Signing off for now

Dear all
I'm not going to be timetabled with DFGA next year so these occasional posts will be stopping I'm afraid. I hope they have been of use and for those of you underging your final dissertation research they still might be useful, so if you have not already done that literature search you might look through some of my old posts for suggestions.
Good luck with your future thoughts on these things, my final tip if you are thinking about how new technology is shaping communication is to read '64 Things You Need to Know Now for Then: How to Face the Digital Future without Fear' by Ben Hammersley and to make sure you know these things http://laptoplogic.com/resources/64-things-every-geek-should-know
Cheers Garry

Playing computer games can be like being in the real world.

This is a really good thing to listen to http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00v0qpf

Using semiotics to decode an image

‘Drive’ 2011 Writer, Director, Producer. Nicolas Winding Refn
Star Ryan Gosling


‘Drive Angry’ 2011 Patrick Lussier starring Nicolas Cage

After the communication theory lecture several people came to me and fed back that the semiotics section on how to de-code an image was perhaps the most useful. However the details of how to use semiotics to analyse an image were perhaps a little vague or brushed over as there were another 6 areas of communication theory to introduce. So, in order to help with an understanding of using semiotics as part of your tools for analysis I have decided to unpick the process a little further.

A film several students have mentioned recently in essays is ‘Drive’. It is a film that has generated much critical acclaim and perhaps this is partly because it is a good film to analyse.

Because this is a short blog post, I shall attempt to constrain the text by simply analysing the poster for the film; however points made should be directly applicable to the film itself. However this does mean that several areas that would normally accompany an analysis of a film are missing. In particular the codes associated with shot selection, mise en scene, editing, sound etc etc are not dealt with and you would be expected to include these things in an analysis. At some point I will go into these issues in more detail.

N.b I shall try and open out the issues surrounding this analysis by pointing out what I am doing as I go along. This will make for a quite clumsy bit of writing, but bear with it, as I’m trying to explain how and why you can do this sort of thing. I will also leave things open for exploration by the reader, suggesting where the analysis might go, rather than doing all the work.

I shall now undertake a semiotic analysis of the image used for the Cannes Festival poster for the 2011 Nicolas Winding Refn film ‘Drive’.

When setting out on a visual analysis I would usually recommend undertaking a detailed compare and contrast of paired images dealing with a similar topic; this is a lot easier than trying to analyse a single image. Therefore I will use the poster image for a superficially similar film from the same year, 2011, ‘Drive Angry’ directed by Patrick Lussier starring Nicolas Cage. Note: If you are using this guide to help you through conducting an analysis and want to reference it, use Chandler’s much better supportive web-site and text as references. This blog is just an indication of what to do, Chandler is much more comprehensive. (See the reference section at the end of this post)

Identifying the ‘text’
As we are going to use semiotics as a tool, the first thing to do is to establish why we are using it. Semiotics as a discipline regards all the things human beings produce as being capable of establishing semiotic meaning and when we start examining these things, semiotics regards them as texts. (Chandler, 2007) This could be an analysis of a haircut or a pair of trainers, if so the haircut or trainers would become the text. In this case the text is a film poster. We should always include a copy of the text with our analysis of it, and explain any significant shortcomings of the copy. We should also describe the specific medium used, the genre to which the text belongs and the context in which it is found.

The first step is to consider why we are analysing the text. This will affect which questions seem important. Usually we would analyse a text to come to a deeper understanding of what is being communicated. In particular by using semiotics we can demonstrate that meaning can have several levels. By using the difference between ‘denotation’ (a literal meaning of the text) and ‘connotation’ (an association, emotional or logical which the text points towards and which provides us with a way into an understanding of the deeper meaning behind the text).
Why am I using Drive as a text? I think it is a film that is not only current and well reviewed (winner of the ‘prix de la mise en scene’ at Cannes) but that it uses very familiar film conventions in fresh ways, reinventing the action movie, it has several channels of reference to past classic films and styles, such as Film Noir, gangster movies, romance and car centered movies. Therefore before I set off I feel confident that it will be useful in developing a wider context for the use of a semiotic analysis. (I’m also hoping it will work as a learning tool or model for others to follow).

So what sort of sign is this poster?
Is it
Iconic -- a sign which resembles the signified (portrait, photo, diagram, map)
Symbolic -- a sign which does not resemble the signified but which is purely conventional (the word stop, a red traffic light, or a national flag)
or
Indexical -- a sign which is inherently connected in some way (existentially or causally) to the signified (e.g. smoke signifies fire; and all the little symbols you see on web pages -- mailboxes, envelopes, arrows etc).

The poster is a sign of the movie, therefore as it resembles the movie it is iconic. But where is the signifier? The whole picture? What does it signify? The movie? However within the poster the driver’s glove is an important sign as well. This is indexical, it signifies driving expertise. There is also some symbolic signage, the logo for the Cannes film festival for instance. The poster could therefore be seen as iconic, symbolic and indexical. This complexity could therefore be another reason for choosing it as something to analyse.

As this is a mass produced poster it is a ‘token’ as opposed to a ‘type’. It is one amongst many copies, rather than being an original, like a painting. How does this influence our interpretation? We might have to reflect upon film conventions as well as advertising conventions. We need to think about this image as belonging to mass culture. It is made to be widely distributed and used to attract audiences to the film itself.

What are the important signifiers and what do they signify?
During a seminar session there were several suggestions as to what the signifiers might be. Below were some of the ones picked out. Initially we were looking for denotation signifiers or the literal meaning of signifiers. As soon as denotation was established, it was apparent that connotation or the deeper meaning started to come through. For instance in this case the driving glove not only signified driving expertise (denotation) but also started to articulate a set of signifiers related to emotional detachment. (connotation)

The driving glove in 'Drive'

The driving glove is clearly prominent and signifies the status of the driver as someone who considers himself an expert. The steering wheel is controlled using one hand, not both hands as recommended by driving instructors, again suggesting that this driver is confident and easily in control. However there is a further connotation that could be developed and that is one of distancing and ‘coolness’. By wearing gloves the driver doesn’t touch anything, the physical sense ‘touch’ being something we echo when we say someone was ‘touched’ by something. We tend to call emotional people ‘touchy-feely’ and there is a secondary set of signifiers operating that all point to emotional detachment and ‘coolness’ that the driving glove reinforces. The glove itself is also ‘stylish’ and beautifully crafted in leather, the owner has taken pride in the choice of these gloves and is ‘cool’ in that other sense of being comfortably stylish. We can deduce from the above observation that there are two systems within which these signs make sense. The first is that of the world of the fast driver, the other is about emotional detachment and ‘coolness’.

The hand on the steering wheel 'Drive Angry'

In contrast, in the ‘Drive Angry’ poster Nicholas Cage’s naked hand grips the steering wheel, a steering wheel that is also clearly made of wood and metal, whilst the steering wheel in ‘Drive’ is covered on some anonymous black material. Cage’s character is, as the film’s title suggests, ‘angry’, clearly in touch with his emotions, to the extent that emotions are taking control.
In ‘Drive’ the distancing of the nameless lead character is further reinforced by the fact that in the poster he is clearly behind glass.


