Which of the following describes the core distinction between literature and cinema regarding what semiotician Christian Metz calls the 'filmic tract' vs. the 'literary tract'?

Correct answer: Literature is single-track (words); cinema is multi-track (image, speech, music, sound)

Christian Metz established that cinema is a composite language made up of five distinct sonic and visual tracks: moving images, phonetic sound, recorded music, noise/sound effects, and graphic text. Literature, by contrast, operates on a single typographic track of arbitrary linguistic symbols that the reader must cognitively decode into mental images. This fundamental difference in sign systems shapes how both mediums build narrative space and evoke sensory responses.