After reading your post, my knee jerk reaction was to disagree with your assertions about the realism of film owing more to the visual than the aural. After all, how does one rank the assumed spectrality of sound versus image as it pertains to film? And what does it mean for something to be "narratively true", anyway?
If by "narratively true", you're referring to the 'objective' events of the plot, I'm still a bit confused by your example of the voice-over being contradicted by the visual. I haven't seen A Beautiful Mind, but by your description, and by using the example of Bate's 'mother' in Psycho, I don't know if I would say that the hallucinated people in either of those cases are any less narratively 'true' for being primarily (or at least initially) characterized through sound. That is, it's 'narratively true' that Russell Crowe's character and Norm Bates both hear and/or speak these hallucinations. It seems more accurate to me to call non-diegetic sound such as soundtrack music 'narratively untrue' (for lack of a better term), as it exists outside of the story space of the film.
Can you think of other examples that illustrate your notion of the visual being most often narratively true as opposed to the audio? (Ones that don't feature crazy people hallucinating :-))
who reads my posts? now that's crazy-talk. I think you hallucinated the whole thing.
"narratively true" may have been awkward short-hand on my part, but I think you got what I meant; still, to define, by "narratively true" I meant "true within the narrative" (or, like you said, an objective event/character of the plot; we could call hallucinations "false within the narrative" -- noting that they're false, yet still within the represented story-space -- whereas, as you point out, non-diegetic sound is "not within the narrative").
Which is why most of the examples I can think of involve crazy people -- because we need to hear something and then see that we were fooled/lied to.
I think most films give you something to hear that's false and then prove that it was false by giving you something to see; for instance, Psycho -- even though we do see the mother (when Norman carries her), what really sticks out in the movie is that we hear her; and when we learn that she's been dead, we don't hear her, but see her. thus, our vision corrects a mistake our hearing made; the objective visual corrects the subjective aural.
as for the visual being more objective than the aural, I think it's a pretty widespread cultural thing (Western, modern, post-Enlightenment), not restricted to film ("I'll believe it when I see it" being the clearest expression of our visual bias).
(I can't quite remember, but I think there's some part in Barry Lyndon where the voice-over says "we had a nice time" and you see them falling down and obviously not having a nice time; because it's a character doing the voice-over, you can easily distrust it, but most movies assume that you won't distrust the visual in the same way. which isn't to say that it's never done. Hitchcock has a false flashback in one of his movies, in which the visual and aural are both lies told by a character.)
I think it might be worth pointing out that our aural perception is somewhat less precise than our visual perception, insofar as they can be compared, and filmmakers take tremendous advantage of that.
Consider the lengths you have to go to to mimic the visuals of a large building on fire---if you don't have a large building handily available for burning, you most likely have to construct a model and speed up the film to compensate for the difference of scale. With sound, however, you have a whole range of effects you can put in play when trying to create a plausible audio-visual correlation to some action, and in many cases they have very little to do with the actual action taking place, whether they be X-wing fighters screaming through space or a bullet ripping through cow flesh.
We are less likely to be impressed with realistic punching sounds in a film than we are with a really convincing performance of someone taking a punch, in part because the latter requires greater skill and in part because we can much more easily discern between a realistic punch and a fake one through our eyes than through our ears, even if only because that's the way we are used to using our eyes and ears.
On the other hand, you are also mixing in another effect, the ironic conflict between what we are told and what we perceive, and there I'm inclined to agree with Andrew.
You use Barry Lyndon as an example and I'm sure we could come up with a million others, but I don't see this as being just a matter of how we relate visual to aural perception. We could just as easily find the same irony in inter-titles in a silent film or in the caption to a photograph, where the textual interpretation of the presented experience is a deliberate (or even non-deliberate) misinterpretation/twist/spin/whitewash of the presented experience itself.
Given that film/video is such a rich medium and it allows us to present information in so many ways at the same time, we have a number of ways in which to present information that will carry that kind of irony, and the underlying humor in the effect usually has to do with how words can mean something different from what we expect (i.e., language is a higher level of and requires a greater degree of interpretation). A similar kind of irony is present in the what-they-really-mean type of jokes, such as Stephen Colbert's "The Word," Tom Tomorrow's gimmick of putting topical quotes in speech bubbles and "translating" them in the narration box, or the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are talking and their thoughts of the moment are written out in subtitles. In a way, this is opposite to the example from Barry Lyndon, where the visuals give the lie to the narration.