Light shining off the window screen. ‘Drive’

We are positioned as an audience in this car’s path, the driver being clearly behind the glass of the window screen. The duality of this situation is fascinating. On the one hand we as an audience are directly involved, but with the potential impact of the car, which is heading straight towards us. The driver gazes off to the right, light reflects across the wind screen, he is unaware of us, distant and cold.
In contrast the figures in ‘Drive Angry’ are seen through an open window, we are close to these people, they are sharply defined. The car itself passes across our line of vision, it is moving off to the right, we are not going to be involved directly with this car, we are invited to look at the woman’s breasts, appreciate her wind-blown hair and respect the focused maleness of the driver. She glances backwards worried, he stares forward, angry and focused. The dark blackness of the car’s interior is used as a backdrop to the brightly lit faces of the car’s occupants. (At this point we could start looking at male and female signifiers and how film conventions are used to establish stereotypical gender roles. The concept of the male gaze and the writings of Laura Mulvey could come into play). But in this case I’m trying to keep moving on in order to indicate where analysis might be undertaken. The construction of maleness, is an issue I would suggest someone could open out in relation to the lead character of ‘Drive’.


The couple in the car ‘Angry Driver’

In ‘Drive’ the car’s lone occupant’s face begins to blur into the rest of the image, the fact that he is a loner, thus reinforcing the image of the ‘cool’ outsider. In contrast the male lead in ‘Angry Driver’ needs to bolster his maleness by having a beautiful female companion; two essentially different approaches, which could be opened out in detail if we were to analyse the films themselves. In particular the complex relationship that is established between the ‘Drive’ male lead and the ‘heroine’ of the film, which could be used to illustrate a more complex understanding of male/female role models.
These posters are set within very different landscapes. The ‘Drive’ poster is a night scene, set in a city landscape. A car with its headlights on follows us, we see vague glimpses of the city and are reminded of a setting from a ‘film noir’ or the urban context of films such as ‘Taxi Driver’.


‘Drive’ View through the rear window

The ‘Angry Driver’ poster is set within a romantic stormy landscape of swirling clouds, flickers of flame and sparks drift past, the raw energy of nature, explosive combinations of air and fire, all brought together to support the emotional intensity of the subject. The romantic landscape paradigm could be a starting point for a sub-set of connotations, which could be compared and contrasted to the urban. As Jaworski and Thurlow (2010) state, “mobility, and especially automobility,has undeniably altered rural and especially urban landscapes, with transport infrastructure (roads, car parks, railways), architecture (stations, out-of-town shopping centres, drive-through restaurants, petrol and service stations, motels, coach and train stations, and airports). As a sub-text to this analysis the semiotics of the two different landscapes as seen through the windows of the respective cars could be examined. This is another Paradigmatic analysis, (the paradigm here is landscape) The rural landscape has at times been used to signify the vitality of nature, (Tanner, 20011) this in contrast to the urban landscape that is often used to signify alienation from nature. This subtext can be used to reinforce a reading of the ‘Drive’ image as one that signifies emotional distance.


‘Drive Angry’ The landscape through the window.

The use of landscape as a sub-text for the ‘Drive Angry’ poster in contrast to the ‘Drive’ poster can be used to reinforce the sense of highly charged emotional vitality that is central to action movies. Landscape can be understood as an aspect of ‘mise en scene’. Therefore another starting point for analysis opens out which could be about the nature of city spaces in film as opposed to rural ones; environmental factors such as street lighting and urban furniture and how these signify certain aspects of the urban, (artificial light/sunlight, grime rather than dirt, waste rather than fertiliser etc)
In any flat image the formal elements that can be examined are composition, space and colour. You can further analyse these things in terms of linear direction, shape, tonal value, texture, and spatial implication. Concepts such as balance, contrast, harmony, emphasis, movement, proportion, variety or unity may be used to help develop an understanding of how these elements help develop signification.
The dominant colour in both images is blue. However there are subtle differences in how the blue is used.


Colour cross section 'Drive'

Colour cross section 'Drive Angry'

‘Drive’ establishes a blue dominant, with light white mainly generated by the driver’s white coat. ‘Drive Angry’ is again blue dominant but this is punctuated by flecks of red and because the skin tones are not mediated by being behind glass they provide a starker contrast. Again ‘Drive’ is cool throughout, whilst ‘Drive Angry’ has hot spots, suggesting a much wider emotional range. The driver in ‘Drive’ is particularly cold, his coat being suggestive of white ice, floating on cold blue sea. It could be argued that blue always represents the world of death or the spirit, however as Kress and Van Leeuwen, (2001) have argued signifiers, and therefore also colours, carry a set of possible meanings from which sign-makers and interpreters select according to their communicative needs and interests in a given context. In this context (the advertising poster) perhaps this issue could be opened out by discussing the use of blue within advertising posters in general.

Geometry/formalist issues

'Drive' is Portrait


Drive Angry' is landscape
'

The importance of structural/formal dynamics in still images often begins with a consideration of whether the image is portrait or landscape. Portrait as a format relates directly to us as human beings. The vertical format reflects our own bi-lateral symmetry and suggests that the relationship we have with the image is similar as to the one we have with another human being. Landscape format suggests that we are meant to enter into this space in the same way that we enter the open vistas of a real landscape.
Issues to discuss as a formal visual analysis develops would be whether or not the main focus is central or off centre, whether the image is stable (usually this would be ensured by a square format) or unstable (usually this would be due to an angular direction). For instance the ‘Drive’ image slopes off to the right, which is in the same direction as the driver’s gaze, whilst in ‘Drive Angry, the whole image seems to be directed downwards.
Other questions:
What does the Symbolic/written text signify? Typographic choice, use of caps, italics, font choice etc. Choice of text, ‘prix de la mise en scene’ as opposed to ‘Shot in 3D’. Text placement, such as actor’s and director’s names etc.
Modality
What are the reality claims? It could be argued that ‘Drive angry’ could be read as a fantasy. ‘Drive’ in contrast has more reality claims even though we know it is also a fiction. The issue here is plausibility. ‘Drive Angry’ is suggestive of a decent into hell, while ‘Drive’ suggests that the bad things that happen are simply the result of human nature.
Modality refers to the reality status accorded to or claimed by a sign, text or genre. More formally, Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress (1988) declare that 'modality refers to the status, authority and reliability of a message. In making sense of a text, its interpreters make 'modality judgements' about it, drawing on their knowledge of the world and of the medium. For instance, they assign it to fact or fiction, actuality or acting, live or recorded, and they assess the possibility or plausibility of the events depicted or the claims made in it.
If you were going to open out this area of analysis these are the main questions.
What reality claims are made by the text?
Does it allude to being fact or fiction?
What references are made to an everyday experiential world?
How do you make use of such markers to make judgements about the relationship between the text and the world?
Does the text operate within a realist representational code?
To whom might it appear realistic?
Paradigmatic analysis
Whereas syntagmatic analysis studies the 'surface structure' of a text, paradigmatic analysis seeks to identify the various paradigms (or pre-existing sets of signifiers) which underlie the texts. In the case of ‘Drive’ I would suggest that there is a set of cinematic signifiers that surround the idea of the young male ‘outsider’ and that these images can be traced back to the iconic ‘look’ developed by the way James Dean and other young male stars were presented during the 1950s. These 50s young men it could be argued came in two models, the cool James Dean type, a slightly confused outsider trying to find meaning in the world and the more angry, visceral, inarticulate figure such as that developed by Marlon Brando in the Wild One, which I would suggest is the distant model for the Nicholas Cage character.


