Notes for a Future Manifesto

A s’en tenir à cette analyse, une narration en images est tout à fait possible (elle repose sur la monstration et est permise par le caractère d’énonçable de l’image). Paradoxalement, c’est l’opération de description qui est impossible dans le récit en images. Tous les éléments de l’image sont rendus avec le même degré de précision et on ne s’arrête sur aucun (alors que la description dans un texte narratif s’arrête sur un élément quelconque). De même, si description il y avait en BD, elle serait indéfiniment recommencée, puisque personnages et décors sont à nouveau rendus en entier dans chaque case (alors que dans un text narratif, on décrit une fois pour toutes et que les personnages et les lieux ne sont plus ensuite que désignés). Cependant, pour Groensteen, cette image qui n’est jamais descriptive est descriptible, et à deux titres: pour commencer, l’image en donne toujours plus que ce qui est strictement nécessaire au récit; en second lieu, elle renvoie au style caractéristique d’u auteur. Mais, comme l’opération de description est confiée au lecteur, cette opération n’est par définition jamais complète.

And my translation:

…A narrative in images is possible (it relies on “showing” and is permitted by the enunciable aspect of the image). Paradoxically, it is description which is impossible in the recit in images. Every element in the image is rendered with the same degree of precision and one does not stop on any one of them (like a description in a narrative text stops/lingers on some element). Likewise, if there were descriptions in comics, it would be indefinitely restarting, since characters and backgrounds are rendered entirely anew with each panel (while in a narrative text characters and places are described once and then after only named). However, for Groensteen, the image which is never descriptive is descriptable, on two grounds: to start, the image always gives more than is strictly necessary for the recit; second, it reflects the characteristic style of the author. But, as the operation of description is entrusted to the reader, this operation is by definition never complete.

Morgan, Harry. Principes des littératures dessinées. Éditions de l’an 2, 2003. 40.

I have to disagree with Morgan that description is impossible in comics (or other forms of drawn literature). In a comic where style and the detail of rendering are consistent, I can see where his argument makes sense. But in a work where style is mutable, description becomes possible through stylistic shift. A classic example can be found in Understanding Comics (44) where McCloud is discussing manga (the section about “masking” which is so often discussed). He notes how a sword that is cartoony at one point may be rendered in realistic detail at another point “not only to show us the details, but to make us aware of the sword as an object, something with weight, texture and physical complexity,” (emphasis McCloud’s). This kind of stylistic mutability is rare (stylistic consistency is one of those comics conventions that has yet to see much widespread attack) but opens a space for description (though it would be extremely difficult in work that is highly realistic to begin with).

With all due respect to Nadel (and to Santoro himself, who chose the pseudonym in the first place), I don’t find Storeyville particularly Sirkian. Throughout his career, Douglas Sirk followed dominant Hollywood practices. His films stick close to classical storytelling and to what film scholar David Bordwell calls invisible style, the use of such formal properties as camera movements, editing, and setting to transmit the plot without calling attention to themselves. Invisible style is easiest to define by counter-example: the wild, hand-held camera movements in The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2007) are not examples of invisible style.

[...]

This technique subverts a formal trope that most comics fans take for granted: readability. When Art Spiegelman says that it’s harder to “not read Bushmiller’s Nancy than it is to read it,” he points to the general expectation among readers that a comic should be easy to read, that its pictures (and combination of pictures and words) should be immediately “legible” to us, that form should seamlessly, effortlessly and invisibly convey the narrative. It’s harder to read Storeyville than not, however, because Santoro doesn’t really care about staying on model; he’s more interested in expanding the vocabulary of comics by using marks, colors and lines as non-narrative elements of design and emotional expression.

Fischer, Craig. “Storeyville (Craig Replies).” Thought Balloonists 12 March 2008.

I’ve been reading a lot of Bordwell, but I haven’t come across this “invisible style” concept yet. It’s a useful term. That type of style can be the hardest to discuss, because it is so unnoticeable.

As regards content, the persistence of certain key antinomies structuring all his work has already been noted [this is from the Conclusion of the book]. While these originate in an underlying opposition between the temporal and the eternal, the human and the divine, the material and the spiritual, they are realized in a variety of recurrent forms: appetite versus austerity, self-indulgence versus self-denial, artifice versus nature, betrayal versus fidelity, reason versus faith, fragmentation versus unity, part versus whole. In various ways the abstract visual parameters available to filmmaketers (inside/outside, up/down, center/periphery, as well as black/white and color oppositions) are emplyed to give form to these antinomies. The result is a thematic recurrence of contrasts between mountain and valley, city and country, Paris and the provinces, day and night.

The narrative structure within which these oppositions are realized is usually overtly or covertly circular, with an extensive central element constituting a “digression” or hole in time through which the temptation of the temporal intrudes. The digression will seem to promise escape from a trap which the protagonist feels closing around him or her, but will come to be seen rather as itself a trap from which the protagonist must escape–hence the circularity. In the course of closing the circle, a threatened distortion or inversion of the “natural” order of things will be corrected. (106)

…the narrative chain is not segmented into the ceaseless shot/reverse-shot clusters that are typical of psychological editing. There is little recourse to the “informative” close-ups of face, hand or object which standard filmmaking employs in order to “orient” the spectator and avoid any indecision or ambiguity.

This avoidance of the two more sophisticated sets of editing practice is characteristic of the technical discretion of Rohmer’s films. In fact, the avoidance of such “normal” practices as film music, optical punctuation, expressive camera angles, and most tracking shots is at times so marked as to register as itself a form of aggressive technical experimentation. Cumulatively, these absent techniques would have served to structure the spectator’s response to the profilmic material, and the contemporary spectator is accustomed to expect such subconscious orientation. Its absence serves to endow that profilmic material, in the spectator’s eyes, with something or the same ambiguity and indeterminacy which it holds for the central protagonist, who, craving certainty yet trapped in endless conjecture, is finally constrained to an act of largely irrational commitment, of faith.

[...] The reason is simple: Rohmer associates with his enigmas neither the plot elements (threat, deadlines, intercutting) nor the technical practices (close-ups, expressive editing, expressionist lighting) which construct suspense in mysteries and thrillers. This avoidance of the viewer manipulation inherent in dramatic narratives is perhaps the strongest evidence supporting Rohmer’s claim to be producing both a moral and a realist cinema. (108)

Crisp, C. G. Eric Rohmer, Realist and Moralist. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.