The night before I had watched Ozu’s Equinox Flower (found in this wonderful boxed set from Criterion). It’s his first color film, but you’d never guess by how beautiful the colors are and how skillfully he organizes the shots to place the color. There’s one series of shots as one of the protagonist comes home that shows the same red teapot in three or four shots at different places in the composition. Which is where the comic came from.

Thanks to the magic of Twitter (a retweet from @Ozu_Yasujiro) I found this great fansite and this image of one of those teapot shots:

The red of the teapot is so vibrant and so in contrast to the rest of the scene that it seems to almost float in front of the rest.

I found this essay, “Tell, Don’t Show,” on the old adage that one should “show not tell,” a really engaging and insightful piece. Bordwell makes the case where “telling” can be a more powerful and effective means to convey narrative than “showing.”

The HBO tv series “In Treatment,” is another great example of this. The show, consists (almost completely) of 30 minute episodes of a psychologist and a patient talking. Almost all the episodes take place in the same room (the psychologist’s office) and none of them (that I’ve seen) include any sort of flashback. Rather, we see a lot of the patients narrating past events. Like Bordwell’s “Persona” example, the act of narrating becomes a major level of narrative in itself, in conjunction with the content of the narration. The story is as much about how the characters feel about the narration and how they tell it (omissions, digressions) as the narration itself. And, at least in this case, it is engaging and entertaining. (Season 1 is out on DVD with Season 2 coming in the very near future. Recommended.)

This got me thinking (naturally) about comics. Comics are a “visual medium”, as people like to say, so I think the tendency is to use images of the narrated content rather than the narration itself. There is the old conventional of having a little head of the narrator in the upper corner of the panel next to a narrative caption, with the panel itself mostly containing an image that corresponds to the narration. Can comics effectively convey the same sense of multi-leveled narrating/narration as film/video?

In some cases, film has the advantage. A lot of comic artists just don’t have the style/skill to show the subtlety of expression and gesture that can be easily captured on film. On the other hand, the stillness of comics allows a reader to linger over the images, with more time to appreciate subtleties that are of a different sort, such as stylistic variations, representational levels, visual detail. If the artist works at it, the images of the narrating could be engaging and add depth to the narration, but too often you see lazy work of “talking heads” whose only real effort at maintaining visual interest is constant changing of the perspectival angle on the character(s). These shifts in perspective usually seem less motivated by narrative need than as a cheap way to avoid visual repetition.

Bordwell. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton UP, 1988.

I tend to read film books with an eye towards comics, how ideas might crossover from one art to another. I’ve found a lot of David Bordwell’s work to be particularly rich in this area. Here are some notes I took from his book on the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, whose films I have a growing appreciation for. You can actually download a very large pdf of this book at the link above.

Early on Bordwell discusses the notion of a poetics of cinema:

‘Poetics’ refers to the study of how films are put together and how, in determinate contexts, they elicit particular effects. A narrative film exhibits a total form consisting of materials — subject matter, themes — shaped and transformed by overall composition and stylistic patterning. (1)

To get a better idea of what he means, here’s a quote from his “Historical Poetics of Cinema” (pdf of the article):

The poetics of any medium studies the finished work as the result of a process of construction–a process which includes a craft component (e.g., rules of thumb), the more general principles according to which the work is composed, and its functions, effects, and uses. Any inquiry into the fundamental principles by which a work in any representational medium is constructed can fall within the domain of poetics. [...]

A historical poetics of cinema produces knowledge in answer to two broad questions:

1. What are the principles according to which films are constructed and by means of which they achieve particular effects?
2. How and why have these principles arisen and changed in particular empirical circumstances?

Historical poetics is thus characterized by the phenomena it studies–films’ constructional principles and effects–and the questions it asks about those phenomena–their constitution, functions, consequences, and historical manifestations. Poetics does not put at the forefront of its activities phenomena such as the economic patterns of film distribution, the growth of the teenage audience, or the ideology of private property. The poetician may need to investigate such matters, and indeed many others, but they become relevant only in the light of more properly poetic issues. Underlying this hierarchy of significance is the assumption that, while in our world everything is connected to everything else, one can produce novel and precise knowledge only by making distinctions among core questions, peripheral questions, and irrelevant questions.

