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From: srt@ucla-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: your film fantasies
Message-ID: <6481@ucla-cs.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 2-Aug-85 01:37:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucla-cs.6481
Posted: Fri Aug  2 01:37:21 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 12-Aug-85 01:01:53 EDT
References: <2802@topaz.ARPA> <377@ucdavis.UUCP>
Reply-To: srt@ucla-cs.UUCP (Scott Turner)
Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department
Lines: 26

In article <377@ucdavis.UUCP> ccrdave@ucdavis.UUCP (Lord Kahless) writes:
>
>Picture a really beautiful mating flight scene, or the hatching
>scene, or flaming thread ...
>

Personally I feel that this is exactly the kind of scene that DOESN'T
work in an sf movie.  People are very sensitive to visual imagery and when
presented with a filmaker's vision of some scene that is completely
orthogonal to real experience, they almost always find some part of the
scene objectionable.  In a movie like Bladerunner, on the other hand, the
filmaker and the viewer share a common base to extrapolate from, and so the
visual imagery is much more satisfying (of course, Bladerunner did this the
best that its ever been done).  I think you'll notice that good fantasy
authors almost never lavish great detail on describing the completely
unnatural elements of their stories.  Instead, they tend to "hint" at the
images and let the reader's imagination fill in the rest in a way that
is pleasing to the reader.  Unfortunately, filmakers don't have the same
leeway.

Different but the same.  That's the ticket for SF films.

    Scott R. Turner
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