VISUALISATION
THE ROLE OF THE VISUAL
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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
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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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1.
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.
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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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