In today’s readings, both Chatman and Mittell contrast some of the storytelling potentials of literature versus film. What facets of these comparisons did you find particularly helpful in thinking about these media? Are there ideas that you disagree with? Might Bordwell’s categories of diegetic and mimetic theories of narration help with these distinctions?
9 thoughts on “Responses for 9/14”
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On p. 164 Mittell writes “Serial programs refuse full resolution of plots, typically ending episodes with an unresolved cliffhanger designed to stimulate viewers to tune in for the next episode.” Watching serial programs, I’m always fascinated by the fine line between suspense and resolution. While the viewer must be curious enough to keep watching, they also need to have faith that they will be adequately rewarded for their efforts. If there aren’t enough satisfactions throughout the series, the viewer may lose the patience to keep watching. Presumably, they are aware of being strung along by cliffhangers. But the question is when do they begin to care? When do these cliffhangers begin to get old and feel cheap? When will the majority of people give up and decide it isn’t worth their while? These questions relate to my own experience watching Lost. During the first and second season I loved to hate these tantalizing cliffhangers. However, as the seasons went on my interests slowly dwindled. The show seemed to have gone too many directions, and I no longer believed that all the loose questions would ever have a satisfying answer. When the characters began traveling through time, the appearance of polar bears were still unexplained, and I couldn’t figure out who was alive or dead, the show literally lost me. Finally, the complex tension between suspense and resolution was no longer there.
I was particularly interested by Chatman’s distinction between “description” and “Description”. As I understood it, description denotes the usual literary term, while Description signifies the all-inclusive total picture, and I agree that visual media, by its nature, Describes. Literary description often attempts to “paint a picture.” I find it ironic then that one of the limitations of film is its apparent inability to paint anything less than a perfect picture. As Chatman says, every noun is “totally saturated with visual adjectives” (40). He uses this point to conclude that narrative films don’t -need- to describe at all because a perfect visual is always on hand. It is not that he believes films incapable of description–he sites “The Passengers” as an example of editing and camera movement used to describe a desert for the sake of description, unattached to any specific plot development. Chatman touches briefly on the necessity of using devices such as redundant voice-over narration if the film’s intent is to use description to highlight specific details. This distinction between description and Description clears up what I think we began to discuss on the first day of class. So, for me at least, R. Kelly’s “Stuck in the Closed” now becomes more academically intriguing. Which details are specifically pointed out in the lyrics (the policeman smokes…) and do they enhance the presentation of the story? In other words, is this an example of a video that -needs- to describe? And on the other hand, what do we ignore because we’re listening to the lyrics? How does the film’s total Description add or detract from the audio-only story originally written?
super belated post but whatever.
Nora’s talks about Chatman’s observation that film cannot help but paint a complete picture. It can’t be ambiguous; it has to lay everything out. But did anyone else think this was kind of a shallow assessment. It is predicated on the fact that all description is visual description. I’ll grant Chatman that, yes, with regards to visual Description literature has the unique ability to describe incompletely, ambiguously, and you might say in a more heightened way.
But visual description is only a small facet of Description in general. There are plenty of other types that film can be ambiguous–i.e. doesn’t HAVE to present in Totality. For example, motivational descriptions, or practical descriptions, task-related descriptions. Film can present these types of descriptions just as ambiguously, in just as heightened a manner, as literature.
Take a task-related description, for example: Let’s say there’s a film depicting a blacksmith at work. You’ve never seen a blacksmith in his workshop before, and you have no idea what a blacksmith does or what tools he uses.
If there were a corresponding literary story about the smith the task description of the blacksmithing would be clumsy and confusing if it didn’t do things like name the equipment by name, if it didn’t describe each action for what it was, etc. The end result of the actions might be ambiguous, but that’s about it. Otherwise it would have to be pretty precise. (“He pulled the rod from the forge and transferred it to the anvil. He flattened it down with the hammer.”)
Now imagine what a film could do with that task-set. The film would never have to name the equipment. The film would never have to describe an action for what it was, because every action in film is at base a undirected physical movement. The film could show banging and burning and vignettes of the smithing task in a way that the written piece could not.
so in the case of task-related descriptions the dynamic is flipped: Here literature can’t help but give a more total Description, and it is the film that has the quality of pleasant ambiguity.
right, that would be “Trapped in the Closet.” How could I forget?
