Rethinking Transitions Part 4
I’ve been rereading more of Neil Cohn’s essays on visual language, which provide much food for thought.
“Time Frames… Or Not” looks at the idea of space=time in comics. Neil does a fine job on that account, though on the most simple level it seems obvious that space does not equal narrative time when we can have panels that show no change in time or those that go back in time. Neil also argues against the concept of “closure”. (I won’t summarize all his points, so go read the essay itself (pdf file).)
Neil says, “The most prevalent belief about the understanding of these sequential units — or “panels” — holds that each one represents a moment in time, which progresses to the next in a linear fashion… codified in taxonomies of “transitions.” (2, all pages refer to the pdf of the essay)
While I’m in agreement that panels don’t necessarily represent a moment in time, I’m not clear why that necessitates throwing out the idea of panel transitions, all together. We can retain that idea in some form differentiated from the McCloudian version.
On space=time, Cohn states:
While the space McCloud refers to is based on physical distance (confirmable because of his instruction for the reader to run their finger along the page), the sense of time he refers to is entirely a mental construct garnered from the contents of the panels. It is fictive time, not “real” experiential time. The time it takes to read something and the mental abstraction of time within the fictitious narrative are not comparable, and exist on totally different levels of analysis. This is why fictive time is unaffected by different arrangements of the same panels on a page, though it might affect the rhythmic pace in which they are read. (6)
This is an important point: the need to differentiate narrative (diegetic) time and “real” time, probably best understood as reading time. McCloud’s various comments on gutter width and panel size as regards to time are better considered as ways to alter reading time rather then diegetic time.
For instance, in Todd Hignite’s In the Studio, Chris Ware talks about some of his strips where he told stories in as small panels as possible with as little detail as possible so that the reader would go quickly through the panels (sorry, I don’t have the book anymore to give a quote or page numbers, look it up). Similarly, large splash pages or detailed artwork can slow down reading time.
With these type of tactics, the cartoonist can contrast diegetic and reading time. The reader’s perception of narrative events could be slowed by showing a brief moment of action with a long succession of detailed panels. Alternately a long period of diegetic time could be abbreviated by using fewer or smaller panels with less information in them.
Back to Cohn, he discusses physical representations of time, and makes two interesting points:
“Many of the perceivable duration of time in nature cyclic as opposed to linear…” (7) which made me think of the cyclical nature of some of the great comic strips such as Peanuts or Gasoline Alley. Peanuts embodies a kind of cyclical time both in its yearly revisiting of holidays and seasons, as well as the repetitions of events (Charlie Brown and the football, kite flying, etc). Even the lack of aging in the characters make them seem stuck in a circle.
To achieve a linear conception of time required a shift in focus from the perceivable circularity of nature to concentrating on the events that occur in human experience. Unlike the passage of sun and moon, which only vary slightly each day, the events of human activities remain novel and unique each time they happen. By shifting focus, nature’s durations simply become a period of measurement to gauge those egocentric events. Without such a shift in focus, a notion of history could not even be possible, since it focuses on the linearity of events. (7)
This is also how we end up with most narratives, I think.
I won’t go into Cohn’s argument about panels not equaling moments, I don’t find it at all problematic (again, go read it). Part of his conclusion:
Panels do not stand for moments or durations in fictive time, but represent depictions of “event states” from which a sense of “time” is derived. Images are just significations of concepts that undergo cognitive processing, while “time” is a mental extraction from the causation/change between them. Indeed, there is nothing about two images next to each other that demands that each represents a moment in “time.” The entire sense of “time” is pulled from the content of what the panels have in them. In other words, because two panels might depict states of an event — and in “real life” events occur in the context of our perceived linear notion of time — we assume that “time passes” between the two panels. But, there is no “time” there, nor can any be assumed to be “filled into the gaps” in any real semantic sense, unless information in the representation is presented to us. The binding assumption that each panel represents a moment or duration in time is merely an illusion, cast by the understanding of events and their parts. (11)
This is an important point, but from it I see more of a reason to look at panel transitions as the comparison of one panel to another, the changes through which we read the narrative.
Later: “…this allows for relational aspects of panels to be explored without the presumption of time restrictions, which begets discoveries that further invalidate any linear approach to understanding” (13)
Again, these “relational aspects” are to me what transitions are. Not necessarily just movements in diegetic time, though that can be one aspect.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding the use of “linear” in Cohn’s writing. Is this linear, as in, one after another, speaking against a simple one to the next to the next reading of these “relational aspects”? Is it linear, as in linear time where each panel represents the next moment in time? (I’m sure Neil can appear in the comments and clarify for me,,, Neil? [Edit: He did, see below.])
This is getting me thinking about transitions in the context of panel groupings. A few examples of which I’ll go into in the next post.
Tags: comicstheory, transitions
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