The aural-visual correlation to this (that we tend to privilege the visual, experienced element over the aural, narrated element) stems, in my mind, more from the fact that we use our ears for language (and music) more than anything else. For a juxtaposition of text and perceived phenomena it makes more sense for the aural to be the means of transmitting the language-based information. To do the opposite would be to have text on a screen describing the sounds that we hear and having them be at odds. It would be awkward and I can't think of a case of someone matching scrolling text to a diegetic audio track, but if they did, it strikes me that having the audio track contain the "truth" would be the more obvious way to go, as the opposite would probably just not make much sense.
Interestingly, I recall a Ducksbreath Mystery Theater piece called, I think, "Goofus and Gallant," which contained an audio-to-audio juxtaposition like the ones I described above, wherein a narrator describes their adventures which play out in the background in sound effects and character voices, sometimes somewhat at odds with what the narrator describes. I think they may have had a couple of other shows like that, and I'm sure in the history of radio drama there are other examples.
man, it's been a while; who knows, my next post could be on "epistemology and ontology of 'the best blt ever'"
I'm going to focus here on the issue of irony, and the two-track medium of film/video:
First, a clarification: you're right to note that irony can exist between any two accounts of the same event, whether they be aural-visual (audio to film), textual-visual (inter-titles to film action, word-bubbles to graphic), textual-textual (two written accounts from different POVs). But what makes the first (aural-visual) kind of irony different from the others is simultaneity.
Only in a two-track medium like film can you have one track simultaneously contradict the other. Every other irony is sequential: for textual-visual irony, see Keaton in The General, where an inter-title says "After a comfortable evening" and then we see that Keaton is all folded up and stiff; for aural-aural irony, Garrison Keillor does it sequentially all the time on radio in Prairie Home Companion.
Sequentiality is interesting, but it raises all sorts of other questions about the way that people's minds accept the first thing they hear as true (primacy) and the way they accept later corrections to the first thing (recency). Only with simultaneity can we ask, without other questions, the question "Which do you believe, your ears or your eyes?"
Actually, we're hurting here for a notion of mimesis; we need it bad. Let's step back (and all this argument from a footnote! just like old times).
Given a bear on film, the visual aspect is a mimetic representation of the visual bear; the aural aspect is a mimetic representation of the aural bear. (Maybe for "mimetic representation" you can just say "copy.") Both visual and aural are true representations of the bear.
But when Herzog/Treadwell start talking, the language they use to describe the bear is non-mimetic. There's a mimesis to them talking (you actually hear the sounds they make), but what they talk about is non-mimetic (you do not hear in their words the bear they talk about). There is a non-mimesis of sound that centers on what people say. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, eh?
But for film, there's no equivalent non-mimesis of the visual. (However, there is a non-mimesis of the visual in animation, cgi, and cartooning.)
You say that when they talk about the bear, there is a mimetic representation of them talking, and there is a non-mimetic focus on the bear about which they are talking. But then you say there is no equivalent non-mimesis of the visual. If you see someone writing about a bear, how is that not a visual equivalent (visual non-mimesis of the bear, visual mimesis of writing about the bear)?
And of course exiting the diegesis altogether, narration can occur both in text and in voice-over, both of which are common, though the latter is generally more common for extended narration, as you don't have to worry as much about slow readers getting lost and fast readers getting bored, along with the fact that you'll usually want some sort of simultaneity (unless you really want to bore your audience), and in most cases you'll want simultaneity with visuals since most of us come to the theater for visuals more than anything else, and if the sound of a film is particularly notable, it's almost always for musical reasons, unless you're demoing a 5.1 system.
Re: mimesissamedietcFebruary 21 2007, 17:15:00 UTC
you're right that I was too quick to say there's no visual non-mimesis, but let's take an example from the film: the difference between Treadwell's videography of the bears, and a child's drawing of the bear.
you're right when you mark the former as mimetic in a certain way; I think Pierce would call it indexical -- there is a (causal) correspondence between the bear and the bear-image. and you're right when you mark the other as non-mimetic, or, for Pierce, iconic, since there is only a (non-causal) resemblance between the bear and the bear-drawing.
