here’s what looks like this year’s essential piece of comics criticism.
Which links to the Barnes & Noble page for Gene Kannenburg’s forthcoming 500 Essential Graphic Novels. It’s only 528 pages, which means 1 page per graphic novel. I’m not convinced we’ll get essential criticism out of that.
This week’s All Over Coffee is a great use of indirect image/text interaction. Each image and it’s caption work together, metaphorically, and as a total the panels come together with a meaning in lack of meaning. The text smoothly flows, while the images jump and swerve. McCloud might call those non-sequitur transitions yet, the text makes them work as a group.
But the moment-by-moment texture of the scene allows the individual shots, gestures, and sounds to drift somewhat free. Each image takes on a more intrinsic weight, and the juxtaposition of picture and sound acquires a resonance that we usually call poetic. A shot of Eva in the sun playing with the Rubik’s cube, unanchored in time (during class? before class started?), invites us to apply metaphors, especially once we learn her name. Pascal’s thorny hair suggests not only extraterrestrials but the explosion of a nova. The silhouetted prof, detached from the mechanism he has set in motion, hints at an unknown deity watching the game play out according to his rules. Why do Godard films spawn long essays built out of erudite associations? Because the narrative progression relaxes and we can weave our own connotations out of what we see and hear.
If you don’t want to go down the expanding-association route, there’s another one open. When individual moments no longer accumulate ordinary dramatic pressure, we can savor the fugitive pleasures of the separate shots (light on face, lips by ear) and the patterns they form: flipover cuts, yellow hair and yellow facets, bookended shots of Eva at the window.
Those patterns, it should be clear, depend on our sensing a bump at every shot change, looking for a way to skip across the gap that Godard creates. The same belief that meaning and effect are born of gaps impelled Kuleshov too, and perhaps even Lloyd. If we pay attention to those gaps we can feel minds—both the filmmaker’s and ours—at work in them.
David Bordwell on Godard’s Je vous salue Marie and constructive editing. “What happens between shots happens between your ears.” Observations on film art and FILM ART. Feb 8, 2008.
