Relationships Between Language, Text, and Images:

"Possession of human language is associated with a specific type of mental organization, not simply a higher degree of intelligence."--Noam Chomsky

Exploring language is a way to explore human cognition, but it is not the only way to explore human cognition: enter the image.

We tend to ignore how humans react to images.  We don't have required classes in grade school that force us to interpret movies etc.  Although the study of images is not new, it is growing in importance with advances in technology.

"The soul never thinks without images"--Aristotle

And the growing interest in images is exemplified in the Matrix where "reality and images have become thoroughly mixed."

Developing Written Language

Most cultures have a myth describing the origins of language and writing, often given by some divine being.  

Is that still true today?  With the Bible etc.?  Do we tend to consider images more spiritual (the crucifix)?

The first drawings date back only 32,000 years ago, while humans have existed for over a million. Pictures were literal representations of objects, not yet related to the words of a spoken language.  Pictographs are still used today, for example, women and men's bathrooms are marked by human wearing skirt or pants.

Literal pictographs were simplified to metaphors out of necessity.  When Spanish ships landed on the shores of Mexico in the 1500s Montezuma was sent a very large and literal painting, this is too time consuming.  The best known system of simplified pictographs are Egypt's hieroglyphics, while the Chinese have simplified full images into tracings.

Learning to interpret Images

Early image critics treated images simply as another form of written word, judging them on the "effective delineation of character, in the pathos of the situation or in the play of emotion it represents...[not] its technical excellence."

But today we distrust images, claiming they appeal too much to our emotions and tricking us into thinking they are real.  

What is it about images that evoke more emotion?

-Perhaps they give visual context that we cannot supply ourselves because we've never been in that situation?

-Cannot use euphemisms to distort reality?  

Danger of Images

Why does the government work so hard to suppress certain images?  For example, dead soldiers returning home:  

-Maybe pictures are too open to interpretation:

Could be seen as victory for enemy.

Exploiting private moment of a family for political purposes.

Or as giving respect by mourning.

The rise of the image scares many critics:

"Images are winning--materialistic, entertainment-besotting, civic-life-depleting images; vain, phony, surface-loving, fantasy-promoting, reality-murdering images."

But which is more real?  A picture of dead soldier or text?

Maybe if we were taught how to "read" images in school they would not be so.  Some movies are as complex as novels.

Relationship between Images and Text

Each of us brings our own biology and life experiences to processing images.

Often novels are seen as allowing for more imagination, but is this really true?  Do we simply not think about movies because we aren't forced to?

Before pictures were seen as support for the text of a news article, this seems to becoming less and less true.  For example, Abu Grab scandal or Laci Peterson.  Stories revolve around what makes good pictures.

A lessning attention-span?  We're demanding more activity to remain interested, but is this a bad thing?  

Today we are able to combine images and language like never before.  Movies, Music Videos and now hypertext works of fiction.  I tried finding examples of hypertext fiction but either links were dead or asked for money...perhaps the market isn't there yet.

The web requires a whole new set of skills that weren't required of previous artists, perhaps this will lead to more collaborative projects, and not just for artists.  Today already 70 percent of jobs requiring a bachelors degree use computers.

According to the screenwriter of On the Waterfront, Budd Schulberg, movies are different from novels because they only focus on sequences leading towards the climax: there is no space or time for nuance, perspective and contradictions.

Is this even true?  And if it is perhaps that is only because of the limits of technology.  It is much cheaper and easier to write a novel then to make a 20 hour movies, but perhaps it won't always be that way.

This is from a presentation I gave on:

•  tip jar Dec. 5th

  by therightlies on Sun Dec 04, 2005 at 10:06:44 PM PDT

•  One thing:

  Often novels are seen as allowing for more imagination, but is this really true?

  Yes, it is.  It's not because film is inferior, but the process of receiving images is more passive than the process of registering language.  

  The French learned this the hard way in the 60s when they tried to transfer the nouveau roman into film: all the things that made the new novel great exposed exactly the weaknesses in film.  When I write the word "dog," you picture a dog, but when I show you a dog, you see the same, concrete dog that I do.  A word is worth a thousand pictures.  That example may seem minor, but once we start stringing words together: "the dog ran down the street," we end up with very divergent and personal readings.  Take that to the length/ambiguity of Ulysses, and the difference is overwhelming.

  Don't get me wrong, there are some really great films out there.  Really great.  But so far, I'd chalk them up to the level of a really great short story, at best.  (There are deeper, generic reasons why I'd relate them to short stories, but that's a long story, and I don't want to hijack your diary.)

  Remember, though, that cinema is only 100 years old.  It's still in its infancy, so to speak.  Where it goes from here, I have no idea: I'm optimistic, but it'll be a long time before we're going to see anything at the complexity level of a Pynchon.

  by pico on Sun Dec 04, 2005 at 10:45:03 PM PDT

  •  Not completely true

    for a couple of reasons. First, if I as the author intend you to visualize, not just a dog, but a specific dog, film or other visual media are clearly superior. Images can communicate more accurately, although they can also be used to confuse or lie (just like words can).

    Second, I happened to catch a little bit of An Affair to Remember on TV today, and there's a scene with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr when the boat is docking and each is  being met by their fiance - it's done with no dialog, but almost entirely with facial expressions by Grant and Kerr, and body language/setting by their fiances (the scene lasts several minutes). That scene would be impossible to create textually. Similarly, a film like Memento would be a different experience in text than in film, because of the use of visual cues (color vs. b&w, changes in appearance or setting, etc).