(sorry I keep changing the terms, from reality to mimesis to index/icon, but I keep thinking of arguments that provide a better scaffolding to my thought here. here, where "mimesis" was meant as "copy" or "model," index/icon usefully distinguishes between the two, between "copy/correspondence" and "model/resemblance.")
for the index/icon distinction, a professor here once made the argument that, if you claimed to have seen a unicorn, a photograph (index) would be taken as proof in a way that a painting (icon) wouldn't be. that is, film-as-index has a manifest realism that drawing-as-icon doesn't.
So, you're right to say that you can represent the non-mimetic on film (i.e., show a drawing/writing), but can you represent non-mimetically with film? That is, since film is an indexical art, can you show something that isn't there?
the common-sense answer is no -- in order to show a photo of a bear, there actually has to be a bear, which is why film has a manifest realism ("what you see is what you get" as I said above). drawings and verbal descriptions aren't indexical in the same way (onomatopoeia excepted), but at most iconic.
However, the common-sense answer may be wrong; I'm not entirely convinced that film is indexical (or rather, I'm not sure we have a binary split here between index/icon, rather than a spectrum that runs from index to icon). There are many ways in which film is non-indexical (e.g., the way different film stocks register color), which is why I said that film wasn't reality, but had a "reality effect" -- it's manifestly indexical, but also manifestly not-indexical (what I meant when I said above that film was illusionistic).
As always, I will struggle to latch on to your vocabulary.
Film, as a visual medium, may be an indexical art, but so is sound recording---including the aural "sub-medium" of film. A sound recording of a bear is to a visual recording of a bear as is a sound recording of people talking about a bear the equivalent (for these purposes) to a visual recording of people writing about a bear. There seems to be some distinction that you are making between them that is unclear to me (or have you left that distinction behind?).
As for the "proof" of a unicorn, it strikes me that we are dealing less with a distinction between index and icon and more a discernment of plausibility, though certainly the index-icon relation may play into our knee-jerk reactions to an image (since a painting is necessarily constructed by a human hand, why not throw in a unicorn? Whereas with a photograph, we must go through an extra step to have the unicorn added). At a time when it seemed impossible that someone could create a convincing artificial image in a photograph, it would have been a form of "proof" or at least evidence to have a photograph of a unicorn. Nowadays it wouldn't even be considered sufficient cause for further investigation; rather it would seem as a demonstration of someone's capabilities in image manipulation, though of course it would depend somewhat on whom you were showing the photograph to. Proof, in this sense depends on one's trust of what is possible and what is not possible, and we are more inclined to take as evidence those things which we trust cannot be faked, and there was a time when that was for most purposes true with regards to photographs.
I'd also like to point out that while index and icon, at least as you describe them, have a somewhat clear distinction in how they are created, they start to lose a practical distinction at some point as you add more steps to the creation of a work, or as you lose an awareness of what went into the work's creation. If I have a digital photograph of something, is that an indexical representation of that something? If I manage to end up with the same ones and zeroes using Microsoft Paint and a mouse, is it then an iconic representation of that something, even though it is exactly the same ones and zeroes? Furthermore, if I take a digital photograph of something and then manipulate it (or if you take a 35mm photo of someone and retouch it), has it slid to some in-between zone between iconic and indexical as you hint at in your last paragraph, or is it in some ways iconic and in some ways indexical? If I take a photograph of something using a camera that distorts the image in significant ways, is that more or less iconic or mimetica than if I have 16 colors of paint and I fill in a million boxes on a large canvas according to instructions from a computer working off of a digital photograph?
Re: mimesissamedietcFebruary 21 2007, 23:17:51 UTC
I have the feeling there's no serious disagreement here -- when people are together for a long time (as we have been), they no longer argue about their differences, but about their similarities.
so, photo of bear : sound-recording of bear :: drawing of bear : people talking about bear
That's not perfect -- I want to say "people imitating bear sounds" to make the parallelism 100% -- but essentially, yes, that's what I would say, and that's actually what I've been trying to say. I think Andrew was right to call me on the vagueness of what I was considering "true"/"real" in the film (i.e., even when a character lies, we hear what he says). Though you notice, the first example I used was when "the visual is contradicted by a voice-over," not by sound in general. My mistake was to pose it as an example, when really image-vs.-narration is at the heart of the case; though the case does carry a general observation, which is that sound in film is often the realm of the spectral and the uncertain. From Oz to the Bates Motel.
