in the texts we read.

You only have to look at how academics treat the analysis of each them to see it in action. English literature is full of debates that basically originate from all the various ways in which individuals have reacted to and have read novel. If this wasn’t the case we would all have the same reading of novels and would never need/want a debate. Whereas film students, almost on a psychological level, analyse how different shots and techniques make a communal audience feel a certain way, like analysing choppy sequences to observe how a director induces a feeling of tension.

Yeah, you can say ‘but books use your imagination’, this is true and yeah i agree, its why i love books. But Film does things that books cant hope to. They put images to you straight in a medium that just isn’t reality; its this ability to cut from one image to another, place to place, scene to scene in a way that can only take be done on film. No book can hope to achieve that which German expressionism or any Soviet montage does. Even ‘Requiem for a Dream’, on paper its just not the same!

Anyway, my point is that how can you compare them in a ‘which is a more important’ or even a ‘which is better’ debate? Actually, scratch that, why would you want to?