Words on Screen by Chion Michel; Gorbman Claudia;

Author:Chion, Michel; Gorbman, Claudia; [Chion, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: chio17498, PER004030, PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / History & Criticism, PER004010, PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / Direction & Production
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

6

Half-Reading

When the Character Reads, the Viewer Does Not

In Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) psychoanalyst Constance Petersen (Ingrid Bergman) receives a letter from her patient, John (Gregory Peck). The letter, bearing the masthead of the psychiatric hospital where they both work, first appears out of focus, then clearly (172, 173): “I cannot involve you in this for many reasons, one of them being that I love you.” The change in focus marks the shot as subjective; it indicates not a simple problem of myopia, and even less a technical error, but rather a state of the reader’s turmoil and confusion. Such subjective reading shots are rare in cinema, even though many films show us characters reading. They show the reader and what she or he reads separately (with some rare exceptions, such as in the films of Jane Campion that I mentioned earlier).

On one hand, the look of the character who is reading communicates to us nothing about what is before her eyes; for us the character’s face absorbing a text we cannot see is enigmatic. On the other hand, when the character reads, it’s as if the text is offering her an escape from the two-dimensional world in which we see her confined.

This is not always the case. With Godard, characters reading (often in bathtubs but elsewhere, too) are often busy reading aloud a passage from the book in their hands to a third party who is often uninterested or doesn’t understand a word. They are rarely alone with what they read; they seem to want to share whatever it is. For them the book cannot be a portal to another reality.

Aiding or Impeding Half-Reading

With silent films the audience was invited not only to see moving images and hear live sound (music and sometimes commentary and/or sound effects) but also to do a lot of reading, both diegetic text and not. In both cases early twentieth-century moviegoers faced a relatively new situation that has become common since then: text inserted into a dramatic action had to be read in a limited time, since the film had to move on. So it was necessary not to have too many words and for the spectator to have the time to read—but not to grow impatient because the text often introduced a pause or rupture in the narrative rhythm. Of course, we can no longer be this spectator of 1900 or even of 1960, for now we are used to pausing films where we want and however long we want.

News tickers that used to scroll repeating headlines across buildings have appeared in films as the diegetic equivalent of what film viewers themselves routinely experience. In Breathless, for example, Michel Poiccard notices at the top of a building a sentence about the progress of the murder investigation in which he is implicated.

But by studying the film as if it were a book, we risk forgetting that until the early 1980s (when a wider audience was gaining access to “reading” films at home with the “pause” capability

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.