Rethinking Transitions Part One

[I'm rambling a bit here folks, as I work through some ideas. This is no finished product and I realize it probably does not make a whole lot of logical, one step-to-the-next sense.]

Following up my post on David Mamet’s film book, I’ve been doing some research into montage and film editing. I think there is some relevance to comics to be found here, particularly in regards to panel transitions and narrative style. Of particular interest is montage:

“Montage” (aka “soviet montage”): “Juxtaposing shots makes them collide or conflict and it is from the collision that meaning is produced.” (79)

“For [Eisenstein], montage meant intellectual montage to make the spectator think. In this light he is close to Kuleshov’s thinking. He believed in the symbolic counterpointing of human beings with objects or other animate forms to create meaning. Thus in Strike the slaughter of a bull is counterpointed symbolically with that of the strikers.” (329)

[Quotes from: Key concepts in cinema by Susan Hayward (Routledge, 1996)]

Montage is something that can be done in comics, though you don’t see it too much. It’s a kind of panel transition that fails to really fall under any of McCloud’s six categories. But in thinking about it, it reminds me of my issues with transition six, the non-sequitur.

It seems like the idea of montage if used in comics might fall into a similar place as non-sequitur were one to read them on a surface level. Any two panels really could be read with some sense of connection, and the kind of transition that, for instance, Dash Shaw frequently uses in The Mother’s Mouth would not really fit into any of the other transitions (unless one wished to stretch the definition of “scene-to-scene”).

I’m questioning the whole structure of McCloud’s six panel “transitions.” While I think it can be useful (and indeed is important) to have an architecture of panel transitions, the more I think about those six categories in Understanding Comics, the more I realize the limitations in them and the (again, a problem I had with Making Comics) realist bias of them. The way the categories are named and described is limiting and reliant upon a rather linear, realistic narrative mode that, while predominant, is not exhaustive.

If we take a closer look at what McCloud is describing in his categories, we find a few underlining transitory elements. Moment-to-moment and action-to-action are inherently time based transitions, that is they represent a shift in narrative time. Aspect-to-aspect is a shift in narrative focus, the visual focus of the panel. Subject-to-subject and scene-to-scene transitions are a combination of narrative time and focus movements. The non-sequitur is well… pointless, almost a denigration of anything outside the box of the rest, writing it off as illogical.

It we think about the names: moment-to-moment, action-to-action, there is a sense of forward movement (one moment to the next, one action to the next). Time moving forward, which immediately biases a conventional forward moving narrative. Terminology does affect how we think about the objects of description.

I think there are better ways to elucidate the different transitions between panels. Why does it matter? Because these types of investigations can describe what we see going on in comics, a descriptive system, but by creating a system, we can also shed light on areas that are being overlooked, that may offer possibilities unused or underused.

Where in McCloud’s six categories can we put the transitions in Richard McGuire’s “Here” (see the latest issue (8) of Comic Art)? The shifts forward and backwards in time that do not alter the focus of the panel. Action-to-action? Scene-to-scene? Neither clearly delineate the way McGuire has organized his story. Similar where do we put the transition in Dash Shaw’s The Mother’s Mouth from a drawn image of the mother being tucked into her bed by a nurse to the photograph of a man on kneeling on the ground holding a blanket over a boy’s head? Scene-to-scene? Is it a shift in “significant distances of time and space”?

I would argue we need a more neutral way to describe shifts in narrative time, panel focus, as well as transitions that involve neither time nor focus. Will it be more complicated, less cut and dried than six categories? No doubt. But I think it’s worth a little time and effort.

Time and effort that will be spend in a following post…

Tags: comicstheory, mccloud, terminology, transitions

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