|
|
|
|
The Nation and the Liberal Polemicist examines the writing of India's liberal polemicists on the Mumbai terror attacks.
 Read |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
IPL, 20-20 Cricket and Audience Manipulation
tries to find logic in the aesthete's view that places 20-20 cricket much lower than traditional test cricket.
Read
|
|
|
|
|
|
Books: |
|
|
The White Tiger: A Novel by Arvind Adiga
Review 1: Two Destinies
Read |
|
|
Review 2: "Gritty India" Read |
|
|
Films:
Slumdog Millionaire Read |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Digital Animation and Filmic Narration
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
'Bihar' in the Telugu Cinematic Imagination
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
Publishers' Puppets
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
Words and Picturables
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
Sam Manekshaw and the Military
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
Genocide, Religion and Atonement in Liberia
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
Food Commodity Prices and Food Insecurity
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
Separation Anxiety: The Schisms and Schemas of Media Advocacy
Read |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Home > Contents > Article: MK Raghavendra |
|
|
Digital Animation and Filmic Narration
MK Raghavendra |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Film, literature and narrativity
An issue that engages students of cinema is the way in which technology alters the shape of the medium. Film, unlike literature, depends hugely upon technology for artists to express themselves and the profoundest/ subtlest expressions of cinema might not have been possible without sound and color. Still, it is difficult to assert that new technologies will continue to improve cinema's capacity to express. The expressive powers of cinema - those imparted by technology - and its ability to narrate may even be hindered by technology today. This essay examines the effect of a relatively recent invention - digital animation - upon narration in cinema, how the attractions of cinema may have changed and how this may also be eventually transforming narration in literature.
Any understanding of the attractions of the fiction film will need to contend with the notion of 'narrativity'. Narrativity in film is the process by which the spectator constructs an ongoing story out of the visual and aural data provided (1). Narrativity is only one legitimate pleasure afforded by the fiction film and there are evidently others. As with literature it can be demonstrated that a film is more fictional as it emphasizes the events narrated, more lyrical or formal when it places emphasis upon its own chosen kind of narration and more rhetorical when it uses both its fiction and its other aspects to some persuasive end.
Narrativity also involves the filling in, by the spectator or reader, details not narrated or shown. When we consider the way film adapts literature we become aware of how much narrativity provides in literature that are actually part of narration in film, for instance the physical details seen on the screen. Narrativity in film and literature differ in a fundamental way because the reader is propelled towards visualization by printed fiction while the visual is provided by cinema. If, in cinema, the spectator is drawn beyond 'imagining' to the 'meaning' of the text, i.e. to interpreting the film instead of only understanding it, descriptive passages in literature have done more than simply picture something. Consider, for instance, this part of the first paragraph from a story by Vladimir Nabokov:
 "Luring aside one of the trolley-car numbers, the street started at the corner of a crowded avenue. For a long time it crept on in obscurity, with no shop windows or any such joys. Then came a small square (four benches, a bed of pansies) round which the trolley steered with rasping disapproval. Here the street changed name, and a new life began. Along the right side, shops appeared: a fruiterer's, with vivid pyramids of oranges; a tobacconist's, with the vivid picture of a voluptuous Turk; a delicatessen with fat brown and grey coils of sausages; and then, all of a sudden, a butterfly store. At night, and especially when it was damp, with the asphalt shining like the back of a seal, passersby would stop for a second before that symbol of fair weather. The insects on display were huge and gorgeous. People would say to themselves, "What
Vladimir Nabokov colors-amazing!" and plod on through the drizzle." (2).
The brilliance of Nabokov's prose may be distracting but I use it only as evidence that 'evocation' in verbal narration is more than picturing. The Aurelian is about the unhappy owner of the butterfly store and is related in the third person. In the above segment the narrator is in the process of establishing the milieu and has not yet embarked upon the events. But establishing the milieu is more than capturing its appearance. The milieu is conveyed to us as a site with a bearing upon the action because it suggests the singularity of the narrator's chosen subject - a butterfly store in a nondescript neighborhood. The contrast between the splendor of the butterflies and the damp weather also finds a parallel in the one between the grandeur of the merchandise and the drab life of its owner. The milieu is, in effect, implicated in the unfolding of events and this is different from merely picturing it. The appeal of the passage to the senses is also not gratuitous but reflects the sensuous craving of a homegrown entomologist to "himself net the rarest of rare butterflies in distant countries, stand waist-deep in lush grass and feel the follow-through of the swishing net and then the furious throbbing of wings through a clutched fold of the gauze."
