Authors note: This short piece is going to be about the
differences between a movie and a short stories imagery and how it effects the
readers interpretation of the characters.
There are not that many short stories that have different
imagery in the movie than in the short story. The short story A clean and
Well Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway has you picturing in your mind different
imagery between the short story and the movie.
The short story is about a man who stays late in a café. In the story
the old man wants more and more to drink and the two waiters say that he is
going to get drunk and not make it home so they force him not to have anymore
and send him on his way.
First of all, The positioning of the characters in the café
in the film greatly changes the way the reader interprets the story and the
characters in general. For instance the old man sitting down at a table by
himself with light all around in the movie. The reader would think that he is a
nice person and seems like he is living a good life and he doesn't seem
depressed. Put in the short story it tells the reader that the old man is
sitting in a dark place in the café with a shadow covering him. That greatly
changes the readers interpretation of the old man and what the reader thinks
about him.
It effects the readers understanding from reading the story
to watching the film greatly because how the imagery is different in both the story and the film. The
reader is going to have different interprets and kind of confuse themselves after
reading the story than watching the film because the imagery that was in the
story to the old man in the film is very different and the scene around him makes the people interpret different thoughts and wonder what the characters are going through.
On the other hand there are also two other examples that may have the reader thinking differently. One is the scene lengths and how they are longer than usual it will get people thinking more about what is showing on the screen and getting the reader to interpret what the film is really trying to say. For instance at the end of the film when the older waiter was walking slowly back to his house it made the people watching it think that he was depressed and lonely because of how slow he was walking and how long the scene length was. The other one is the sound that really effects the tone because when people here the sound they can tell if it is a happy film or a depressing film. There is no sound in this film so you can tell that it is depressing and sad.
Many readers would like to have the film the same as the
story so they can read the story and when
they watch the film they would see the same imagery as in the book. If the
director of the film made it the same as
the short story it would be the same he didn't make it the same because he
wanted readers to see what their interpretation would be.