Brando in the Wild One


James Dean in Rebel without a cause


Fake poster, as if James Dean had been in 'Drive'

'Paradigmatic relations' are the oppositions and contrasts between the signifiers that belong to the same set from which those used in the text were drawn. So what we have to do is at this point chose a stance to take. In this case I am choosing to develop an argument that signifiers taken from a particular film history are most important
Some more questions
To which class of paradigms (medium; genre; theme) does the whole text belong? To look at James Dean and film’s young men as outsiders. To look at clothes worn, the open neck look, hair cut etc
How might a change of medium affect the meanings generated? If these images were not film posters, what else could they be?
What might the text have been like if it had formed part of a different genre?
What paradigm sets do each of the signifiers used belong to? For example, in photographic, televisual and filmic media, one paradigm might be shot size.
Why do you think each signifier was chosen from the possible alternatives within the same paradigm set? What values does the choice of each particular signifier connote?
What signifiers from the same paradigm set are noticeably absent?
What contrasted pairs seem to be involved (e.g. nature/culture)?
Apply the commutation test in order to identify distinctive signifiers and to define their significance. This involves an imagined substitution of one signifier for another of your own, and assessing the effect.
What is the syntagmatic structure of the text?
Identify and describe syntagmatic structures in the text which take forms such as narrative, argument or montage. As a film poster photographic montage is the structure. This would be compared to the narrative elements in the film. See Drive" What If... Poster © 2012 by Peter Stults
How does one signifier relate to the others used (do some carry more weight than others)?
How does the sequential or spatial arrangement of the elements influence meaning?
Are there formulaic features that have shaped the text?
How far does identifying the paradigms and syntagms help you to understand the text?

Rhetorical tropes
What tropes (e.g. metaphors and metonyms) are involved?
How are they used to influence the preferred reading? You might want to revisit the Communication lecture to remind yourself what these were.

Intertextuality

Does it allude to other genres?
Does it allude to or compare with other texts within the genre?
How does it compare with treatments of similar themes within other genres?
Does one code within the text (such as a linguistic caption to an advertisement or news photograph) serve to 'anchor' another (such as an image)? If so, how?
What semiotic codes are used?
Do the codes have double, single or no articulation?
Which codes are specific to the medium?
Which codes are shared with other media?
How do the codes involved relate to each other (e.g. words and images)?
Which codes are notable by their absence?
What relationships does the text seek to establish with its readers?
How direct is the mode of address and what is the significance of this?
What cultural assumptions are called upon?
What seems to be the preferred reading?
How far does this reflect or depart from dominant cultural values?
How 'open' to interpretation does the sign seem to be?

Social semiotics
What does a purely structural analysis of the text downplay or ignore?
Who created the sign? Try to consider all of those involved in the process.
Whose realities does it represent and whose does it exclude?
For whom was it intended? Look carefully at the clues and try to be as detailed as you can.
How do people differ in their interpretation of the sign? Clearly this needs direct investigation.
On what do their interpretations seem to depend?
Illustrate, where possible, dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings.
How might a change of context influence interpretation?

You don’t have to develop answers for all these questions, they are simply there to stimulate questions and help you say things that perhaps you would not be able to without a bit of prompting.

Some references

Chandler, D (2007) Semiotics the basics London: Routledge
An on line version of Chandler’s text is available at: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html
Jaworski A and Thurlow, C (2010) Introducing Semiotic Landscapes In Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds.) Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum.
1–40.

Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2001) Multimodal Discourse – The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.

Mulvey, L (1989). Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Tanner, K (2001) Spirit in the cities: searching for soul in the urban landscape New York: Augsburg Fortress
Mercer, J (2012) Semiology and Film Theory Film Reference available at: http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Romantic-Comedy-Yugoslavia/Semiotics-SEMIOLOGY-AND-FILM-THEORY.html

Moebius died on Saturday

Jean Giraud posing by a fresco based on his artwork in Poitiers, France, in 2008. Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images

Those of you who have had to sit through my lecture on the comic book will have realised that one of my all time heroes was Moebius. This is the full text of Steve Holland's Jean Giraud obituary taken from this Tuesday's Guardian.

The artist Jean Giraud was principally known for his work on comic books under two pen names. As Gir, the co-creator of Blueberry, one of France's most popular strips, his brushwork was detailed and realistic; as Moebius, he used intricate, visually arresting penwork to explore the subconscious in his creations Arzach, Le Garage Hermétique (The Airtight Garage) and L'Incal (The Incal). But Giraud, who has died of cancer aged 73, had an impact on the visual arts that went beyond comics. He was seen as a figurehead linking bandes dessinées with modernism and nouveau réalisme. As the co-creator of Métal Hurlant magazine, he took comics to an older, more literate audience. In cinema, his fans ranged from Federico Fellini to Hayao Miyazaki and his style influenced dozens of others, including Ridley Scott, George Lucas, James Cameron and Luc Besson.

Giraud was born in a suburb of Paris. His parents divorced when he was three and he grew up in Fontenay-sous-Bois with his grandparents. He began drawing illustrations and comic strips in his early teens and sold his first story to the publisher Jacques Dumas (better known as Marijac) at the age of 15. At 18, after two years' study at the École des Arts Appliqués in Paris, he began producing artwork for advertising and fashion, as well as his first substantial comic strip, Les Aventures de Frank et Jérémie, for Far West magazine.

When his mother moved to Mexico to remarry, Giraud joined her for nine months and found himself inspired by the desert landscapes. He returned to France to undertake military service, drawing for a military newspaper while stationed in Germany and Algeria. On his release, he visited the Belgian artist Joseph Gillain, who hired him as an assistant on the western strip Jerry Spring. In 1961-62, Giraud also worked on the non-fiction L'Histoire des Civilisations and produced illustrations for the satirical magazine Hara-Kiri, where he first began using Moebius as a signature.

Giraud met Jean-Michel Charlier, editor-in-chief of the newly founded Pilote magazine, and was invited to draw Charlier's new western strip featuring Lieutenant Blueberry. Blueberry was the nickname of Mike Donovan, a lieutenant in the US cavalry based at Fort Navajo, where he faced constant battles against gunrunners and Native American tribes. Drawing and sometimes colouring Blueberry filled most of Giraud's time for the next decade, by the end of which he was keen to explore new territories. He contributed a number of short stories to Pilote, notably La Déviation and L'Homme Est-il Bon?, exploring different styles of storytelling and letting his imagination roam free.

After one further volume of Blueberry, Giraud teamed up with others to found Le Humanoïdes Associés and publish Métal Hurlant (Screaming Metal). Heavy Metal, as it became in translation, quickly attracted the likes of comic creators Richard Corben, Jacques Tardi, Vaughn Bode, Serge Clerc and Enki Bilal. It was in the pages of Métal Hurlant that Moebius experimented with non-narrative (Arzach) and non-linear (The Airtight Garage) stories, developing many of the iconic images that were to make Moebius such an influence – the figure of Arzach flying over a barren alien landscape on a pterodactyl, or the pith-helmeted Major Grubert, a central figure in The Airtight Garage.