It strikes me that one key difference between a painting (painted by a human) and a photograph (unmanipulated by a human) is that the painting is entirely filtered through a layer of human interpretation as it is being constructed, whereas with a photograph, only certain aspects are filtered through layers of human interpretation (which f-stop to use, what depth-of-field to aim for, how to construct the camera, what filters to use, and in the case of digital photography, how much noise reduction and sharpness to apply to the picture, etc.). But clearly you can blur these lines in considerable ways, and in many cases people do (people that paint from photographs, for example, are one step closer to painting in boxes according to the dictates of a computer, and closer yet if they have those photographs projected onto the canvas as they paint).
Question: if you capture a model of a building on fire and speed up the film, have you created a mimetic or non-mimetic representation of a building on fire? If your answer is that it is a non-mimetic and/or iconic representation of the building on fire, then perhaps rather than "can you represent non-mimetically with film?" you meant to ask:
Whether you are representing your subject in film mimetically or non-mimetically, can you do so without producing a mimetic representation of something?
If that is the question, then my answer is: It sort of depends on how you define mimesis, but you can certainly distort film prior to or after its creation and thereby reduce its mimesis.
Does it indicate that I misunderstand this notion of mimesis if I ask: is a 10-pixel, 4-bit representation of a bear more, less, or just as mimetic as a 24 MP, 48-bit representation of the same bear? A second question: are the terms mimesis or index as you understand them tied to human experience? I ask, because I'm curious as to whether an infrared photograph would be considered mimetic (I'm guessing that it would definitely be considered indexical).
icon vs. indexsamedietcFebruary 21 2007, 23:53:23 UTC
again, not sure there's much disagreement here, but I'll go through the argument to check it out.
1) first, and unrelated to icon/index, I have to disagree when you say that a photograph doesn't show a human hand, and I don't mean because of the labor that goes into taking, developing, cropping, etc. the picture, but because you ignore the labor that goes into making the camera (by which I really mean, the human labor that went into inventing photography). you said there was some human input in choosing f-stop; but you forgot that "f-stop" itself is a human choice, or if you prefer, a layer of human interpretation. that is, a camera all by itself is a set of human choices (about what photography should be) frozen in time.
2) about icon/index, I should say that I'm using them as my prof (Walter Benn Michaels) did when he made the unicorn argument, not exactly as C.S. Pierce used them. Here's another way to think of an "index": smoke is an index of fire. That is, where there's fire, there's smoke; where there isn't fire, there isn't smoke.
When we turn to photography, there's an assumption of indexicality because of the correspondence between the light bouncing off objects and the chemical effects on film/photo-plates; as I said, where there's a photo of a bear, there's a bear. That's the argument about photographic proof that WBM would make.
However, I don't buy the indexicality of film, and in fact, while digital photography certainly makes more apparent the malleability of images, the history of chemical photography is littered with clever and accidental fakes. Not only that, but since photography is as open to human choice as any other representational system, the choices that get made seem to interrupt the natural indexicality gestured towards in the smoke-fire example.
To go back to that example of how different film stocks register color differently, if I give you a photo of a woman wearing red, the common-sense/initial response is probably to think that there really was a woman wearing red, because film is thought to be indexical. However, the film isn't indexical; in the old days, she might have been wearing an orange dress that registered as red, and today, there might not be a woman at all.
4) Yes, mimesis is tied to human experience, so you don't misunderstand the concept when you ask if different resolutions are more or less mimetic; that's kind of the history of art right there -- think of the change in perspective from classic to renaissance art: different conventions being taken as sufficient models (and to be clear, "mimesis" is closer to "model" than it is to "realism," though it's often used to mean a "model of realism" (because what else can you model?) -- so it's not like the Greeks walked around not understanding perspective, they just didn't register it in their art in the way renaissance painters did -- which might in fact mean, from our pov, that the Greeks didn't "understand" it the way we do). if we had different senses, our idea of mimesis would be different.
Re: icon vs. indexjundaiFebruary 22 2007, 00:38:33 UTC
I guess we aren't really disagreeing.
You misunderstood me, however, when you understood me to say that photography doesn't show a human hand. In fact, I produced the same example as you as a counter to that notion. I referred to it as "how to construct the camera" and you referred to it as "the labor that goes into making the camera." Same thing.