I have to explore this concept further. A quick google search reveals very little by way of “poetics of comics.” All the hits I see are referring to comics as poetic (as in, poetry), which is a much different arena.

I noticed how some of his analyses make me think of manga.

One convention of Japanese classical cinema thus became the crisp, economical cut to synecdochic details of action. Some filmmakers turned to haiku’s atmospheric brevity as a model for cutaway shots of nature or objects. (29)

Cutaways are inserted shots that interrupt the main action by enlarging a detail not present in the prior shot; they do not represent any character’s optical viewpoint. (106)

This reminds me very much of McCloud’s aspect-to-aspect transitions which he found so often in manga. I like the ring of “synecdochic details.”

In the editing phase, Ozu dictated absolute shot lengths often independent of what was on screen. He gave strict instructions to his editor about the length of each speaking shot and he insisted on a 6-8 frame interval after every line of dialogue. Ozu would time his ‘empty shots’ of scenery by abstract metrical patterns. (75)

I love this idea of a lingering on a subject after the words are spoken.

According to Burch, the transitional passages achieve this goal [suspending the progress of the narrative] by their stillness, their prolonged duration, and their lack of a compositional center. (‘They demand to be scanned like paintings.’) (104)

Film v comics: Film can have subtleties to it that hide in the bg. In comics since everything has to be drawn little can be taken for granted.

Dominant/overtone cutting, being purely pictorial, creates a non-causal means of guiding viewer expectations through intermediate spaces. (134)

I talked about this in a previous post without realizing there was a term for it.

Themes are important as material for the work of art, but thematization tends toward ‘recuperation’, toward pulling the work back into our most anodyne habits of thought. To treat interpretation as the highest goal of criticism is to foreclose the possibility that a work may challenge us not through new meanings (what new meaning are there?) but though new patterns, processes, and effects. (137)

Gerard Genette has observed that a dissymmetry exists within verbal narration. A story may very well be told in words without specifying the place where it happens and whether this place is more or less distant from the place where it is now being told; nevertheless, it is almost impossible not to locate the story in time with respect to the narrating act since the story must necessarily be told in a present, past, or future tense. Thus in a verbal narrative the temporal determinations of the narrating act are more salient than the spatial determinations. By contrast, this dissymmetry is exactly reversed in pictorial narration. A picture initially is atemporal and will remain so unless the discourse assigns it a temporal reference; nevertheless, a picture invariably discloses its spatial determinations for the reason that the picture must necessarily be taken from some angle and location. (44-45)

This is an area where comics have great power and versatility. Textual captions can anchor a pictorial narrative in time, while images can anchor a text narration in space. The combination used or withheld (a wordless series of images, or a sequence of text only) can create a wide variety of functions in this respect, especially when one considers parallel text-image interactions that might subvert one’s reading of text or image and create a sense of dissonance, suspense, or purposeful obfuscation.

*

Branigan divides p.o.v. shots into two major variants: prospective and retrospective (“discovered”) (111). Prospective shows the seeing agent first then the object seen, while the retrospective shows the object seen first then the seeing agent. I imagine one could defer the retrospective pov shot for a long period of time, showing many objects seen before revealing a seeing agent. This might have a visual correlation in Robbe-Grillet’s Jalousie where the fact that the book is kind of narrated pov shot is only revealed subtly over time. In something like Brian Ralph’s Daybreak, the seeing agent is never revealed, but we are early on made aware that there is someone there, behind the panel, so to speak.

He also elaborates a number of “simple structures” for p.o.v. shots (111-117):

a) closed: This is a sequence where the image shows agent then object before returning to the agent again.

b) delayed: The moment between the again and object shots are separated by some amount of time or images.

c) open: The agent is shown looking but the object is not shown (one assumes a opposite version where object is missing an agent, though it is not explicitly noted). A great comics example are the Peanuts, cloud watching strips.

d) continuing: A sequence showing several objects related back to one agent.

e) cheated: A use of the object view which is not realistically attributable to the agent (close-ups, alternate angles, etc).

f) multiple: Where the same object is seen by multiple agents.

g) embedded: A p.o.v. shot within a p.o.v shot (A(person) looks at B(person) who looks at something).

h) reciprocal: Best explanation would be two facing characters looking at each other.