Giraud's experimental stories also appealed to the film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky, who, in 1975, was attempting to adapt Frank Herbert's political, ecological and religious epic of science fiction, Dune. Although that particular adaptation eventually came to nothing, in the process Giraud met the visual effects supervisor Dan O'Bannon, who went on to write the screenplay for Alien. Its director, Ridley Scott, used many of the creative team from Jodorowsky's abortive Dune project – including Giraud, Chris Foss and HR Giger – to design what has become a science fiction/horror classic.

Giraud was now able to split his time between his various personae: Gir was able to take up the reins of Blueberry once again, writing as well as drawing the strip following Charlier's death in 1989. He also penned four volumes featuring another western hero, Jim Cutlass, with artwork by Christian Rossi. Moebius, meanwhile, embarked on the multi-volume story of The Incal, which debuted in Métal Hurlant in 1980. Written by Jodorowsky, the story is set in a dystopian galactic empire where rulers, rebels and aliens are all seeking an energy crystal which has fallen into the hands of a shambolic private eye, John Difool. This simple premise underpins an endlessly inventive masterpiece, a relentlessly paced galaxy-spanning adventure that, at the same time, charts Difool's philosophical and spiritual evolution.

Meanwhile, Giraud was in demand from the film industry as a concept designer, storyboard artist and even director. The films he worked on include the animated Les Maîtres du Temps (Time Masters) and Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, the live-action science fiction and fantasy movies Tron, Masters of the Universe, Willow, The Abyss and The Fifth Element, and the live-action/cartoon hybrid Space Jam. For French television, he directed the animated Arzak Rhapsody and La Planète Encore. His story Cauchemar Blanc was filmed in 1991; a Blueberry movie was released in 2004.

In the 1980s, Giraud spent much of his time in the US (and, briefly, in Tahiti and Japan), where many of his best works began appearing in translation. His connections with Marvel led him to illustrate the two-part Silver Surfer: Parable, written by Stan Lee.

In the 1990s, he again collaborated with Jodorowsky on Le Coeur Couronné (The Crowned Heart) trilogy and Griffes d'Ange (Angel Claws). A sequel to The Airtight Garage, L'Homme du Ciguri, appeared in 1995, and Giraud, despite being kept busy with his scripts and artwork for Blueberry and Jim Cutlass, still managed to produce further Moebius works, including an Incal sequel, Le Nouveau Rêve (2000), and Ikaru (Icarus, 2001) drawn by Jiro Taniguchi.

Giraud is survived by his wife, Isabelle, and two children, Helene and Julien, from an earlier marriage.

See this blog for a really good post on why he is so good.

Transmedia narratives

Transmedia narratives
Games or Worlds?

From immersion to interaction

In the book ‘Narrative as Virtual Reality’ Ryan (2001) points out that there is a clear difference in language and associated thought patterns between computer games and computer worlds. (P. 192) For instance in games language can be used to develop an understanding of the matrix or toolbox that allows a player to navigate or play the game. In virtual worlds language is used more to develop a picture or mirror like virtual image of a supposed reality. Of course the confusing thing is that many computer games are hosted within virtual worlds, whilst others such as ‘Tetris’ or ‘Chess’ etc are clearly games defined and confined within a set of rules that describe both game-play and layout, whilst ‘Civilization’ is a synergetic format of world and game. The distinction does have its uses however. In order to solve a game or puzzle you have to be ‘lucid’ but in order to fully be immersed in a ‘world’ you have to fully suspend disbelief. You can ‘explore’ a virtual world but you would perhaps examine permutations in order to solve a game. The underlying text involves a change in language and therefore associations that we take from the differing experiences. Ryan points to authors that have approached writing as if it was a game, and the suggestion is that those of us that like to remain aware of ourselves when engaging with literature as opposed to being immersed in it would gravitate to these authors. Writers such as Laurence Sterne, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino have all at times engaged with the processes of writing as subject matter and have used the notion of writing as a game, gambit or ploy that is used to engage the audience's intellectual awareness of the process of literary construction.
However at the core of the process is narrative. This according to Todorov (1971) requires 5 stages. 1: A state of equilibrium. 2: Disruption of equilibrium. 3: Recognition of disruption. 4: Attempt to repair the disruption and 5: A reinstatement of the initial equilibrium. Using this format we could conceive of this as an alternative gaming strategy that can be used to describe not only computer games hosted within virtual worlds but also any other game format. Chess can be seen as a particular type of narrative whereby an initial state of equilibrium is disrupted as players move their pieces, as players become aware of possible strategies they attempt to repair the opponent’s disruption of their territory, eventually we ether arrive at a stalemate or a winner, in both cases the initial equilibrium or stasis is re-established. Of course this is a much easier fit when used to describe the various stages of a game such as SimCity.


Pokemon trading card

The differences in language pointed out by Ryan are pointers towards ways of analyzing transmedia narratives. In video games language is needed to help a player to navigate the game-world, at the start of a card game two players may initially set out the rules of the game using a short conversation or in the case of trading card games, rules may be printed on the card itself. (See above) A film may use opening credits to familiarize an audience with the type of film language to come or a book may have an introductory chapter. In each case a specialized language will be developed and this can be a useful guide as to the media specific nature of the narrative and the cross or trans-media aspects of it. As Henry Jenkins points out, “Each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story”. (2006) In this case you could examine how each medium necessitates a change in language because of its particular structure and relationship with users. However within a transmedia environment the entry point for analysis is perhaps different.



“ When I first started, you would pitch a story because without a good story you didn’t really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take-off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. And now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media.” Hollywood scriptwriter cited by Jenkins. (2006 p.114) Instead of starting off with the narrative, you need to unpick the various possible narratives out of the world view. Once this is done, it is easy to spot the differences as storylines move across platforms. Some support intense game play, others suspension of disbelief and immersion. Therefore we have evolving stories and ‘deep’ content. (The bigger story that drives all the mini-narratives).

At this point can I make a plea for why we are undertaking this area of the course. In order to achieve ‘deep’ content you need to develop a completely furnished world that has an encyclopaedic amount of information. It may use sociological, pop, religious, philosophic, psychological, ethnic, mythological, historic or other academic references and mix them up and make new things from them, but without serious research this ‘world’ will not stand up to user investigation. Think of Tolkien’s years of researching the culture and myths of northern Europe before writing the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. This area of critical and contextual thinking, opens out into everything that can be read, looked at and listened to as potential grist to your creative mill and without your growing immersion in culture, your designs and ideas will lack that integrity and layering necessary for an audience to become seriously engaged.

“ If you give people enough stuff to explore, they will explore. Not everyone but some of them will. The people who do explore and take advantage of the whole world will forever be your fans, will give you an energy you can’t buy through marketing ” Ed Sanchez: Blair Witch Project

Sometimes of course society looks for something beyond consumption and some transmedia narratives seem to evolve out of political necessity. The so called ‘Arab Spring’ has been driven by narratives using contemporary social media. Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are perhaps going to be the main narrative drivers of the future and as the recession bites what will happen to all those who can’t afford to access digital technology?
The deeper question that may be asked however, is how much of this ‘reality’ story is a response to ‘real’ events and how much is driven by the need to see oneself as part of a story? A Baudrillard take on the events in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen would suggest that the merging of fact and fictional narratives is the ‘reality’ behind all stories.

