The following essay is a comparison between the visual narrative techniques between films and comic books. These techniques have been extracted from the articles called “Imagetextuality 'Cutting Up' Again” by Donald Ault and “The Possibility of Minimal Units in the Filmic Image” by Sophie De Grauwe. The following are points that are concerned with the narrative of different mediums, which will be compared in the conclusion.
Comic book Narrative techniques
According to Ault, comic books have three aspects which are the:
Imagery order - the pictoral dimension
Symbolic order - the linguistic dimension
Real order - the interruptions or cuts in the body-space of the page
The Narrative Techniques that comic books use are:
The use of an undivided image to illustrate a verbal text - The word spaces cover parts of the images on the page so that one has to use their imagination to compensate for the rest of the image.
Fragmentation of the gaze – This allows one to see a character from different places at the same time or different places at different times
Cut and the suture - this invokes subtle temporal and spatial discrepancies that produce a visual surplus or excessivity. Simultaneous, different spatial "perspectives "
characters relating indirectly to the reader and characters relating directly to the readers
shifts in aspectual incommensurability – same character goes through radical transformations
cutting in the body of the page so severely that it calls attention to the surface of the text.
cutting up frames into (dis) ordered fragments.
myself seeing myself - This momentary allusion to the desire to master the imaginary by transferring it to the fortuitous actions
Producing identity through the failure of representation:
· multiple intersecting trajectories of misrecognition.
· relay of signifiers,
· explicit mobilization of the roles of metonymy and metaphor.
· disruption of the suture of the imaginary and symbolic by the real
The different narrative strategies:
the gaze,
the imaginary,
the symbolic,
and the real
Film Techniques
De Grauwe has a social semiotic approach to analysing the minimal units of narratibve in film that are:
Abstraction,
Discreteness,
Iconicity,
Economy, and
Arbitrariness
Representations represent dynamic relations between participants. These processes are represented by vectors (diagonal lines) or directional movements.
One-participant action process - action realized "by the vector created by the diagonal line of action
Symbolic attributive process - symbolic, realized by juxtaposition (establishes the identity of the Carrier, i.e. what the Carrier means or is)
Interpersonal metafunction
(between the producer and viewer
size of frame - eg "close-up" "long shot"
horizontal and vertical angles
moving camera
"speech functions" or "speech acts",
modality "truth value or credibility of […] statements about the world" (K&VL 1996: 160).
Different social groups that determine modality
· technological,
· sensory,
· abstract,
· and naturalistic
Iedema has identified four coding orientations of the moving image:
· the Real,
· the Really Real,
· the Real-as-Sensation,
· and the "Symbolizing the Real".
textual or compositional metafunction
· Salience “degree to which the element draws attention to itself" (K&VL 1996: 225)
· Temporal
· Spatial
Semiotic systems can be studied at different levels of specificity,
different levels of schematicity:
Langue1 is the most abstract level - Phonic and conceptual terms in the two orders of difference
Langue2 is the level of "sign types" - Sign types; typical lexicogrammatical forms and patterns (morpheme to sentence)
Langue3 is the level of the typical uses of the forms according to the text type
Metz
According to Metz, there is no one cinematographic "code", but a multitude of cinematographic codes. Each of these codes has its own minimal unit:
Segmental units are units which "occupy a continuous segment of filmic space and time" (Metz 1971: 151; my translation
Suprasegmental units are more abstract, being not present in the "textual surface".
Eco
Three articulations in film (kinesic, iconic signs, iconic figures)
Two articulations in verbal language
Groupe m
Minimal units on visual perception and cognition
Groupe µ identifies three basic terms involved in the constitution of iconic signs
Signifiers and referents (see figure 6). Types are mental representations of visual precepts
Groupe µ's division of the semiotic field into iconic and plastic signs
Meaning is realized simultaneously on three different levels: the referential, the interpersonal, and the compositional level
Phonemic features
Contrast is established by realising a distinction between the feature and its absence, Different positions, making each position into a different feature
Exaggeration of both similarities and differences in the image.
It exaggerates the difference between figure and ground and it emphasises the similarities constituting the figure.
Mobility between entities and sub-entities
What is an entity in one image can be a sub-entity in another.
Representational processes
These can be discreted on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic level through features like movement, duration of movement.
Interpersonal and compositional levels
The contrasting systems are gradational systems: contrast is established by making a distinction between degrees of a feature
Visual parameters
The contrasting system is again a gradational system. ‘Relative contrast may be less relative in some cases than in others, and absolute contrast is not as absolute as is sometimes maintained. As regards the former, the feature of /brightness/, for example, is a gradational feature’ De Grauwe
Viewer/listener has to go through certain discretion and abstraction processes to establish discrete units.
Referential abstraction.
In the filmic image, the concretisation is established not only by the context of situation and the textual context but also by the instance itself, its concrete expression
Abstraction of a concrete is given
Through selection of its pertinent features so that a type is established
Through its analysis into several types rather than one
This is a result of the arbitrariness of verbal language. Arbitrariness induces a distance from reality
A certain level of abstraction is necessary to understand the filmic image: without it, there could be no recognition of concrete instances.
Lighting and focus can also enhance abstraction of represented participants as well as of the setting in general.
Limited number of meanings realised by absolute contrast it offers a large number of possible meanings realised by relative contrast.
Iconicity, arbitrariness and economy
Iconicity
This is linked to systems of relative contrast on the basis of gradational scales. It also entails an increased difficulty to manipulate reality when compared to arbitrariness, pro-filmic reality, abstraction of represented participants, changes in colour, form or texture, etc
Arbitrariness
This brings about a distancing of reality, so that manipulation of reality becomes possible.
The greatest distance from reality
Economy
Results in arbitrariness. There is no paradigmatic economy as regards the inventory of represented participants. However, paradigmatic economy is also concerned with the limitation of grammatical gradational scales
Syntagmatic level
Temporal syntagmatic economy - Rather than being a grammatical limiting device, increase or decrease of temporal complexity has become linked to text-types
Spatial syntagmatic economy - the reduction of represented participants through abstracting devices, and the reduction of information through the limitation of depth of field
Conclusion
Comic narrative is a more non-linear form of narrative and is concerned with the use of frames, how hey are depicted as a whole, what they represent and how they relate to each other. Film is a linear kind of narrative that uses abstractness and discreteness, iconicity, economy and arbitrariness to express the subjects and events. This is through different camera positions, lighting, editing, ect to depict a perspective of the subject, events and story. Comic’s verbal form is text, which is expressed in a visual manner while film uses audio, which is expressed through tone and diction. Despite this, both comics and film express their subjects, stories and events through the selection by the producer or creator of what to reveal to the viewer but in their own distinct manners.
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