Montage and mise-en-scène
The French theorist André Bazin drew a distinction between what he regarded as the two sides of cinema. The first, ('montage') which he associated with editing is primarily connected to the spectator filling in the unseen details as well as inferring the various relations in the narrative. The second ('mise-en-scène') which he associated with the single shot - incorporating tracking and/ or panning - is more a matter of observation. Where relations are only implied in montage, mise-en-scène enables the spectator to actually see the relevant relations. Of course, one cannot 'see relations' because, in a sense, they can only be inferred from 'transactions', but mise-en-scène attempts to reveal the transactions.
If we regard the passage from Nabokov as a piece of cinema - and the comparison is inaccurate - we could say that the establishment of the space of the action and the location of the butterfly store as roughly corresponding to mise-en-scène. The second part - in which we get an image of the store in the dark, the butterfly as a symbol of fair-weather on a damp night and the passersby exclaiming under their breath - may correspond to montage as it involves inference of some kind, perhaps creating an incongruously splendid context for the dreary life subsequently described and dealt with by the story.
Montage itself can be of several different kinds and American cinema showed a preference for 'invisible' montage, i.e. scenes broken down only for the purpose of relating an episode according to the dictates of the material and the dramatic logic of the scene. At the other extreme is Eisenstein's 'montage of attractions', i.e. reinforcing the meaning of one image with another image not necessarily part of the same episode. 'Montage of attractions' is perhaps best described as the means of suggesting an idea through an association of images, through a process very akin to allusion and literary metaphor.
Between montage and mise-en-scène the latter appears more explicit but it is accurate to say that both only suggest, although differently. Montage draws our attention to a relation through the juxtaposition and association of elements while mise-en-scène depends on the elements being in an actual interaction for us to understand the underlying relation. But the interaction/ transaction can itself only suggest the underlying relationship. Bazin (mise-en-scène's most ardent votary) regarded the film frame as distinct from a picture frame. While the picture frame entirely contains the subject, he argued, the film frame is more in the nature of a mask; what is revealed is like the tip of the iceberg with nine-tenths still concealed. Mise-en-scène puts its faith in the wholeness of the underlying reality while montage perhaps puts its faith in the expressivity of associations. Bazin compares the close-up of a child in a film by Rossellini with an exercise in montage devised by the Soviet film theorist Lev Kuleshov. Kuleshov cut the same impassive face of a clown named Mozhukin to different images and they suggested different things. Mozhukin's face plus dead child suggested pity and cutting it to food suggested hunger. Bazin observes that in Rossellini's close-up of the child in Allemania Anno Zero, he is preoccupied with preserving the mystery in the child's face (3), which is different from what Kuleshov had done with Mozhukin.
While both mise-en-scène and montage are involved in promoting narrativity, an issue to be considered is whether interruptions in narrativity are necessarily to be disapproved of in the fiction film. I earlier observed that a film could, instead of merely narrating, also draw attention to its chosen kind of narration - leading to either lyricism or formalism. As well-known instances from world cinema, the montage sequence involving the sleeping stone lion in Potemkin, which sits up and roars, draws attention to Eisenstein's own formal preoccupations (illustrating what montage may achieve) and does not further the narrative in any perceptible way although it is also used to rhetorical effect. This non-furtherance of narrative is also true of the uncut sequences in Tarkovsky's films - for instance the journey into the Zone in The Stalker (1979) - in which narration appears to have been interrupted by mise-en-scène. Many of Tarkovsky's sequences appear to be only engaging our senses without calling upon our minds to construct a narrative out of what we see. This perhaps finds an equivalent in the first three sentences in the passage from Nabokov in which the narrator is not actually proceeding with narration but is offering sensual pleasure to the reader. It is apparent that these 'interruptions' to narrativity are legitimate because a fiction film must do things other than simply deliver the story - if it is to be 'cinematic' - and the spectator needs to be drawn emotionally into the film.