References
Ryan, M. L (2001) Narrative as virtual reality London: John Hopkins Press
Tordorov, T (1971) The two principles of narrative. (Find this on JSTOR)
Jenkins, H (2006) Convergence Culture
http://www.slideshare.net/leorayman/transmedia-narratives-ddb
Apperley, T. (2008). Citizenship and consumption: Convergence culture, transmedia narratives, and the digital divide. In: Proceedings of IE2007: Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment, RMIT University.

Truth and Illusion

Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” has just won five Oscars, for cinematography, art direction, visual effects, sound mixing and sound editing. It’s not just a technically interesting film though. The first films were direct recordings of reality and Mêlées (The early film director that is the subject of Scorsese’s film) was the first film maker to challenge this by introducing stop motion effects and the possibilities of fantasy to the general public. This dialogue between film as truth and film as illusion lies at the core of film theory.
Sometimes these polar opposites however seem to change places. In Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise, the character Guillaume gives a lecture and in it he states that Méliès, was the true originator of the documentary film. “They say Lumiére invented current events. He made documentaries. But there was also Méliès, who made fiction. He was a dreamer filming fantasies. I think just the opposite…” (Godard, 1967)
Godard was filming at the same time as McLuhan was developing his communication theories; both were fascinated by how media affect our perception of reality and the world. These views would inform Baudillard’s postmodern awareness of how media creates "the death of the real". Eventually, as Baudrillard wrote, wars such as the Gulf War of 1991, wouldn't take place in reality. For Western audiences they would only be aware of war as a series of hyper-real images on television.
Film theory mirrors these polar oppositions. Bazin stressed the importance of ‘reality’ and truth to the filmed document, whilst Parker Tyler stated that “Camera trickery is really camera magic, for illusion can be freely created by the movie camera with more mathematical accuracy and shock value than by slight-of-hand or stage illusion”. (1947, p. 586)
Tyler was the first theorist to compare audience reception of Hollywood stars to the worship of Gods in ancient rituals. All films were essentially like ghost stories or they operated as time machines. The trick of illusion being at the centre of film’s attraction, its power coming from our deep rooted need to seek that other spiritual reality on the other side of the membrane. (Once again ‘the Mind in the Cave’ provides a useful image)
Mêlées was a stage magician and like many others at this time recognised the potential for film to extend his powers of illusion. (In England the magicians Fèlician Trewey and David Devant introduced film projections into their acts). Derren Brown has been at the Grand Theatre in Leeds this week, and several of his illusions rely on the fact that video footage can be edited. Our fascination with illusion is obviously very powerful, the fact that Brown’s performances were all full, reflecting the fact that even in an age of scientific scepticism we yearn for a world of magic and illusionistic tricks.

Stan Brakhage sees Mêlées as a precursor and this reminds me that as film students perhaps you ought to be looking at a much wider range of film-makers. It is worth investigating screenings such as ‘Future Shorts’ last seen at Temple Works in Leeds. Future Shorts highlights the communal experience of film, and how the physicality of the media affects an audience’s responses. This year David Reilly’s The External World (2010) was shown in Leeds as well as Juan Pablo Zaramella’s stop-motion film Luminaris (2011). This is a film you ought to see in conjunction with Mêlées’ work, because it highlights how traditional techniques can still be made relevant to contemporary work.



References:
Tyler, P (1947) Magic and Myth of the Movies in Mast, G & Cohen, M (1974) Film Theory and Criticism New York: Oxford University press p. 586)

Check out Saturday Guardian, 25. 2. 12. J Hoberman’s article ‘A History of Trickery’, is a detailed response to Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” and opens out many of the issues above.

Developing emotional attachment in a video game or film

Polanski: End credits: The Pianist: 2002


The ability to empathize with the characters portrayed in a narrative is vital to both film and game. The actions of a character are designed to enable an audience to develop empathy with a particular emotional experience in the expectation that this will allow the audience to understand why the characters feel the way they do. However in a game both the player and the developer have control over a character’s actions. In fact the association between a player and a particular character can become extremely intense. I can clearly remember my sister an obsessive MUD player, being totally obsessed with her character. She used her involvement in the game’s fantasy world to "shut off" her own life so that she could become part of another reality. The writer Sherry Turkle (1997) wrote extensively about this and in particular how participants might create more than one personality which would allow them to act out several types of roles. The interesting issue here is that these ‘personalities’ are partly a construct of the game designer and partly the player. The character is not a ‘tabula rasa’ or blank slate, it is designed to fit into a particular world and respond to the rules and principles laid out for it. (See previous post: 14 December 2011: “Therefore when designing stages one of the first issues is how to begin the narrative and then how to get the player to learn the rules.”) So what are the ways a designer can set out conditions for character development and how does a player develop these further?
The designer will usually start with a decision as to the type of world the game will exist within, (science fiction, war, fantasy, historical, etc. etc.) this world will already have associations with pre-existing stereotypes which the player will subconsciously take into the situation. (If a combatant in a war game, the player will expect to behave in certain ways probably using clichés developed by going to war movies/reading books or comics etc). The formal design of the game may be emotionally suggestive, (dark colour palette, high contrast, a section where everything goes purple, sharp angles to all the forms experienced, soft out of focus feel, lots of shadow, intense colour saturation etc etc) and background sound may be used to either sooth out tensions or build anxiety. However it is through the game-play that most emotional intensity will be experienced by the player. As each challenge is overcome or not as the case may be, the way this is achieved will add to the player’s understanding of their character. This understanding will then be laid upon a growing awareness of the ‘narrative’ of the game and its particular goal. Thus narrative consequence will have a direct influence on emotional engagement, in particular when the player’s character is involved with other characters within the game world, the player will be unconsciously comparing and contrasting his/her own player’s characteristics with others.
Emotional intensity is often associated with player accomplishment. The balance between player skill and game difficulty is central to this. “If the game is too easy the player quits because they are bored. If the game is too hard players quit because they are too frustrated.” Lazzaro (2008) The diagram below designed by Lazzaro sets out some of the issues.



N. B. Fiero is ‘the Italian word for “Personal triumph over adversity.” It is the emotion that accompanies the experience of mastery.


In film emotional intensity is partly developed by the building of empathy with particular characters and partly by creating a general emotional atmosphere as a formal quality. This can be through the use of sound (I will be putting up a post on this at some point), editing style, cinematography, actor’s ability to give depth and weight to a character, and of course directorial ability as co-ordinator of all these elements. What is sometimes being aimed for is ‘emotional catharsis’ Once again this is a very old term. Aristotle pointed out that in a play or drama what was important was the controlled release of pent-up emotion. He also outlined the fact that this was both on the part of the audience and the characters in a play. This has also been called, ‘emotional cleansing’ as a result of experiencing strong feelings. Through these emotional experiences the inner turmoil built up in an audience can be released.
For instance, in the Roman Polanski film ‘The Pianist’ (2002): the ending is a wonderful catharsis. The body of the film deals with death, persecution and destruction but at the end redemption occurs. Over the end titles, the central protagonist plays Chopin’s ‘Grande Polonaise for piano & orchestra’ with the Warsaw Philharmonic in a concert hall, a close-up on the sensitive concert pianist’s fingers setting the scene for a cathartic balance between emotional release and spiritual yearning. In order to achieve this there are no opening credits or titles, all the text, including the title, appear at the end of the film, thus allowing Polanski to direct the audience to focus on the cathartic moment. Again we experience ‘personal triumph over adversity’.