Branigan offers examples and variations on all of these which are too numerous and involved to detail here. I imagine we could find these in comics if enough effort were spent in searching them out.

Last time I posted on Ozu, I shared some stills of the opening sequence. I noticed similar sequences a lot more this time around, and Bordwell talks on the commentary about the way Ozu cuts the shots together, using a repetition of elements in the frame to join them narratively and visually. Here are two examples that I quite enjoy (also a great example of Ozu’s color use). In all cases these shots have no camera movement. Most of them have people walking through the frame as the only movement.

Note the repetition of the poles (telephone? electric?) then the barrels then the signs.

In this sequence, I love how the the red/yellow/green sign in the foreground becomes part of the midground in the second shot. The “Tory’s Bar” sign that is in the midground of the second shot, moves to the foreground in the third shot. It is almost as if the signs are switching places with each other. It creates a great sense of movement without the camera moving at all. In that way, it’s a lot like comics.

In this long conversation sequence, notice how each character has a beer bottle at his right (our left). There are two beer bottles on the table, but Ozu frames the shots so we only see one in each shot. But the one soy sauce bottle on the table is always kept in frame so it appears to ping-pong back and forth throughout the scene. Bordwell points this out in his commentary (I’d have not noticed it on first viewing otherwise). Ozu makes much use of objects that sit between characters in a conversation. They repeat across shots, often providing bursts of colors and anchors for orientation.

I highly recommend this latest Criterion DVD. As an extra bonus it has portions of a French documentary about Ozu which features Georges Perec! That’s the only time I’ve ever seen him on film.

from College Chums (1907)

An interesting film still that not only shows three separate shots at once, but also shows a rather comics-like use of text making a visual path across the image from one character to another.

(Image from David Bordwell‘s post “Lucky ’13″.)

According to Crisp, the loss of the retrospective narration, and therefore the loss of identification with the first person, is unfortunate. He contends that in the Moral Tales the retrospective narration gave the audience the pleasures of searching for ambiguity and contradiction in the ‘uneasy coexistence of these subjective reflections and of the “objective” image proposed by the camera’ (Crisp 1988:88). But what this objection misses is that the absence adds a measure of complexity to attitudes towards the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs. There might well be less identification with the characters in this series than there was in the Moral Tales, but there is certainly more engagement with them. They become much less ironic than their counterparts in the Moral Tales, and the audience is left instead to come to terms with these characters who are frequently irritating (Anne in The Aviator’s Wife and Delphine in The Green Ray must be two of the more annoying heroines of recent films) but who are perhaps all the more human precisely because they are stuck in an empirical situation about which they have only incomplete knowledge yet in which they seek to stumble across the ‘real life’ for which they so deeply yearn. Whereas the encounter with the characters in the Moral Tales is largely abstract identification, that with the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs is much more engagingly compassionate (this is the catch of a loss of identification; the characters are always other, and therefore they can be the subject of an empathetic engagement), for the simple reason that they are seen to make mistakes and embarrassing leaps of faith, and are inclined to take as destiny what is in fact only an accident, in a world from which they can never escape. Unlike the retrospective narrators, who imposed a false certainty and confidence on the story of the Moral Tales, the characters in the Comedies and Proverbs do not know what is going to happen next, and neither does the audience.

Tester, Keith. Eric Rohmer: Film as Theology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 119.

I don’t remember exactly why I marked this passage. I know it bore some relation to thoughts at the time I was reading the book (a few weeks ago now).

To the extant that these fictions work through a limited number of motifs, they pointedly critique the notion according to which true filmmakers are those who refuse to repeat themselves. For Rohmer, the art of the film director lies not in the search for new subjects, genres, or tones but in orchestrating now subtle, now overt effects of similarity and difference. The challenge is to find an equilibrium between content and form such that the return of motifs is not confused with sterile repetition or the mere application of a rule along neo-classical lines. As the director remarked upon completing Contes des quatres saisons [Tales of Four Seasons]:

What’s to be avoided is confining oneself to any one manner. And paradoxically working within a series keeps that from happening. Since my stories are more or less alike, I have to seek variety elsewhere.