 On the other hand, we could also say that interruptions in narrativity in cinema, being a respite from the intellectual business of actively constructing a narrative, are lapses into passivity because cinema, unlike literature, does not require the receiver of stimuli to imagine. While all interruptions in narrativity may amount to lapses into some kind of passivity, it is still necessary to distinguish the sensual pleasure afforded Lawrence of Arabia by the sequences in Tarkovsky's films or even the lesser kind of pleasure afforded by adventure spectacles like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) from another, more dubious pleasure. While watching Lawrence of Arabia's desert sequences the spectator is still involved in the fiction, perhaps regarding the desert as it might have appeared to the protagonist, but the use of the exotic locales in many James Bond films is a different matter. In this latter kind of film, the spectator's role is often transformed from that of someone constructing a story to a consumer of images. The spectator is invited to feel the same emotions with regard to Monte Carlo or Nassau that one feels for James Bond's Aston Martin - i.e. covet the lifestyle for which they are emblems. If this is a pleasure offered by cinema, it is a baser kind of pleasure because it induces the spectator to abandon the story, even if only briefly.
By and large, this capacity of cinema to produce spectacle for 'consumption' was, until the last decade or so, restricted only to a few films. Filmic spectacle like that in Ben-Hur (1959) relies on physically constructed action and producing 'spectacle' extensively for consumption tends to compromise verisimilitude - mistakes become only too apparent (4). This situation changed with the advent of digital animation because the filmic image could now be manipulated so that nothing 'inadvertent' would appear. But more importantly, digital animation moves from selecting and focusing upon bits of the reality on hand (the methods of both montage and mise-en-scène) to conjuring up 'reality' for the spectator. Digital animation that cannot convince that its images are real is evidently worthless. Since digital animation needs to convince the spectator that 'reality' has actually been produced, it places its emphasis upon verisimilitude, thereby even transforming cinema from the way Eisenstein and Bazin conceived of it, at least in the segments involving the exotic.
Pre-digital storytelling: Jaws
 As may have been evident, montage and mise-en-scène pay tribute to reality's inaccessible side although in different ways. But with digital animation gradually influencing storytelling, it is to be considered if reality will have an 'inaccessible' side in future. Some of the bravura spectacles offered by recent cinema - like the eagle's eye view of an Jaws ancient battle in Alexander (2004) make it apparent that mere 'implication' could soon be over - which means that montage and mise-en-scène could lose importance. To see how this could happen, we may consider two films by a key filmmaker - one each in the pre-digital era and digital eras - that arouse roughly same emotions. The director I have in mind is Steven Spielberg and the films are Jaws (1975) and Jurassic Park (1993). Both Jaws and Jurassic Park were promoted as 'horror' films and are about predatory beasts on the rampage. Both have scientists among their principle characters and both show persons underestimating the dangers from the beast(s) and paying with their lives or the lives of others. More importantly, both films have as their climaxes the appearance of the Beast, kept in the shadows prior to the moment and only glimpsed. The differences between the two films are, of course, manifold and I will dwell upon them in due course.
Since both Jaws and Jurassic Park are exceedingly well known, I won't describe them but only examine the sequences pertinent from my point of view. Jaws, as everyone knows, is about a giant shark that terrorizes people in an island resort called Amity. The plot devices in the film are loosely based on Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and they rely on the dangers from the shark being deliberately suppressed by the mayor because it represents a threat to Amity's tourist trade. The film begins with a prologue in which a girl swimming in the sea at dead of night is snatched away. We are not shown the shark but an underwater 'shark's point-of-view shot' of the girl in the water. When she is snatched away, we are not shown the fish but the girl being propelled by a force from underwater until she disappears from sight. The next important sequence is the one in which Police Chief Brody is on a beach crowded with holidaying people looking out for the shark. This sequence - perhaps the best in the film - depends for its effectiveness on Brody alone - and the spectator, of course - knowing of the danger to the people on the beach. Spielberg relies on 'invisible' montage in this sequence with Brody's anxious countenance repeatedly cut to sunbathers and swimmers, to the objects in the water that may or may not be the telltale dorsal fin. In this and other sequences he cuts from those people who know to those who do not, from Brody to the carefree others in one sequence and from the shark expert to the boisterous bounty hunters in another. This amplifies the tension in the sequences and makes them extremely effective. The spot of concern amidst the lightheartedness makes the danger graver. The trick in this and many other sequences is also to conceal the shark from us, only showing its effects - the jetty ripped from the shore and dragged off, or the yellow floating barrels attached to the fish that appear or disappear with it. The mechanical shark used by Spielberg was something of a failure and appears only at the climax.
