From impression to rhythm

How does a film begin? With a vague impression: a chance remark, a piece of music, a shaft of light across a street. It leaves a mood, like a brightly coloured thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious.

If he winds up this thread carefully, a whole film takes shape, with its own rhythms. Then comes the nearly impossible task: turning those moods into a screenplay, a written script.

Only the dialogue transfers well to paper, and even dialogue is like a musical score: it needs skilled interpreters (the actors) to come alive.

What matters most in a film is montage (how the shots are put together), rhythm, and how each picture relates to the next. No notation can record how a film 'breathes'.

So film has little to do with literature. Reading works through the intellect; a film works directly on our feelings. Film is most like music: mainly rhythm.