What is a MUD? Originally this term came from Multi-User Dungeon, (As in Dungeons and Dragons) with later variants Multi-User Dimension and Multi-User Domain. A MUD is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat.

If you wanted to explore these issues further the texts below would be a useful start.
Bellantoni, P. (2005) If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die: The Power of Colour in Visual Storytelling New York: Focal Press
Freeman, D. E. (2003) Creating Emotion in Games: The Craft and Art of Emotioneering London: New Riders Games
Lazzaro, N (2008) Why We Play Games. Baltimore: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Lazzaro, N (2008) Halo Vs. Facebook: Emotion and the Fun of Games. Etech Conference. http://en.oreilly.com/et2008/public/schedule/detail/1589
Lazzaro, N (2007) The 4 most Important Emotions of Game Design Available at: http://www.2007.loginconference.com/session.php?id=46
Turkle, S (1997) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet London: Simon & Schuster

More Thoughts on Communication Theory

Frame from the Piers Sanderson film: High on Hope

The interesting thing about communication is that it is a process by which we assign and convey meaning in an attempt to create a shared understanding. It requires both intrapersonal and interpersonal skills and it is through communication that we can develop collaboration and cooperation. As an old fashioned Socialist I strongly believe in communication as being at the core of all political activity and a lack of communication is usually at the core of organisational dysfunctionality and poor politics. I therefore worry about individualism. What can happen when the deep underlying reasons for collective, communal communication are lost is the rise of cultural fragmentation and individualism, a state that the Rowntree Foundation (Lawson and Thake, 2008) has argued as being one that needs to be confronted and replaced. "This individualism was seen to have damaging consequences, fuelling selfishness and greed and leading to isolation and fear as people struggle to cope and live fulfilling lives."

As DFGA Students you specialise in moving image communication techniques. We presume that a visual message with movement and sound has a greater power to inform, educate or persuade a person than a static visual. I.e. it is a synchronistic concept, whereby two or more forms of communication come together in order to achieve a powerful effect. In The Mind in the Cave by Lewis Williams (I do believe this is essential reading and I know I have mentioned it several times before) it is pointed out that sound, vision, dance and touch were all used to convey shamanistic messages to the tribe. Perhaps the rave is the clearest modern format for this. The film/music documentary ‘High On Hope’ which commemorates the 20th anniversary of acid house, telling the story of the infamous ‘Hardcore Uproar’ warehouse parties in Blackburn in the late nineteen eighties is a good illustration of this. Over 10,000 people dancing in cavernous warehouses across the north-west every week was the nearest to a Shamanistic experience I think we could get. For a brief moment perhaps our individualism is shed and we operate as one with the group.

You could say that one implication of communication theory is that evaluation of a good visual design/communication can be done by measuring the comprehension by its audience, not by aesthetic or artistic preference. In this case the problem in terms of communication theory is that if the people evaluating the art, media product or design are themselves media professionals they are too 'attuned' to the business to be aware of how a non media specialist would receive the communication. I.e. the best critics are those experiencing the communication, in the above instance the ‘ravers’.

Rhetoric
However it is within the old history of rhetoric that I find a deeply fascinating series of narratives. It is strange and wonderful and as it covers memory training, body language, voice projection as well as the well known 'rhetoric tropes'. It is indeed a deep river to fish. (To use the rhetoric trope 'metaphor'.)


An image from Yates: The art of memory

A key book to look at is I would suggest, ‘The Art of Memory' by Yates. For DGFA students this book can be an entry into a way of thinking of writing a film script as a memory aid (cues can help with memory retrieval) or developing a navigation theory for game design (Developing a system within which players' decisions are limited but significant). In fact if you follow Cicero’s rules for mind walking as a memory aid, you realise that the whole construct feels like an interactive video game. He suggests leaving odd, memorable images in significant places as you walk around a building. You ‘collect’ these as you retrace your memory steps, in a similar way to the collection of weapons or tokens as you navigate through a game. Cicero was when at work, a teacher of rhetoric to the powers that were in control in Rome. His texts were written to explain how rhetoric worked. What is interesting is that modern day computer games often outline how their ‘worlds’ work and there are several analogies between how Cicero pictured a controlled political environment and how game designers such as Hideo Kojima and Sid Meier set up the control systems for game parameters.


An orator speaks to the Roman senate

As Galloway (2006, p. 90) states in relation to a discussion of Meier’s work, “The gamer is learning, internalising and becoming intimate with a massive, multipart, global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game.” I.e. you need to learn a process or set of rules in order to be able to calculate how to solve problems. This is very similar to Edward Channing’s (1856) definition of rhetoric; he stated, “rhetoric undertakes to show man rules or principles which will help to make the expression of his thoughts effective”. If you want to progress in a game such as ‘Civilization’ you need to internalize the logic of the program, once you understand the rules and principles you can make your thoughts effective. It could therefore be argued that a good game designer like Meier is someone that clearly understands how to use a contemporary type of rhetoric. In both cases, Cicero and Meier, their work can also be used to understand things about the wider political culture within which they both operate. In the game ‘Civilization’ the “massive electronic network of command and control”, as Galloway (2006) puts it, reflects the reality of contemporary power structures, whilst Cicero’s principles of rhetoric reflect the organizing principles of the Roman senate.


Sid Meier’s Civilization

Galloway., H. R. (2006) Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture London: University of Minneapolis Press
Lawson, N and Thake, S (2008) Why individualism has created "social recession" York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Title Sequences for video games

Deus Ex: Human Revolution 2011

It was interesting to see how many level 4 students wanted to write an essay on title sequences. In the examples we looked at in the seminar we were concentrating on film, however Goldtooth Creative’s title sequence for the game ‘Deus Ex: Human Revolution’ really works well as an opening for the Eidos-Montreal designed video game; a game which revolves around the development of a cybernetic reality, where reality and fiction, the artificial and the real are all merging. The setting of an operating theatre for the film’s title sequence, within which shattered human organs are being replaced by artificial organs is somewhat reminiscent of the scene in X-Men Origins:‘Wolverine’ (2009) where the title character has his skeleton replaced by a fictional super metal; ‘adamantium’. A particularly interesting connection to Deus Ex: Human Revolution is that in both sequences we see fleeting images of a lost past, suggesting that a former life is being erased. Underlying both films are very old story lines that have mythic associations. One theme is the concept of the duality. For example, individual control over a new body versus the altered human as agency of dark controlling forces. This metaphor occurs within many story and plot lines. We are shaped by the Gods who give us life, however once we have life we have a tendency to want to exercise control over it and forget our debts to our creator. In Christopher Booker’s ‘The Seven Basic Plots’ this type of plot centres on what he calls, ‘the rebirth’. Darkness is presented as centred within the hero’s own personality (2010, p. 226) and in order to liberate himself he will need to go through some sort of psychic shift, usually by some sort of quest or adventure in order to come to terms with a deeper, ‘true’ self.
The concept of ‘rebirth’ is echoed in the fact that the operating table is very similar to the birthing table or bed.
The opening credits blend live-action with CGI to introduce an audience to a world at the dawn of a cybernetic renaissance. The operating table provides a platform for the birth of a new life-form that has yet to develop a soul. Lens flare type light streaming into the image from an unseen operating table light source, allows cuts to be made seamlessly, whilst a layering of x-ray images with white text that rotates with the camera becomes a ‘backbone’ grid that stabilises the images as the text moves through. An overall high tonal contrast but restricted colour palette of warm yellows, blacks and browns is tinged with blue, while graphic elements such as circles and heartbeat indicator lines underpin the invisible typographic grid. Vector drawn diagrams float in white over underlying images of bones, suggesting the integration of organic and manufactured materials. The totality produces a dream-like quality that suggests that these are images glimpsed by someone moving in and out of consciousness, flashes of memories and dreams, interspersed with a low level awareness of the operating procedures being enacted.


