Point of View between Movie and Text

When you take a written work and compare it to a movie made about that work, it is

almost always different. One of the main differences is the way in which one perceives point of

view. When reading it is usually very easy to tell from whose point of view the story is being

told. In the story "A Worn Path" by Eudora Welty, the point of view is third person. The reader

gets an objective view of an old woman named Phoenix who travels down a treacherous worn

path every year to retrieve medicine for her grandson, but not actually able to see into the mind

of this woman. It does, however, give us an idea of who her character really is when she speaks

aloud to herself.

The movie was much different for me. When I saw it the point of view was changed from

that of an objective third party just watching these events occur to that of Phoenix's point of

view. I was no longer just watching Phoenix travel through the woods encountering people in her

journey, but I became Phoenix. I felt her pain and saw it in her facial expressions. I think that the

movie gave the text a visual aspect that is only attained with movies.

Movies can be a great way to define characters from stories, but you also lose your own

vision or idea of how you wanted that character to be. When you read a book or a story, you tend

to visualize it the way in which you want it to be. No two people read a story the same because

you put yourself and your own life experiences within the characters and story itself. However,

when you see a movie someone else has already done that for you. They chose the actors that

would represent the characters and chose the setting that would be used to their standards not the

readers. I think this can be seen as both a positive and negative aspect of converting texts to

movies. In one sense you get to see how the characters could look as a real person and for a lot of

people this make the story itself come to life more. It is negative though because when you read

a story after watching the movie you tend to associate what you have seen, so that all you can see

when you read a character's name is the face you saw in the movie and not get it from your own

imagination.

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