I think what’s so interesting about literature is this “non-commitment” that Chatman brings up, and it is alluded to in Mittell’s essay. Literature allows for details to be indeterminate because the words are there to stimulate the reader’s mind and imagine the scenes using such description. Details can be withheld and left to be simple, vague, and short. It all boils down to the brevity of the sentence, really. Chatman mentions how the visual image in a film exhausts itself with details by adding them because everything is simultaneous and in an instant. Mittell adds that not only what’s there is important, but was is NOT there can be quickly assumed to be non-existent in the diegetic world. It feels as if that while a sentence takes its time to complete itself, a scene must get everything together an in instant in order to both satisfy and heighten the requirements of the sentence.
I would just like to further add (after taking several minutes trying to figure it out) that while I don’t necessarily disagree with Chatman’s idea about literature’s beneficial and precise way of fixing description as opposed to film’s hope-you-get-it mentality/technique, I do think that film has it’s own “fixing.” As a result of film displaying images instead of words, those unable to possibly understand description, whether it be lack of vocabulary, the topic, or previous schemata, can witness film visually show, introduce, or possibly remind one of such ideas and schemata.
I missed the 6Am deadline, but wanted to throw this in there anyway. Dustin, I believe at some point in Chatman’s analysis he compares the literary sentence to the shot. I haven’t found the exact reference yet, but the essential idea I want to get at is that the camera is “tacit” (48). It is a means of communicating description that is silent. Through its duration and location the camera effects what information is Described and what information the viewer is most likely to absorb. In this way, the camera replicates, although imperfectly, a sentence’s construction and rhythm. I suppose I like that idea.
Chatman also mentions the idea of perspective, and whether the camera’s eye can provide objective verse subjective narration. He concludes both. I bring this up because it is another example of how the cinematic shot can imitate the literary sentence. Free indirect discourse (which is a narrator expressing a character’s voice without the use of quotations i.e., How marvelous a day!) can be translated to film when the camera discloses information from the viewer. For example, when dream sequences are not properly introduced, the viewer is left in a state of confusion and the camera’s eye becomes a matter of subjectivity. What can we believe? Whose perspective are we supposed to align with? I’m sure there are other means of replicating indirect transference of emotion in film, but I’m sensing that all means of doing so may have the unwanted effect of creating momentary confusion as well, which is not necessarily true within literature. It’s those small differences between mediums that make each medium unique and worthwhile, and give us a reason to want to consume or create one over the other.
To build on Dustin and Patti’s points: I think Chatman’s comparison that “literary narrative has a kind of power over visual details that is not enjoyed by the cinema…the power of noncommitment” (40-41) is a crucial one. Whereas text can shroud a subject through selective description, filmic description doesn’t enjoy the same subtlety, often meaning certain details are plainly visible; in this way, all subjects in film inherently have a more concrete texture that can be both a blessing and a curse. At the same time, film is perhaps nowhere as directly authoritative or specifically accurate as literature (e.g. as we discussed, the problem of depicting a “luscious” fruit in cinema).
Whereas literary description, even during obvious moments which halt the narrative’s chrono-logic, seems to be a conventionally accepted device that explicitly informs, filmic description is problematic as all the pictorial details are shown simultaneously. To highlight certain details, whether by camera trickery or editing, is to court the danger of being almost too transparent (causing viewers to become aware of the director’s construction, and therefore return to disbelief); some directors have played with this notion in more self-reflexive films like Annie Hall, though for the most part, it’s hard for film to be as directive, as the gap between story and audience is wider. Despite the device of the “unreliable narrator” also cropping up in literature, there seems to be, in a way, a greater degree of narrative control with text.
Am I the only one who thought that these were due before Thursday…? Wow. Evidently, I am 30+ hours late on this… Anyway…
It should be stated that the cinematic shot will NEVER be like the literary sentence. When one is reading descriptive narration in a book one places one’s own archetypes in it. For example: “The hairy dog jumped on the table.” Chances are that everyone is imagining a different kind of dog and a different kind of table (unless further description is given and even then, one can interpret description differently). The cinematic shot, on the other hand, is blatant. There is no mistaking. What the director wants you to see is what you will be seeing. This is why there is sometimes dissapointment when a book gets turned into a film and the cast that is chosen does not resemble how the characters look in one’s mind. While it is true that they are both similar, the mediums are still extremely different.
Let it also be noted that the camera is NOT objective–simply put: there is a world that exists outside of the framing that it is not simultaneously capturing. By choosing WHAT to show and WHEN there is subjectivity.