An illustration of what goes into the composition of each shot within the opening sequence

The suffering experienced by the lead character Adam Jensen could, I would argue, be related to another mythic series of stories that surround the North American Indian concept of the shaman. Often the shaman’s transformation into a being that can straddle both the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit is said to be accompanied by physical pain. The stories of shaman are often told as if all of the actions take place in a dream world, half way between reality and another world that exists on the other side of death. This is echoed in other stories and religious myths, the one we are of course most familiar with is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. After enduring his time of suffering on the cross, he will eventually rise and assume his true position as a God. Jesus again reminds us of the dualism that lies behind many religious stories. In his case the duality is centred on whether or not he is a man or God. In all of these cases the individual is elevated into a new consciousness because of their traumatic experiences. There are also several myths that focus on what is called ‘the dismembered God’ thesis. In prehistoric times leaders of tribes themselves played the part of a god and were at certain points in the year slain and dismembered then ‘planted’ to ensure that next year’s crops would grow. Again some form of death is necessary for a rebirth. The opening credits therefore operate as a type of mythic doorway into the game and set up the conditions for the first level of immersion. (See post on immersion Wednesday, 14 December 2011)

The background to the development of the images used is interesting too. A trace memory of James Whale’s original ‘Frankenstein’ images still runs through this title sequence as well as ghosts of Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp’.


Image from James Whale's Frankenstein


Rembrandt: ‘Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Tulp’

In order to start your own research into all this a good start would be an interview on the Blog http://www.artofthetitle.com/ with the film credit director Paul Furminger of Goldtooth Creative and ‘Human Revolutions’ game director Jean-François Dugas of Eidos-Montreal. They talk about concept development and how they combined the digital and live-action footage. A clip of the opening sequence is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIqJaT3cvf8

Hyper-reality and political reality

Image above taken from the Matrix.

There has as always been a lot of interest in hyper-reality as an area around which to develop level 5 essays, however it is not enough just to celebrate Baudrillard for his perceptive analysis of the media soaked conditions of our time, he needs to be put into some sort of perspective. On the one hand of course it is possible to compare and contrast his views with those of Marshall McLuhan but perhaps you could even go back to one of McLuhan’s key influences F. R. Leavis, a man who basically set out the framework for what in colleges and universities we now call critical studies. In 1930 Leavis published ‘Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture’ this was a book that would set out how to critically analyse contemporary cultural products. He was teaching in an English Literature department so was essentially writing about the paucity of critical thinking around writing but his views would influence a much wider spectrum of thinking. He reconnected critical thinking in relation to culture with political awareness and in doing so set out a framework of relationships that both Baudrilland and McLuhan would benefit from. He wrote about culture as it exists within the ‘modern industrial world of mass production’ which treated men as ‘a factor necessary to production” in a system where power and capital had become one. He stated, “Men are now incapacitated by their work, which makes leisure necessary as it was not before.” People are now “using their leisure for ‘humane’ recreation, that is, in pursuits that make them feel self fulfilled and make life significant, dignified and satisfying.” He pointed to newspapers, the cinema, the gramophone and radio as being areas that people were turning to as technologies within which they could immerse themselves in order to give their life meaning. McLuhan took these ideas further as he recognised that these technologies were changing the way we think and Baudrillard extends the idea further as he posits a world where the technologies of escapism now drive our view of reality. If you are going to write about hyper-reality perhaps you need to consider it as a gradually developing idea and introduce a historical context.
The central problem with Baudrillard however, is that the proliferation of simulacra gives us nothing to grasp, no reality with which to forge weapons that can be used to fight back against the prevailing conditions of capitalism and its accompanying evil consumerism. However Deleuze and Guattari in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ find a way to think about levels of representation rather than simulations. Thus a double becoming looks towards the growth of potential. By combining ideas that are embedded within the representations that surround us, we can start to create anchor points. Then, Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of rhizomatic connections can be envisioned as a sort of flexible underlying grid, each intellectual move taking up another position on the grid that had not previously been used. These then become the lever points for new fables and stories created from unforeseen amalgamations of potential. (This could be seen as a type of philosophical big bang). From these new positions of leverage you can then fight back against Capitalism’s simulacra and overturn simulation with representation. Deleuze and Guattari state that this resistance is a collective project and locally the rise of new cooperatives such as the Leeds Creative Time-bank could be the type of organization from within which these changes might happen. Eventually these working bodies of self-supporting groups of connected individuals may inject themselves into the body of Capitalism as antibodies designed to eliminate and protect us against false consciousness.
What Deleuze and Guattari offer is a theoretical standpoint capable of re-reading Baudrillard's hapless world of illusion as a type of metamorphosis that offers up a range of leverage points for change. Set against the cynicism of postmodern ethics a new moral landscape emerges of hope and new possibilities. As artists and designers we can combine our talents and seek to re-touch the real through making and constructing our own narratives of representation. In the world of the Matrix it is interesting to see that the hollow book that represents simulacra and simulacrum is handmade with a green cloth binding with its title in embossed type. The prop no doubt made by an expert craftsperson. This craft is of course linked to the crafts of camera work, editing, special effects creation and all the other skills required by the community of film-makers. Debates in seminars have suggested to me that our ethical and moral world is one that needs rebuilding and perhaps one avenue we can take as artists and designers is to do this collectively alongside the collective sharing of our individual crafts. Is this perhaps a move towards a new type of guild system or the establishment of co-operatives? A co-operative is defined as "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise". In a world where power is often invested in large corporarte organisations, it may be worth thinking about alternative models within which you can set up ways of working that enable you to achieve a lifestyle that is as Leavis put it, "self fulfilled, significant, dignified and satisfying.”

