What Makes a Novel “Cinematic”?

“When I get together with writers I know, we don’t talk about books, we talk about movies. This is not because we see the mechanism of the novel operating in certain films, work ranging from Kieslowski to Malick. It’s because film is our second self, a major narrative force in the culture, an aspect of consciousness connected at some level to sleep and dreams, as the novel is the long hard slog of waking life.”—Don DeLillo

What is it we mean when we say that a novel is “cinematic”? Do we mean that it engages, on a thematic level, with film history and cinema culture? That it continually alludes to the movies, via quotations or other intertextual means? Or do we mean that it embodies techniques (zooms, jump cuts) or translates ideas (montage, etc.) from cinema into prose fiction? Do we mean that the author’s language and style mimic the dreamlike nature and stream-of-consciousness movement of screen images, or that the prose is punctuated and exacting, like a screenplay? Or do we mean simply that the narrative is ready-made for adaptation, that we can almost “see everything”?