Ralph Mazza I think we need to separate “visual imagery” from “must be described using screenwriting jargon”. Part of my argument is that one doesn’t necessitate the other. You could describe a character in terms of how they’d look if van Dyck painted them, or the epithet Homer would have ascribed (as Lex Larson mentions above), etc.

I also think “characters doing things” is maybe too wide a net. I mean, Leopold Bloom “does things” in Ulysses. And a lot of the stuff characters “do” in an Austen novel isn’t visually dynamic, yet they still adapt her work for film.