My point about that was that these (camera-construction, depth-of-field-control, color-correction, choice of film-speed, etc.) are simply layers on an indexical process of filtering the image of a bear into a re-viewable form, and that this does have some contrast to a traditional idea of painting, which filters the image of a bear entirely through the human mind before we get the resultant re-viewable image.
One of the key differences between the two is that with the latter swapping out the real bear with the imaginary one simply requires a good imagination, whereas with the former we must perform mechanical tricks (e.g., using a bear-icon or bear-index in the photograph, printing a bear-icon into the negative, etc.), many of which will leave traces in the final product (though certainly there are bound to be traces in a painting that can tell us whether the bear was real or imaginary, but that would require an advanced understanding of psychology or certain slip-ups on the part of the artist that would be improbable in the presence of the depicted subject).
Before we add in all of the grey area and talk about spectrums, that seems like the basic distinction between the terms and the two media, and why we view them or consider them as evidence differently comes out of that.
Re: icon vs. indexsamedietcFebruary 22 2007, 01:16:41 UTC
now we're disagreeing. I'll note that the question has gone from a footnote about the visual to a question of the human element of art and technology. that's the way things go, I guess. (Oh, pretty soon I'm gonna watch Superman Returns -- have you seen it? we could do a cross-country round-table discussion. or do you have another film to suggest?)
I don't think I misunderstood you about photography not showing a human hand, because you say something very similar right here. that is, you're right that "how to construct a camera" (as you said) is very similar to "the labor that goes into making the camera" (as I said) -- but that's not the whole of what we said.
The really important thing that you said originally was that, "with a photograph, only certain aspects are filtered through layers of human interpretation" -- which you reiterate later by saying that the human choices involved in taking a picture are "simply layers on an indexical process."
I understood that, and I countered by saying that you were forgetting "the human labor that went into inventing photography"; my bad for using a short-hand and for putting this point in parentheses. I'll try to clarify.
By "inventing photography" I meant all of the technical and philosophical questions that have become solidified in the object of the camera -- single-aperture, film reactive to certain wavelengths, possible portable light-sources, etc. Think of it this way: what do you have to believe in order to make it worth your time to create something that takes a photo? (Note, different cameras do different things; I'm not saying all photography is monolithic, and there could be multiple answers to the questions raised by photography; but I am saying that photography makes certain questions inevitable.)
You say there are layers of human choice on an indexical process; I say that what looks like an "indexical process" is actually the sedimented layers of human choice -- and it only looks like a purely indexical and mimetic process because a) all the human intervention has been effaced (hidden by the camera), and b) we've been trained to use our eyes like cameras. (b) is a separate issue, but I thought I'd raise it. now I have to go grade some papers.
If by "narratively true", you're referring to the 'objective' events of the plot, I'm still a bit confused by your example of the voice-over being contradicted by the visual. I haven't seen A Beautiful Mind, but by your description, and by using the example of Bate's 'mother' in Psycho, I don't know if I would say that the hallucinated people in either of those cases are any less narratively 'true' for being primarily (or at least initially) characterized through sound. That is, it's 'narratively true' that Russell Crowe's character and Norm Bates both hear and/or speak these hallucinations. It seems more accurate to me to call non-diegetic sound such as soundtrack music 'narratively untrue' (for lack of a better term), as it exists outside of the story space of the film.
Can you think of other examples that illustrate your notion of the visual being most often narratively true as opposed to the audio? (Ones that don't feature crazy people hallucinating :-))
-Andrew
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"narratively true" may have been awkward short-hand on my part, but I think you got what I meant; still, to define, by "narratively true" I meant "true within the narrative" (or, like you said, an objective event/character of the plot; we could call hallucinations "false within the narrative" -- noting that they're false, yet still within the represented story-space -- whereas, as you point out, non-diegetic sound is "not within the narrative").
Which is why most of the examples I can think of involve crazy people -- because we need to hear something and then see that we were fooled/lied to.
I think most films give you something to hear that's false and then prove that it was false by giving you something to see; for instance, Psycho -- even though we do see the mother (when Norman carries her), what really sticks out in the movie is that we hear her; and when we learn that she's been dead, we don't hear her, but see her. thus, our vision corrects a mistake our hearing made; the objective visual corrects the subjective aural.
as for the visual being more objective than the aural, I think it's a pretty widespread cultural thing (Western, modern, post-Enlightenment), not restricted to film ("I'll believe it when I see it" being the clearest expression of our visual bias).