Is film an art form? Part 2

Plato's Cave

The last post argued that stained glass is an art form; however it can come in very different formats. A Medieval cathedral round window, a narrow niche in a college foyer, a lamp shade etc. I think there has often been slippage as to what is considered an art form and what is a format. I would argue that a symphony is a musical format, so is a 3 minute pop record, someone singing in the bath and a folk song. Non of them necessarily are aesthetically pleasing unless they “provide a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction”. My problem now is the word ‘pleasure’. Is giving pleasure enough? We tend to associate ‘pleasure’ with ‘entertainment’ and disassociate the term from ‘meaning’. Perhaps this is a mistake. Much art is ‘difficult’; hard to understand, jarring, designed to shock etc. Modernism (as in Dada, Surrealism etc.) is often ‘transgressive’, which itself is defined as, “of or relating to fiction, cinematography, or art in which orthodox cultural, moral, and artistic boundaries are challenged by the representation of unconventional behaviour and the use of experimental forms”. So the old chestnut, “But that’s not art!” is perhaps not as simple to get round as we think it is. If an art form is “a conventionally established form of artistic composition”, if this convention is broken, is this not a way of therefore establishing the fact that what is there is not art? Again though there is the problem of ‘convention’. Who establishes this and why? Conventions have often been overthrown because they were out of date or put in place by power structures that have now been deposed. The avant-garde as a concept presumes that artists should operate at the boundaries of convention. Is this something to do with how a society establishes its ‘moral’ fabric? What is it right and proper for me to do as a member of society?
It might be of interest at this point to go back in time somewhat. Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) believed that knowledge is derived from the senses. The pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, were therefore at the centre of life’s decision making. He tried to demonstrate the differences between natural desires, (need for food etc) and artificial ones (need to pander to vanity, have more riches etc). He was looking to develop a philosophy that led to contentment of mind. He would therefore suggest that transgressive art forms were to be avoided as their assimilation could lead to a disturbance of mind. Inner peace or ‘ataraxia’ is what we should be aiming for. Therefore forms of art that lead to contemplation are what he would advise we should develop. All this however seems in opposition to Aristotle's ethical and social activism.
In Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics Book VI he states: “What affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit and avoidance are in desire; so that since moral virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, and choice is deliberate desire, therefore both the reasoning must be true and the desire right, if the choice is to be good, and the latter must pursue just what the former asserts.”
In order therefore to make choices “reasoning must be true and the desire right.” So it isn’t enough to set out a clear reasoned argument for the establishment of an art form, the emotional need for art must also be given a voice.
My feeling is that emotional needs are linked to deep psychological drives and that these have been wired into us over thousands of years of evolution. It could be argued that human psychological traits are evolved adaptations to solve recurrent problems that have faced humankind in the various environments we have found ourselves living within. So why do we get pleasure or satisfaction in sitting together in the dark watching an illuminated screen of moving images?


Being inside a dark cinema is similar to being inside a cave or the womb


We have archeological evidence of human beings doing similar things over 30,000 years ago. In 1976 Richard Dawkins published ‘The Selfish Gene’, in this text he proposed that there was a way to look at culture from an evolutionary standpoint. He came up with the term ‘meme’ his word for a unit of culture that was supposed to be rather like a ‘gene’, something that is carried by a mind and that can be reproduced from mind to mind. In the same way that a gene is subject to the ‘survival of the fittest’ evolutionary test, a meme will survive if it is useful to us and our collective survival.
There is a wonderful book by David Lewis-Williams called ‘The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art’. He proposes a scenario where early humans collected together in caves to develop a particular set of rituals which were essential to collective survival. The shape and form of these rituals is I would argue still apparent within our present cultural products and activities. Williams describes a scene from 30,000 years ago, where people enter through a narrow passage that opens out into a cavern. The darkness is lit by flickering lights and images appear to almost move as the light flickers across the surface of undulating stone. Sounds of drumming fill the space and chants are sung and narratives told as social rituals are enacted. I’m sure certain modern forms of entertainment reflect these conditions quite closely. On the other hand, caves, in particular those structured in similar ways to the Rock Womb at Nenkovo, are clearly womb-like structures, the significance of which is inescapable.


Still from Herzog's 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams'

What really struck home with me however was Lewis-Williams’ description of the wall of the cave as a membrane. A surface that was understood as a barrier between the world of the living and the world of the spirit. It is an awareness of this divide and a need to come to terms with it that I feel lies at the core of what ‘art’, ‘religion’ , science’ and all our other forms of collective coming to terms with what’s out there are all about.

The psycho-analyst Lacan has a term called ‘the big other’. This is something that is so radically different to us that it goes beyond the imaginary. This term is usually linked to his understanding of constructions such as the law. However if we think of death as a passageway between what has life or ‘élan vital’ as Bergson would put it and what is inanimate or dead, the big issue is what is it that changes? At one moment a human being is alive, moves and has soul, at another there becomes no difference between a body and a stone, both exhibit complete inertia and are lifeless. This is a fundamental thing that we as conscious beings have to come to terms with. Perhaps all our ‘art’ forms are in one way or another simply trying to help us understand what it is to accept death as part of life’s experience. Without the development of culture our lives would be meaningless. In this sense culture has an intimate relationship with the development of religion. My experience of religious chanting or whirling dancing being at times not far away from my experiences in raves; my experiences in art galleries has at times reminded me of visiting a cathedral.

So is film an art form? Well yes and a powerful one. It brings together light, movement, sound and narrative in a collective environment and its images and stories attempt to make sense of the world. How many times as we leave a film with a partner do we end up discussing, “what was that all about?” What it was about was a meditation on the human condition. Whether or not it was a useful one, a deep one or a superficial one is another issue.

Is film an art form?

Rose window: Notre Dame de Paris

Early film theory looked at how film differed from ‘reality’ and tried to establish how it could become an art form in its own right. But what is an art form? Some definitions are circular, such “as a genre or activity viewed or treated as an art form”. On the other hand you get definitions such as, “a conventionally established form of artistic composition, such as the symphony or the sonnet”. But a film is a technology, not a form of artistic composition. It can be a documentary or a western, short or long. Is playing musical instruments an art form? According to this definition it is when a symphony is being played but not perhaps when a group of people get together and jam in someone’s front room. The key phrase is, “a conventionally established form of artistic composition”. So how is this convention established? The 3 minute single was a product of technical limitations, so is the convention of the pop single a conventionally established form of artistic composition? In this case we have the word ‘artistic’ to contend with. The definition of which is, “performed, made, or arranged decoratively and tastefully; aesthetically pleasing”. Aesthetically is defined as; “Characterised by a heightened sensitivity to beauty”. So is it to do with defining whether or not an art form can achieve “a heightened sensitivity to beauty”? If so, what are the structures that enable it to do this? If these structures can be singled out, how then do we measure the success or failure of these structures to “capture beauty or heighten sensitivity to it?
Beauty is defined as; “characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction”. In the case of a film, I would presume this could be both an object (the film itself) and an idea (the film’s content). I can see how the perceptual experiences of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction could be important, but again how each of these is singled out as a measure of success or failure of aesthetic worthiness is hard to understand.
For example a very unpleasant film may serve to heighten an understanding of meaning. This understanding may give great satisfaction but am I therefore to now read “beauty” as some sort of recognition of ‘meaning’?
Light has at times been thought of as being a symbol for the revelation of God; this can be seen at its clearest in the production of Medieval stained glass windows. If you visit Chartres for example, the stained glass lights your travel through the dark spaces of the cathedral’s interior and you feel the resonance between the building’s religious significance and your experience of how light is controlled by the makers of that time. There is a pleasure in the understanding of how this light is shaped in deference to a deeper meaning and this gives great satisfaction. Therefore it could be argued that stained glass is an art form. As an art form it seems to me that it is not very far away from film. Light is projected into a dark space in order to “illuminate” the audience. However there are also stained glass makers who make inserts for door panels, lamp shades etc. and they do not usually attempt to forge a symbiosis with a grander concept, such as religious experience. However they may for instance develop floral decorative motifs designed to remind us of nature. It must be art if it is, “performed, made, or arranged decoratively and tastefully”. But is it aesthetically pleasing? Where is the dividing line between a weak decorative connection to nature and a deep convergence of religious meaning and formal expression?