In sixty tersely exquisite realist paintings and as many succinct lines of text, Lawrence compressed the epic sweep of the Great Migration into a cinematic saga.
Some seem to be cramming too much in, as if the best way of graduating to feature films is to try and compress an epic into a quarter of an hour.
The imagery conveys a vulnerable beauty and a Gothic romance worthy of Caspar David Friedrich, as if compressing the epic sweep and isolation of the Northern landscape into the run-down grandeur of the interiors.
It was an entire Shakespearian epic compressed into three minutes.
But whereas the weave of epic is loose, leaving spaces for expansion and adaptation, the tragedies — many of which, we should remember, were themselves adaptations of episodes from epic — are highly compressed, almost hermetic.
Both novels treat primordial situations of American violence - slavery and its aftermath in one case, the conquest of the Southwestern frontier in the other - in compressed, lyrical language that rises at times to archaic, epic strangeness.
As its screenwriter, Kaufman faced the daunting task of compressing Wolfe's discursive epic into a cohesive narrative.
In wrestling his bursting-at-the-seams, sometimes wearying epic into movie-acceptable size, he has pared it of authorial quirks and compressed it, lopping off subplots and characters and flights of fancy.
"Very tightly compressed.
