The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the original was not 'cinematic'.... But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined.... There must be a pleasure in such stories distinct from mere excitement.
—C.S. Lewis, On seeing a film version of King Solomon's Mines
Nothing is more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is death in the camera.
—C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: On Stories p17.
On Stories
"In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive. Whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how to do it, so that at last either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the bird to its own country," I cannot say. But I think it is sometimes done in stories.
—C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Fairy Stories p20.
—C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Fairy Stories p20.
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