(I can't quite remember, but I think there's some part in Barry Lyndon where the voice-over says "we had a nice time" and you see them falling down and obviously not having a nice time; because it's a character doing the voice-over, you can easily distrust it, but most movies assume that you won't distrust the visual in the same way. which isn't to say that it's never done. Hitchcock has a false flashback in one of his movies, in which the visual and aural are both lies told by a character.)
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I think it might be worth pointing out that our aural perception is somewhat less precise than our visual perception, insofar as they can be compared, and filmmakers take tremendous advantage of that.
Consider the lengths you have to go to to mimic the visuals of a large building on fire---if you don't have a large building handily available for burning, you most likely have to construct a model and speed up the film to compensate for the difference of scale. With sound, however, you have a whole range of effects you can put in play when trying to create a plausible audio-visual correlation to some action, and in many cases they have very little to do with the actual action taking place, whether they be X-wing fighters screaming through space or a bullet ripping through cow flesh.
We are less likely to be impressed with realistic punching sounds in a film than we are with a really convincing performance of someone taking a punch, in part because the latter requires greater skill and in part because we can much more easily discern between a realistic punch and a fake one through our eyes than through our ears, even if only because that's the way we are used to using our eyes and ears.
On the other hand, you are also mixing in another effect, the ironic conflict between what we are told and what we perceive, and there I'm inclined to agree with Andrew.
You use Barry Lyndon as an example and I'm sure we could come up with a million others, but I don't see this as being just a matter of how we relate visual to aural perception. We could just as easily find the same irony in inter-titles in a silent film or in the caption to a photograph, where the textual interpretation of the presented experience is a deliberate (or even non-deliberate) misinterpretation/twist/spin/whitewash of the presented experience itself.
Given that film/video is such a rich medium and it allows us to present information in so many ways at the same time, we have a number of ways in which to present information that will carry that kind of irony, and the underlying humor in the effect usually has to do with how words can mean something different from what we expect (i.e., language is a higher level of and requires a greater degree of interpretation). A similar kind of irony is present in the what-they-really-mean type of jokes, such as Stephen Colbert's "The Word," Tom Tomorrow's gimmick of putting topical quotes in speech bubbles and "translating" them in the narration box, or the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are talking and their thoughts of the moment are written out in subtitles. In a way, this is opposite to the example from Barry Lyndon, where the visuals give the lie to the narration.
The aural-visual correlation to this (that we tend to privilege the visual, experienced element over the aural, narrated element) stems, in my mind, more from the fact that we use our ears for language (and music) more than anything else. For a juxtaposition of text and perceived phenomena it makes more sense for the aural to be the means of transmitting the language-based information. To do the opposite would be to have text on a screen describing the sounds that we hear and having them be at odds. It would be awkward and I can't think of a case of someone matching scrolling text to a diegetic audio track, but if they did, it strikes me that having the audio track contain the "truth" would be the more obvious way to go, as the opposite would probably just not make much sense.
Interestingly, I recall a Ducksbreath Mystery Theater piece called, I think, "Goofus and Gallant," which contained an audio-to-audio juxtaposition like the ones I described above, wherein a narrator describes their adventures which play out in the background in sound effects and character voices, sometimes somewhat at odds with what the narrator describes. I think they may have had a couple of other shows like that, and I'm sure in the history of radio drama there are other examples.
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I'm going to focus here on the issue of irony, and the two-track medium of film/video:
First, a clarification: you're right to note that irony can exist between any two accounts of the same event, whether they be aural-visual (audio to film), textual-visual (inter-titles to film action, word-bubbles to graphic), textual-textual (two written accounts from different POVs). But what makes the first (aural-visual) kind of irony different from the others is simultaneity.
Only in a two-track medium like film can you have one track simultaneously contradict the other. Every other irony is sequential: for textual-visual irony, see Keaton in The General, where an inter-title says "After a comfortable evening" and then we see that Keaton is all folded up and stiff; for aural-aural irony, Garrison Keillor does it sequentially all the time on radio in Prairie Home Companion.
