film vs prose

I had an interesting conversation with a professor today about the Godfather, both novel and film. Most people haven't read the novel, which is no great loss. it's a thoroughly mediocre potboiler kind of thing. what I find more interesting is the larger question, of which of the two media is more effective. Personally, I love both. I read more or less constantly, and have for probably fifteen years. I also see at least one movie a week, and have studied film fairly extensively. Part of this interest came out of my parents telling me that novels tend to be much better than the films adapted from them.
      Often, this is correct. Original works tend to be superior to the derivative. There are exceptions, of course. Mystic River, which Clint Eastwood adapted into an extraordinary film, comes out of a well written but not especially distinguished Dennis Lehane thriller. What people fail to understand in most cases is that the weakness of the derivation process obscures the fact that books and films really are different media, with different strengths.
      Reading doesn't make a lot of sense as a human activity. Our brains are are not wired to make anything in particular out of black marks on white paper. Seeing, the act of interpreting visual data, is wired into our brains at a very basic, primitive level. At the first motion picture show in Germany, audience members screamed at flinched at the image of a train hurtling towards them. Remember, this was early twentieth century, and the picture wouldn't have been convincing. That visual stimulus accessed the audience's primitive brain. There are some film makers, like Eastwood, Scorsese, James Cameron and Christopher Nolan, who still know how to create that effect. I love books and the act of reading, but I'll be the first to admit that books don't hit me the same way.