A healthy soul stands united with the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the medium of the highest influence to all who are not on the same level.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words—that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canvas or chisels into stone or notes of music—those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. “Close analysis” is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism.
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
It would seem that the film maker is able to exert a greater degree of control over his medium than the writer since the image of a farmhouse is much more explicit than the word itself. That is, it is not necessary to translate a picture into an image—film is literal, concrete, and explicit. The film maker is able to show precisely the farmhouse he has in mind—he doesn’t have to trust that the reader will “see” the same farmhouse. And yet, despite his superior technical ability to delineate the concrete, the film maker gives up some of his power of suggestion by insisting on explicitness.
—William Jinks, U.S. educator, critic. The Celluloid Literature, ch. 1, Macmillan (1971)