Since the actual object at the centre of the film cannot be relied upon to produce much of a sensation, Spielberg devices a plot that, while suggesting 'shark' at every juncture, avoids the actual creature. Instead, here are some things he fills Jaws with: holiday crowds initially ignorant of the danger; vignettes of the people affected; the people who hope to use the shark as an opportunity to further themselves; those responsible for public safety, their families and their problems; pranksters getting a laugh out of the situation; people with prior experiences of sea voyages and sharks and with stories to relate. Particularly effective is making Quint a survivor of the USS Indianapolis, sunk by the Japanese in 1945 after it secretly delivered the A Bomb and most of the sailors on board were dead from exhaustion or killed by sharks. In order to work this material into coherent plot, Spielberg has three dissimilar characters with different attitudes towards the shark. Brody is hunting the shark to rid the town of a menace; Hooper is pursuing it on behalf of science while Quint is both after the reward and intent on proving his toughness. Since the three men have different attitudes they also suffer different fates. The indomitable Quint, the survivor of so many marine encounters, is casually eaten while the least skilled of the three - Police Chief Brody - is the one eventually chosen by the story to destroy the creature. There is an unmistakable design in the way the narrative unfolds and one cannot imagine the film with a different resolution or climax. That the shark should be killed with the aid of an innocuous weapon (compressed air) is also part of this design. Overall, we could say that paucity of the means to provide spectacle forces Spielberg into plot devices and montage sequences that suggest 'shark' entirely through its effects.
Digital storytelling: Jurassic Park
 Jurassic Park begins with a prologue reminiscent of the one in Jaws; uniformed and armed guards attempt to transfer an unknown beast from one cage to another on an island off the coast of Costa Rica. We don't get more than a glimpse of the beast, which is reptilian, but it is evidently of savage disposition. One of the guards gives the creature a chance and it drags him into its cage. The victim's motions - as he is jerked away to be eaten - are reminiscent of the victims' in Jaws and Jurassic Park Spielberg is apparently invoking his own earlier film. But Spielberg is merely teasing the spectator with this mimicry of Jaws because, unlike the shark in Jaws, the reptile is not unwilling to exhibit itself to the spectator.
The rest of Jurassic Park is perhaps simplicity itself. The first dramatic episode in the film involves the sighting of a giant herbivore by the scientist protagonists. The only 'drama' in the scene lies in the scientist protagonists not being aware that what they are about to see are dinosaurs. After delaying the exhibiting of the dinosaur to the spectator for a few seconds, Spielberg shows us the reptile in full and this is followed a couple of minutes later by a 'primeval scene' - a herd of herbivores drinking by a large pool of water.
Catching an animal in a natural environment - even a stray dog on a street - and employing it usefully involves 'capture' of some sort. Mise-en-scène and montage need perhaps to be combined selectively to place the animal effectively in the fictional context created (5). Since the creatures in Jurassic Park are digital creations, exhibiting them does not involve a 'capture' of any kind. Neither mise-en-scène nor montage is pertinent and the scene is like an artist's impression with verisimilitude as the only factor of importance.
'Verisimilitude' does not imply showing dinosaurs as they 'really were' but to provide a version of the dinosaurs that will be satisfying to the spectator. Were science to tell us that dinosaurs were different from the way they are imagined, Spielberg would need to be untrue to science to provide satisfaction. Take for instance the ground trembling when T Rex approaches. It would appear that the ground trembling under a dinosaur is more a consequence of the reptile's mass than of its intent. Yet, the herbivores - which are larger than T Rex - do not set the ground trembling the way T Rex does. Also, the sick Triceratops is only about the size of a small elephant but the quantity of matter it excretes is not limited by the dictates of science and it must be large enough to gratify the spectator.
The showpiece of Jurassic Park is T Rex and the most 'terrifying' scene in the film is its first sighting. Here the spectator gets a better view of the reptile than he or she might have got of an actual street dog. When one of the children flashes a light at it, we actually see its pupil contracting - the best instance of the film's verisimilitude. While a cinematographer attempting to catch an actual dog rushing at him/her needs to be content with an indistinct image because of the difficulty in focusing the camera on a moving object, T Rex creates no difficulty because it is as anxious to exhibit itself as a model might be on a ramp. All this, I propose, is subliminally recognized by the spectator who, rather than responding to the fiction in the sequences, is simply soaking in the verisimilitude of the images.
Once the novelty of the dinosaurs begins to wear out, we notice that there is hardly any narration going on in Jurassic Park. After a 'scientific' explanation that tells us what to expect, the film arranges itself as a series of adventures undergone by various people with different dinosaurs. Something needs to go wrong and the 'disturbance' is provided by the villain who hopes to sell dinosaur embryos in the market. The film evades the issues that any spectator - not distracted by the spectacle of the dinosaurs - might raise: how the DNA of so many species can be extracted from one mosquito; how broken vials of dinosaur embryo can produce dinosaurs without the benefit of laboratory culturing. Jurassic Park revels in plotting and scientific inadequacies but the significant thing is that none of this attracts the attention of the critical community at large, and the film is regarded as classic SF.