Sequentiality is interesting, but it raises all sorts of other questions about the way that people's minds accept the first thing they hear as true (primacy) and the way they accept later corrections to the first thing (recency). Only with simultaneity can we ask, without other questions, the question "Which do you believe, your ears or your eyes?"
Actually, we're hurting here for a notion of mimesis; we need it bad. Let's step back (and all this argument from a footnote! just like old times).
Given a bear on film, the visual aspect is a mimetic representation of the visual bear; the aural aspect is a mimetic representation of the aural bear. (Maybe for "mimetic representation" you can just say "copy.") Both visual and aural are true representations of the bear.
But when Herzog/Treadwell start talking, the language they use to describe the bear is non-mimetic. There's a mimesis to them talking (you actually hear the sounds they make), but what they talk about is non-mimetic (you do not hear in their words the bear they talk about). There is a non-mimesis of sound that centers on what people say. Ceci n'est pas une pipe, eh?
But for film, there's no equivalent non-mimesis of the visual. (However, there is a non-mimesis of the visual in animation, cgi, and cartooning.)
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You say that when they talk about the bear, there is a mimetic representation of them talking, and there is a non-mimetic focus on the bear about which they are talking. But then you say there is no equivalent non-mimesis of the visual. If you see someone writing about a bear, how is that not a visual equivalent (visual non-mimesis of the bear, visual mimesis of writing about the bear)?
And of course exiting the diegesis altogether, narration can occur both in text and in voice-over, both of which are common, though the latter is generally more common for extended narration, as you don't have to worry as much about slow readers getting lost and fast readers getting bored, along with the fact that you'll usually want some sort of simultaneity (unless you really want to bore your audience), and in most cases you'll want simultaneity with visuals since most of us come to the theater for visuals more than anything else, and if the sound of a film is particularly notable, it's almost always for musical reasons, unless you're demoing a 5.1 system.
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you're right when you mark the former as mimetic in a certain way; I think Pierce would call it indexical -- there is a (causal) correspondence between the bear and the bear-image. and you're right when you mark the other as non-mimetic, or, for Pierce, iconic, since there is only a (non-causal) resemblance between the bear and the bear-drawing.
(sorry I keep changing the terms, from reality to mimesis to index/icon, but I keep thinking of arguments that provide a better scaffolding to my thought here. here, where "mimesis" was meant as "copy" or "model," index/icon usefully distinguishes between the two, between "copy/correspondence" and "model/resemblance.")
for the index/icon distinction, a professor here once made the argument that, if you claimed to have seen a unicorn, a photograph (index) would be taken as proof in a way that a painting (icon) wouldn't be. that is, film-as-index has a manifest realism that drawing-as-icon doesn't.
So, you're right to say that you can represent the non-mimetic on film (i.e., show a drawing/writing), but can you represent non-mimetically with film? That is, since film is an indexical art, can you show something that isn't there?
the common-sense answer is no -- in order to show a photo of a bear, there actually has to be a bear, which is why film has a manifest realism ("what you see is what you get" as I said above). drawings and verbal descriptions aren't indexical in the same way (onomatopoeia excepted), but at most iconic.
However, the common-sense answer may be wrong; I'm not entirely convinced that film is indexical (or rather, I'm not sure we have a binary split here between index/icon, rather than a spectrum that runs from index to icon). There are many ways in which film is non-indexical (e.g., the way different film stocks register color), which is why I said that film wasn't reality, but had a "reality effect" -- it's manifestly indexical, but also manifestly not-indexical (what I meant when I said above that film was illusionistic).
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Film, as a visual medium, may be an indexical art, but so is sound recording---including the aural "sub-medium" of film. A sound recording of a bear is to a visual recording of a bear as is a sound recording of people talking about a bear the equivalent (for these purposes) to a visual recording of people writing about a bear. There seems to be some distinction that you are making between them that is unclear to me (or have you left that distinction behind?).
As for the "proof" of a unicorn, it strikes me that we are dealing less with a distinction between index and icon and more a discernment of plausibility, though certainly the index-icon relation may play into our knee-jerk reactions to an image (since a painting is necessarily constructed by a human hand, why not throw in a unicorn? Whereas with a photograph, we must go through an extra step to have the unicorn added). At a time when it seemed impossible that someone could create a convincing artificial image in a photograph, it would have been a form of "proof" or at least evidence to have a photograph of a unicorn. Nowadays it wouldn't even be considered sufficient cause for further investigation; rather it would seem as a demonstration of someone's capabilities in image manipulation, though of course it would depend somewhat on whom you were showing the photograph to. Proof, in this sense depends on one's trust of what is possible and what is not possible, and we are more inclined to take as evidence those things which we trust cannot be faked, and there was a time when that was for most purposes true with regards to photographs.
