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VISUALISATION

THE ROLE OF THE VISUAL

PICTORIAL NUANCE Ernst Lubitsch, German director, "In my silent period in Germany as well as in America I tried to use less and less subtitles. It was my aim to tell the story through pictorial nuances and the facial expressions on my actors. There were often very long scenes in which people were talking without being interrupted by subtitles. The lip movement was used as a kind of pantomime. Not that I wanted the audience to become lip readers, but I tried to time the speech in such a way that the audience could listen to their eyes. " That Lubitsch Touch [1968] quoted in Leyda, Film Makers Speak.

CREATIVE COGNITION ÒIn contemporary research on human cognition, topics such as retrieving memories, generating images, and solving problems have typically been explored in what are essentially non-creative contexts. Being creative is one of the most important things that a person can do, yet there is little one can actually learn, about creativity from reading the current cognitive literature. Indeed, if a person were to ask ÒWhat can I do to act more creatively ?Ó few answers could be found in most of the cognitive studies that have been conducted up to now.Ó from Finke Ward Smith 1992 p.4

Alfed Hitchcock, film director, article in Stage, July 1936 ÒThere is not enough visualizing done in [film] studios, and instead far too much writing. People take a sheet of paper and scrawl down a load of dialogue and instructions, and call that a dayÕs work. It leads them nowhere. There is also a growing habit of reading a film script by the dialogue alone. I deplore this method, this lazy neglect of the action, this lack of reading action in a film story or, if you like it, this ability to visualize.Ó quoted in Sidney Gottlieb, Hitchcock on Hitchcock, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, the original title of HitchcockÕs article was ÒClose Your Eyes and Visualize !Ó

 

 

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THE AUTHOR AND THE IMAGE William Saroyan, "To tell a story implies plainly a narrative ability. How to intersperse description with action, and in what quantities ? How much to dwell on the minor activities of a character, which will reveal that character, before continuing the major action of the drama itself ? How much dialogue? How much straight statement, how much silent implication of the underlying theme ? And so on. All these quantities will depend on nothing but the quality of the author's taste, and on his response to certain undeniable influences in life outside literature. I mean technical influences like, say, the cinema. Add now television and the increased of the photographed image in newspapers, magazines. In short, the great new currency of the Image. Whether this enormous pictorial increase makes us see more clearly is debatable: it is possible that too quick a succession of images becomes blurred, cancels itself out, as with the pictures in an art gallery when one tries to see too much in too short a visit; it is possible that a Victorian faced with a few oleographs absorbed much more (compare the lasting impression of the illustrations in a book read and prized in childhood). But what is certain is that the frequency of the image projected at us has resulted in an increase of movement or action. Even a motionless photographed figure, static in itself, implies action before and afterwards. And certainly in films and television you cannot have a figure on the screen sitting about and doing nothing for long. This has had its effect on writing. The pace has increased. " from William Sansom, The Birth of a Story, Chatto & Windus 1972.

DAYDREAMING Jerome Singer on Daydreaming to Drawing as a child, Singer 1981 ÒAs schoolwork, sports and organised games took more of my time, ands as I naturally became embarassed by continued overt make-believe, I indulged in these fantasy characters more and more by drawing pictures of them in notebooks. Eventually the sequences were almost totally internalised in private visual imagery. My drawings were much like comic strips elaborating particular sequences of adventures, except that no captions were necessary because the fantasy was played out internally....
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