But here is a segment from the New York Times's review which is more insightful about Spielberg's film:
"Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park is a true movie milestone, presenting awe- and fear-inspiring sights never before seen on the screen. The more spectacular of these involve the fierce, lifelike dinosaurs that stalk through the film with astounding ease. Much scarier, however, are those aspects of Jurassic Park that establish it as the overnight flagship of a brand-new entertainment empire. Even while capturing the imagination of its audience, this film lays the groundwork for the theme-park rides, sequels and souvenirs that insure the "Jurassic Park" experience will live on. And on. And on."
While the review is accurate in finding the truly 'scary' part of Jurassic Park in its transformation of the film entertainment, even more significant perhaps is its transformation of the spectator. From being someone engaged in narrativity, he or she is now transformed into a consumer of images, a consumer of 'verisimilitude'. Where a spectator engaged in narrativity might have considered the plausibility of the story, the consumer-spectator does no such thing. The differences between Jaws and Jurassic Park demonstrate how this consumer is actually pandered to in Jurassic Park. The 'consumer', almost by mandate, is the person who should not be caused annoyance. While Jurassic Park is designed to elicit approximately the same emotions as Jaws, it does not provide a parallel to Quint's death. Spielberg follows strict regulations about who may be eaten by a dinosaur. The following are those who may not be eaten: children, scientists, personable young men and women and/ or characters played by stars. Since dinosaurs should nonetheless kill to remain threatening, the film has peripheral people who are placed there to be eaten. Jurassic Park also does not have a parallel to the climactic killing of the shark. The dinosaurs, even when they run amok, are still in the nature of endangered species; the consumer may be hostile to a suggestion that it is permissible to kill them - even in self-defense.
The consumption of verisimilitude
The digital animation in Jurassic Park is generally restricted to those scenes where the reptiles appear but, increasingly, there is evidence that the technology will be used even in more mundane contexts. The animated film today - with the Japanese technically at the forefront - is very different from the way Walt  Disney imagined it because of the attention to verisimilitude. As instances Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001) and Howl's Moving Castle (2005) are brilliantly drawn films which have received considerable acclaim. But the striking quality about the films is less their narrative inventiveness than their unique pictorial quality. While the characters themselves are drawn as one-dimensional stereotypes, the film gives
Spirited away great attention to the way the milieu is pictured, suggesting fragile things like the dampness of decaying walls, fleeting reflections on floors of polished wood and the puckering of fabric under a milliner's needle. The significant thing is that, had the same images been provided in traditional cinema, one would hardly find them remarkable because it is camera's nature to catch aspects of reality, however slight. But while watching the Japanese films, one finds oneself paying less attention to the narrative than savoring these minute visual effects. Instead of wondering what path the narrative might take, the spectator is soon basking in the images and the quality one appreciates most about them is their extraordinary attention to verisimilitude.
The films just described are animated films but there are instances in films like The Lord of the Rings in which ordinary scenes, which might have been easily have used sets, rely on digital animation. The Lord of the Rings does not showcase verisimilitude in these sequences - although it does so in the more exotic scenes like those among the elves or dwarves. If it is hypothesized that only the costs can eventually prevent cinema from going entirely digital - though stars will be difficult to displace - one might soon have a cinema in which the primary pleasure is the consumption of verisimilitude. Cinema, in short, might soon devote itself almost entirely to providing the Norman Rockwell experience (7).
I began with a comparison between narration in cinema and literature and it seems appropriate to conclude in the same way. Links between publishing and film production have strengthened considerably in the last two or three decades. In the first place the newer generations of readers have been brought up on images instead of on words through the influence of television. Secondly, while the relationship between the two was once restricted to cinema adapting literature, we have books now that feed upon films and Jurassic Park apparently began as a film project. The graphic novel is another instance of the close commercial ties that have developed between the literature and cinema. As may be expected these developments have begun to have consequences upon the way fiction is conceived. An early paragraph from Kiran Desai's
a Norman Rockwell picture Booker Prize winning novel The Inheritance of Loss, for instance, establishes the setting of the protagonist's house as a film might have - 'at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga, with the clouds drifting past its summit'. Cinema, it must be noted, cannot establish a location through the description '50 kms from Siliguri' and may locate in relation to visually identifiable landmarks. Since literature has no such difficulty, why shouldn't Desai locate the house in this manner? One can perhaps attribute Kiran Desai's approach to cinema's influence upon literature.
