The sound helps us attribute depth to what is, after all, a two-dimensional sequence of lighting effects. Most teachers of Shakespeare and their students are apt to lump film and video together as mechanical media, in contrast to live performance, and yet film and video are technically and phenomenologically quite different from each other. The large projection screen for film, exploited by deft camera work, facilitates the illusion of infinite space, whereas video, with its small screen, typically concentrates on the foreground. T he relationship of the viewer's body to the actors' bodies in stage performance, film and video is profoundly different. At such close range visual cues to meaning replace some of the verbal cues that are more important in the middle distance.
Literary fiction works oppositely.
As fictions made out of words and spectacle, Shakespeare's plays would seem to fall somewhere in between. N o matter how faithful to Shakespeare's verbal text a film or video claims to be, it inevitably represents a transformation from the medium of live performance into the medium of mechanically reproduced light images synchronized with mechanically reproduced sounds. Several critics have proposed schemas for analyzing the differing kinds and degrees of transformation.