Annie Hall

Why do books still exist?  For that matter, why do stages?  One would think that the inventions of film and television would have made them both obsolete.  There must necessarily be something that a book can do that a movie cannot, or the natural selection of memes (not the internet medium, but the original sense of a social concept that behaves like a gene) would have made them extinct fifty years ago.  And such a position is not difficult at all to support.  Can you imagine a movie version of My Name is Red?  Impossible.  Or Tropic of Cancer? 

And by the same token, the very appearance of Film in the natural order of things means that it must occupy some niche, that there is something a film can do that a book or a play simply cannot.  Of course there is the matter of visual spectacle, that's obvious enough.  I can't  imagine Independence Day or Pacific Rim doing very well as a musical. But there is something else to film.  An overlapping of thought and reality is possible in that medium that is extremely difficult to make clear in a book, and nearly impossible on the stage.  On the page, the reader must either be led through the process, or deliberately misled if the effect is to succeed.  On the stage, scene changes, or at least lighting cues are necessary whenever there's a movement between past and present.  If one's goal is to meld the two, to show how the "real" world takes place at the same time as the world in our minds,  there can't be such lines drawn.  To that end, Annie Hall does exactly what film was meant to do, and in a way that I don't know has been successfully duplicated since.

Which is not to say that I liked it.  Just that it was brilliant.