By PHILIP PULLMAN [The Guardian] – What I dislike about the present-tense narrative is its limited range of expressiveness. I feel claustrophobic, always pressed up against the immediate.

I want all the young present-tense storytellers (the old ones have won prizes and are incorrigible) to allow themselves to stand back and show me a wider temporal perspective. I want them to feel able to say what happened, what usually happened, what sometimes happened, what had happened before something else happened, what might happen later, what actually did happen later, and so on: to use the full range of English tenses.

There’s a close parallel here with the increasing use of the hand-held camera in cinema. Just like the present tense, the hand-held camera is an expressive device whose expressive power is being drained away by making it the only way of shooting a film. And I dislike that too, you won’t be surprised to hear. I dislike it partly because it makes me feel sick, and partly because the camera never seems to be looking where I want to look, and partly because of the sheer monotony of texture that it brings, but mainly because of its falsehood. It seems to say: “We were there when these things happened. They were real. We didn’t have time to adjust the focus on that shot or swing round in time to see who said those words or keep the camera steady. It was all happening there right in front of us. It was all urgent and real.”

Well, of course it wasn’t real and of course it wasn’t urgent, and there was plenty of time to get the focus right, and if they’d wanted to they could have put the camera on a stand so it didn’t shake about.

Continued at The Guardian | More Chronicle & Notices.