Let's remember that this montage can work both ways. An accompanying verbal text can anchor the visual image in a different way. Case in point, the Rodney King video viewed in montage with the defense team's "voiceover" which argues that the beaten King was really struggling to fight back. Claims about the "objectivity" of a given visual image are at the heart of the struggle for ideological dominance and closure over interpretation that we all engage in. More important than the image's actual "objectivity," it seems to me is its widespread perceived objectivity. Barthes discusses the problem of the photograph's appearing to be a message without a code. That said, I would still argue that visual images can provide a whole series of clues about reality that verbal utterances can't. A couple of days ago I saw a new documentary video with lengthy footage of the Chicano high school "blowouts" of the late 1960s in LA. No matter how many history lectures students listen to or articles they read about these walkouts, there's no question that "re-seeing" these events even through the non-objective video footage will provide them with a wealth of previously unavailable information with which to understand these past events. How could one know how "clean cut" most of these kids looked, for example, without access to that visual information in today's context of quite different youth attire. Ellen McCracken Spanish & Portuguese UC Santa Barbara On Tue, 19 Sep 1995, Mike Frank wrote: > somehow i just got around to liz weis's comments of 4 september in which she > says, in part: > > > > Often a naive or biased narrator is contradicted by the images--which are > > SOMEHOW even more "objective" in contrast to the unreliable speaker. > > Case in point: "Badlands" with its naive narration spoken by Sissy > > Spacek's character. [caps mine] > > yes . . . terrence malick's entire two-[wonderful]-film career was based on > this device, a kind of eisensteinian montage in which the image track > collides with the sound track to produce something quite new . . . this > device is not all that uncommon, but is rarely theorized in this way . . . > > . . . but more important [i think] . . . is the claim that images are SOMEHOW > more objective than speakers . . . is this always true? . . . is it true in > cinema specifically or is it a generalization about all images vis a vis words? > . . . is someone out there willing to speculate or theorize > about why this should be so, how it is so, and what use the language[s] of > cinema can make of it? . . . aren't these issues at the heart of > understanding the way images communicate? > > > > mike frank [[log in to unmask]] > > > > ---- > To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L > in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask] > ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]