mike frank asks:
"would it be
possible to get, from the writer or others on the list, examples of the kind
of "visual trickery" that is used in "nearly all film story-telling" . . .
 
. . . for my part, what i THINK i'm concerned with is the extent to which the
camera in a film (or editing, or cinematography, or mise-en-scene. . . that
is, all the things that the film-maker controls to shape the finished work)
must be theorized as similar to the language in a novel, and thus equally
subject to fallibility"
 
Examples:
flatness (2-D) of image
black and white (when used)
color that depends on the quality of the film stock and processing
distortion by non-"normal" lenses
delimiting the field of vision to a rectangular frame
selecting one particular angle (or set of angles) to view the object from
camera movement
 
--and that's not even taking into considertion manipulations of the mise-en-
scene, editing, and sound!
 
But this is only by the thinnest analogies "similar to the language in a novel".
 
Maybe a better way to put it would be to say that *any* attempt to convey some
aspect of narrative (to confine ourselves for now just to narrative cases)
inevitably abstracts the "reality" it purports to represent.  Of course, the
mainstream of film (like the mainstream of literature) either tries to efface
that abstraction or has built a system of cues and conventions that audiences
take for granted and overlook.
 
It might be useful to go back to Rudolf Arnheim's FILM AS ART, which tries to
make a case for the *advantages* of film's inevitable abstracting capabilities.
 
Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)
 
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