    The reason those things work is that the Chomsky quote above applies to the human visual system as well as the language system. The eye is really just an extension of the brain, and the brain's largest system is the visual cortex, which is linked directly to the limbic system (the "reptilian" portion of the brain that's connected to emotion and long term memory creation among other things). The vision system is a lot more complicated (and a lot more counter-intuitive) than just a projector displaying images for the "conscious mind" to view.

    I also wouldn't agree that things like the Affair scene described above or films like Memento are largely passive experiences, although a lot of what the visual arts produce are more passive than the same thing done in text or even as a radio drama. I'd be hard to convince though that something like a da Vinci or Pollock painting or just a family photo album are passive experiences, even though they're completely static images.
    

    by badger on Mon Dec 05, 2005 at 12:17:25 AM PDT

    •  food for thought.

      I never said that they're completely passive experiences, but images simply don't recreate the level of active experience that the word does.  The word is symbolic, the image is concrete (even when it's symbolic).  You are limited by the image in a way that you aren't by the word: thus, we may all have different interpretations of a painting, but we've all seen the same painting (more or less), while everyone reads The Brothers Karamazov differently: the faces, the tones of voice, the setting, all are personalized.  

      If you intend me to visualize a specific dog, film is not superior.  Film is more efficient.  

      An Affair to Remember is a great movie.  But Salinger can do the same thing in a short story.

      Memento would be fairly easy to recreate in prose (color v. black and white becomes standard type v. italics, for example).  Finnegans Wake would be impossible to recreate in film.

      The closest I've ever seen a film come to a literary experience is In the Bedroom (especially the closing sequence).  But it succeeds not because of what it shows, but because of what it doesn't.  The visual is a distraction, while the active mind is running through other hoops.  

      Keep it up, though - this is a good break from the political blogging.  And even if it's just us, I'm game.

      by pico on Mon Dec 05, 2005 at 12:30:23 AM PDT

      •  I recognize

        you didn't say "completely passive", but it was late and I didn't feel like adding all of the qualifications.

        I don't think Salinger could do the same thing - there's a lot of brain hardware/software that's specific to interpreting visual cues from facial expressions (esp noticeable in cases where people have a deficit in this area due to mental illness or physical brain damage). That engages different machinery than a textual description would. Salinger might be able to do something similar, but not the same.

        One of my favorite examples of that is Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother Depression era photo.  We all see the same photo, just as we all see the same words on a page. We may even have mostly the same reaction to the central image (or to words), but some of us may interpret differently the way the children bury their faces. Some us may never go beyond the instant captured in the image, but some might wonder how she got there, where she went after, how we could help, how she got herself into that situation, how a nation could let that happen, or lots of other things. Of course a lot of the reaction will be initially non-verbal too. That's certainly as active as reading The Grapes of Wrath.

        If we (as a culture) didn't mostly share a common view of the image it wouldn't be effective. But if we didn't see different things in the image, there wouldn't be politics. It would be interesting to know what someone from China or Africa would see in the image.

        Another odd example is Jeremiah Johnson. I've read both of the books the film is based on - one is barely literate, the other is overly literate, and the film is actually a much better story (rare that that happens).

        But there's a shot early in the movie of flickering aspen leaves that always gets a reaction from me that probably no one else notices. That scene really sets the entire film for me, and makes it a more active experience. I don't think you can evoke in words the same thing that image evokes, especially since the image lasts only seconds, while reading the description and processing would take much longer, and the time interval is a big part of the context.

        I think most good literature is impossible to recreate in film, but there's a lot in film that can't be recreated in literature too. Unfortunately a lot of visual communication (esp in film) doesn't recognize or use the strengths of visual media very well, for example, the extremely fast cuts in some music videos really destroy any possibility of active participation (at least for me - might be a generational thing). They're different media, but they're both still mediated experiences.
        

        by badger on Mon Dec 05, 2005 at 11:31:00 AM PDT

        •  asdf

          You know, Borges made a really perceptive comment that the best film comes from the worst literature.  There's some truth to this.  "Bad" literature gives the director space to breathe and to explore.  "Good" literature usually confines them too much into a mistaken notion of "fidelity."

          Not always true, of course.  Like I mentioned above, I think In the Bedroom is a superior film because it understands the text in the way that superficial rendition would have missed.  

          Did you know that they were considering letting Eisenstein film a version of Ulysses?  Man, that would have been worth a watch.  

          by pico on Tue Dec 06, 2005 at 02:16:54 PM PDT

          •  Unfortunately

            both Joyce and Eisenstein are beyond my experience, so I can't really comment on that.

            The Borges quote is interesting though. In one way it's similar to what I posted upthread. On the other hand, what I posted is probably the only example I can think of, but then my judgment of what constitutes both good film and good lit is a lot braoder than most people's and a lot different. I still haven't seen Titanic and I saw The Godfather for the first time several months ago.

            The quote seems to have found a possible solution in the way Charlie Kaufman adapted The Orchid Thief for Adpatation, although that seems to be a one-time fix. It's also a quote from a (ultimately) blind man whose life was consumed with literature. But Borges, and not Al Gore, should get credit for inventing the Internet in Library of Babel.

            by badger on Wed Dec 07, 2005 at 12:15:44 AM PDT

•  Oh...

  and if anyone could suggest some good articles on the relationship between the Feingold-McCain Campaign Finance reform and political blogging, I will update the diary with them.

  by therightlies on Mon Dec 05, 2005 at 01:32:55 AM PDT