Schilling, Derek. Eric Rohmer (Manchester UP, 2007), 159.

This relates in some ways to the theory of constraint. By limiting oneself in certain areas, one is forced to be innovative, or at least variable, in other areas.

Bordwell looks as criticism as a practical art and an act of problem solving in building up an interpretation from a film. He differentiates multiple types of meaning that are made from a work (film):

1. Referential: This the meaning created by constructing the diegetic world, that is the basic putting together of images/words/sounds/etc to understand the work literally. This can be pulling together the connections between characters in a realistic work of fiction or figuring out the rules of a fantasy or science fiction world. Generally this is an easy process though in some cases this could be very complicated (like Last Year at Marienbad, or perhaps Mulholland Drive).

2. Explicit: This is the direct “message” of a work, the “point.”

Bordwell considers the referential and explicit meanings the “literal” meanings and part of “comprehension.”

3. Implicit: These meanings are more in line with the traditional idea of “theme.” These are indirect, symbolic, hidden, etc.

4 .Symptomatic: These are “repressed”, involuntary meanings, often showing the opposite than the explicit or implicit meaning. Often economic, political, or ideologically based. This is the kind of thing you’ll see where the critic makes the film say something that seems the opposite of what is shown. Heavy Freudian influence.

Bordwell considers the latter types of meaning as part of “interpretation,” which is his primary focus in this book.

He covers a history of interpretation in regards to literature and then film. About half of the book is taken up by a step-by-step examination of interpretation though the lens of academic film criticism.

Semantic Fields: “conceptual structure” for organizing “potential meanings in relation to one another.”

As opposed to theme which is a unifying concept.

Bordwell relates his implicit and symptomatic meanings to two types of criticism, explicatory and symptomatic. Explicatory is the traditional type of thematic discovery. He generalizes this with using semantic fields that are humanistic and based on individual experience, such as suffering, identity, freedom, perception, creativity, good/evil, love/hate, truth/falsity, etc. Symptomatic criticism on the other hand is more social, systematic, and generalizing: power/subjection, desire, law, subject/object, class struggle, nature/culture. This sways more towards the arena of cultural theory.

A popular arena is reflexivity where a film is interpreted to to be about some aspect of film in general.

Types of semantic fields:

Clusters: “semantic overlap” “low degree of implicit contrastiveness” synonyms, family resemblance. theme often fits here

Doublets: binary, antonyms, contrast

Proportional Series: combinations of doublets, often moving from referential opposites to implicit to symptomatic (ie nature/exteriors, life/death, freedom/confinement)

Hierarchies: branching or nonbranching. inclusion/exclusion. graded series: continuous variation on an axis (good girl, good bad girl (appears bad), bad good girl (prostitute redeemed), bad girl) chains: linear sequence on spatial or temporal axis (spring/summer/autumn/winter). could also be the following of a previous narrative (paratext? allegory?)

Mapping schematic fields to cues:

“In practice, critics mix both one-to-many and many-to-one mapping, seeking a balance between explanatory breadth and economy on the one hand and local density on the other. In this mixture criticism attains its particular thickness of conceptual texture. Even gross or banal semantic units become linked or opposed, discriminated, incarnated in various guises, qualified by expressive attributes of image or sound, and come out looking comparatively nuanced.” (130)

On cues:

“It is risky to be innovative in picking out cues. If we want to prove that reel-change marks are worthy vehicles for semantic fields, then we will need at least to show that they have an effect on spectators’ comprehension of the film. (133)

Socially implanted hypotheses on how texts mean: coherence and some relation to the external world. (133)

“There are certain general heuristics that most problem-solvers apply in all domains. There are, for instance, what researchers have called the representativeness heuristic, whereby problem-solvers tend to reduce all inferential tasks to judgments of similarity, and the availability heuristic, whereby solutions are sought among what is most readily accessed in memory. Both are affected by a tacit criterion of vividness, whereby the most sensorily concrete data are given saliency.” (138)

And that’s where my rereading got stalled by other books… so I’m just gonna post this.

Orson Welles quoted in Brady, Frank. Citizen Welles. Scribners: 1989. p. 356.