This got so long I bolded the bits worth readingI guess Bagheera and Xard has said everything they wanted about showing vs telling but I'll do my best to drag it up again. First what does showing and not telling even mean when outside of literature? I was looking for examples so the first thing I went to was wikipedia where I found this quote.
Needless to say, many great novelists combine "dramatic" showing with long sections of the flat-out authorial narration that is, I guess, what is meant by telling. And the warning against telling leads to a confusion that causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out ... when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.
Replace language with image and you get film.
In the Bob's death example assuming Alice is in the frame we will always be shown how she reacts. Of course it can also not be shown but revealed in some other way by say a dialogue between Alice and third characters. But then something else is still shown - how Alice interact with someone - and this would (ideally) also be what's important to the story.
In the less specific examples from Eva the assumption is that (inner) monologues tell rather than show. But that's denying that the images (as well as plot situation situations etc) shown when those monologues are heard also tells (uhg) something. It's reducing the story telling to the voiced script. It's even reducing the script to convey nothing but specific information to be taken at face value (like "Alice was upset") ignoring that what a characters say or think can tell us something besides the outright stated.
To try and find some better example of telling rather than showing I googled some more and found this.
http://howmovieswork.com/how-to-show-not-tell-in-your-movie-script/
It tells us how
the ‘hippest, coolest’ movie makers like Kubrick, Altman, Malick, and Tarantino achieve their effects.
We learn that
It means don’t use words when images can do the job.
It then contrasts a "exposition-heavy CSI script" with wordless scenes from Bridesmaids and The Tree life that moves the audience to tears, several times in fact.
I think whoever wrote this has a sound attitude to film generally but has also confused something along the way. Films that don't tell us something with images are dull, bad films. Good films tells us things with images even when no words are spoken. I agree here. The style and the mood a film conveys will always be the most important aspects to me.
But here is where the writer commit an error thinking more or less that if good films tells us something with images when there are no words spoken then it means that when words are spoken they tell us nothing through images. The less words the more "pure cinema"
it is. It's treating words like they subtract something rather than adding another layer. I don't think this comes from the "show don't tell" debate of literature so much as from the now antiquated discussions that tried to raise films status by showing that they were not an extension (or degradation) of theater. Leading to words becoming the enemy. Still, I have a feeling that watching two CSI agents zooming and enhancing during a wordless sequence is just as dull as watching them talk about finger prints for some reason
. Bad films might rely on words instead of images but a good film can rely on words and images. It's the lack of an instead that makes all the difference.
(A side note on the film vs theater/words thing. Aren't the people who use phrases like "pure cinema"
and castigate certain films for not being "film like" enough also surprisingly often devotees of certain New Wave filmmakers who like no others before them fused film with theater and literature through the borrowing of their techniques and styles? How did that happen?
)
(Is this a good idea for a sf short story?: In an alternative past where film has been dismissed as an extension of the concert film critics are working to raise the status of film by trying to separate it from music. Good films rely less on music. The "pure cinema"
is fact completely silent save for the dialogue. The story itself is the essay arguing for this. Also in the end the critic signs his name and he's Goebbels.)