Another recent tendency is for fiction to rely increasingly upon the present tense. When one relates the story of a film one finds oneself using the present tense because a film, in some sense, exists in perpetuity. One may watch a film all over again and the events recur in exactly the same way. This is scarcely true of life and as long as fiction believed it drew directly from life events were related in the past tense. If fiction does not draw directly from cinema yet but from life, there is still evidence that cinema mediates significantly and this is perhaps the connotation of the present tense in contemporary fiction.
The consolidation of digital cinema and the position of the spectator being transformed from someone following the narrative to someone consuming verisimilitude may be expected to result in a transformation of literary fiction as well. Here is a passage from a highly regarded recent novel:
 "Howard Belsey directed his American wife, Kiki Simmonds, to the relevant section of the e-mail he had printed out. She put her elbows either side of the piece of paper and lowered her head as she always did when concentrating on small type. Howard moved away to the other side of their kitchen-diner to attend to a singing kettle. There was only this one high note - the rest was silence. Their only daughter, Zora, sat on a stool with her back to the room, her earphones on, looking up reverentially at the television. Levi, the youngest boy, stood beside his father in front of the kitchen cabinets. And now the two of them began to choreograph a breakfast in speechless harmony: passing the box of cereal from one to the other, exchanging implements, filling their bowls Zadie Smith and sharing milk from a pink china jug with a sun-yellow rim. The house was south facing. Light struck the double glass doors that led to the garden, filtering through the arch that split the kitchen. It rested softly upon the still life of Kiki at the breakfast table, motionless, reading. A dark red Portuguese earthenware bowl faced her, piled high with apples. At this hour the light extended itself even further, beyond the breakfast table, through the hall, to the lesser of the two living rooms. Here a bookshelf filled with their oldest paperbacks kept company with a suede beanbag and an ottoman upon which Murdoch, their dachshund, lay collapsed in a sunbeam." (8)
While it is in the nature of a camera to catch detail whether it wishes to or not, literary fiction has until recently not seen it necessary to picture so much (e.g. 'pink china jug with a sun-yellow rim', 'dark red Portuguese earthenware bowl', 'suede beanbag') when the picturing does not contribute to narration. I propose that the verisimilitude provided by digital cinema is inspiring writers of fiction to also replicate the 'Norman Rockwell experience'. Writers of fiction are by definition 'creative writers' but writing placed a higher premium on plotting than on picturing until fairly recently. An explanation that appears to fit is that traditionally, cinema and literature both worked with reality as a given. Cinema captured existing reality, as was its nature, while literature assumed that this reality was available to the reader of fiction to relate to. Neither believed it necessary to place their emphasis upon verisimilitude - which might have been perceived as banal. With cinema going digital and therefore drawn to picturing reality, literature is perhaps being increasingly drawn in the same direction. That this will have consequences is apparent - because it means that instead of making narratives of the world for those who want to understand, both cinema and literature will be preoccupied with making pictures of it for those who wish to consume.
Notes:
| 1. |
Robert Scholes, Narration and Narrativity in Film, from Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Third Edition), New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp 393- 399. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 2. |
Vladimir Nabokov, The Aurelian, from The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, New York: Vintage, p248. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 3. |
Andre Bazin, The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, from Leo Braudy, Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Fifth Edition), New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp 43-56. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 4. |
See http://www.moviemistakes.com/film143. As instances, during the chariot race, where the contestants are riding towards the screen, tyre tracks from the camera vehicle are clearly visible imprinted in the sand. In the sequence where one of the ships collides with the other you can clearly see that the rowers being hit are dummies. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 5. |
In Samuel Fuller's White Dog (1982), about a savage attack dog, Fuller actually uses four different dogs to suggest a single dog because he could not catch a single dog actor meeting the demands of the fiction. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 6. |
|
| 7. |
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) was a celebrated American painter who charmed people with sentimental but extraordinarily detailed pictures of everyday life in the USA. ( Back to Main Story) |
| 8. |
|
M.K.Raghavendra is the Founder-Editor of Phalanx
Courtesy: silverfishbooks
Courtesy: britannica
Courtesy: horrorstew
Courtesy: legalmoviesdownloads
Courtesy: hirvine
Courtesy: farmchronicles
Courtesy: brynmawr
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Print this articleTop |
|
|
|
|
|
