Comic Book Film Style by Dru Jeffries

Author:Dru Jeffries [Jeffries, Dru]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2017-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4.3. Page from The Amazing Spider-Man #50

FIGURE 4.4. Still from Spider-Man 2

Clearly, the meaning of the film shot is enhanced by its association with the comics version of the same. This is only a slightly modified articulation of the tendency toward cinematic allusionism that Noël Carroll associates with New Hollywood directors’ obsession with film history: in both cases, a revered earlier work is invoked in a new context, in order to both “[project] and [reinforce] the themes and the emotive and aesthetic qualities of the new films,” while also benefiting from the cultural capital associated with canonical works.26 While The Amazing Spider-Man #50 is hardly a canonized work of literature, it nevertheless holds a great deal of currency within fan circles, for whom the reference is both loaded and meaningful. This practice thus invokes what Carroll calls a “two-tiered system of communication which sends an action/drama/fantasy-packed message to one segment of the audience”—those who appreciate the film solely as a self-contained narrative—“and an additional hermetic, camouflaged, and recondite one to another”—those who seek out and understand these kinds of intertextual references and whose experience of the film is significantly enhanced by the supplemental meanings they invoke.27 Allusionism may also flatter the fan because it “affords the opportunity to adopt the role of guardian of specialized knowledge.”28 For comic book fans, each new comic book film provides new opportunities to put their encyclopedic visual memories to the test.

Mimetic compositions also serve an indexical function, implicitly pointing to the previous text. Since indexicality is a concept that is so often misunderstood in film studies, it may not be immediately apparent how the relationship between the mimetic composition and its comic book source is indexical in nature. As defined by Charles Sanders Peirce, signs are “how we come to know things about the world by representing it,” be they verbal or visual in nature.29 Indexical signs—the index refers to the finger used for pointing—point toward something and are also existentially connected to the thing they represent. The concept of “existential connection,” however, is not merely causal in nature: pronouns like “that” or “this” are indices of whatever they stand in for, and a person’s first name is an index of that person. Most film scholars understand photographs as indexical because of how light imprints itself on celluloid, causing the image to come into being, similar to an inked fingerprint pressing against paper. Through the lasting influence of Bazin, Kracauer, Barthes, Cavell, and others, indexicality has become the photograph’s—and therefore live-action cinema’s—defining characteristic and the guarantor of its veracity. The shift to digital imaging practices, whether alongside or to the exclusion of emulsion-based photography, has been conceptualized by many as a loss of the image’s direct relationship to the world. For many, this represents a crisis because “digital imaging operates according to a different ontology than do indexical photographs.”30 Lev Manovich has perhaps stated this most boldly in his pronouncement that “cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a subgenre of painting.

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