I'd also like to point out that while index and icon, at least as you describe them, have a somewhat clear distinction in how they are created, they start to lose a practical distinction at some point as you add more steps to the creation of a work, or as you lose an awareness of what went into the work's creation. If I have a digital photograph of something, is that an indexical representation of that something? If I manage to end up with the same ones and zeroes using Microsoft Paint and a mouse, is it then an iconic representation of that something, even though it is exactly the same ones and zeroes? Furthermore, if I take a digital photograph of something and then manipulate it (or if you take a 35mm photo of someone and retouch it), has it slid to some in-between zone between iconic and indexical as you hint at in your last paragraph, or is it in some ways iconic and in some ways indexical? If I take a photograph of something using a camera that distorts the image in significant ways, is that more or less iconic or mimetica than if I have 16 colors of paint and I fill in a million boxes on a large canvas according to instructions from a computer working off of a digital photograph?
to be continued. . .
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so,
photo of bear : sound-recording of bear ::
drawing of bear : people talking about bear
That's not perfect -- I want to say "people imitating bear sounds" to make the parallelism 100% -- but essentially, yes, that's what I would say, and that's actually what I've been trying to say. I think Andrew was right to call me on the vagueness of what I was considering "true"/"real" in the film (i.e., even when a character lies, we hear what he says). Though you notice, the first example I used was when "the visual is contradicted by a voice-over," not by sound in general. My mistake was to pose it as an example, when really image-vs.-narration is at the heart of the case; though the case does carry a general observation, which is that sound in film is often the realm of the spectral and the uncertain. From Oz to the Bates Motel.
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photo of bear : sound-recording of bear ::
writing about bear : people talking about bear ::
drawing of bear : people imitating bear sounds
1. index of (to?) subject
2. index of text about subject
3. index of icon of subject
obviously we can then start to imagine other possibilities: a painting of a photograph of a bear, me writing about said painting, etc.
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It strikes me that one key difference between a painting (painted by a human) and a photograph (unmanipulated by a human) is that the painting is entirely filtered through a layer of human interpretation as it is being constructed, whereas with a photograph, only certain aspects are filtered through layers of human interpretation (which f-stop to use, what depth-of-field to aim for, how to construct the camera, what filters to use, and in the case of digital photography, how much noise reduction and sharpness to apply to the picture, etc.). But clearly you can blur these lines in considerable ways, and in many cases people do (people that paint from photographs, for example, are one step closer to painting in boxes according to the dictates of a computer, and closer yet if they have those photographs projected onto the canvas as they paint).
Question: if you capture a model of a building on fire and speed up the film, have you created a mimetic or non-mimetic representation of a building on fire? If your answer is that it is a non-mimetic and/or iconic representation of the building on fire, then perhaps rather than "can you represent non-mimetically with film?" you meant to ask:
Whether you are representing your subject in film mimetically or non-mimetically, can you do so without producing a mimetic representation of something?
If that is the question, then my answer is: It sort of depends on how you define mimesis, but you can certainly distort film prior to or after its creation and thereby reduce its mimesis.
Does it indicate that I misunderstand this notion of mimesis if I ask: is a 10-pixel, 4-bit representation of a bear more, less, or just as mimetic as a 24 MP, 48-bit representation of the same bear? A second question: are the terms mimesis or index as you understand them tied to human experience? I ask, because I'm curious as to whether an infrared photograph would be considered mimetic (I'm guessing that it would definitely be considered indexical).
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1) first, and unrelated to icon/index, I have to disagree when you say that a photograph doesn't show a human hand, and I don't mean because of the labor that goes into taking, developing, cropping, etc. the picture, but because you ignore the labor that goes into making the camera (by which I really mean, the human labor that went into inventing photography). you said there was some human input in choosing f-stop; but you forgot that "f-stop" itself is a human choice, or if you prefer, a layer of human interpretation. that is, a camera all by itself is a set of human choices (about what photography should be) frozen in time.
2) about icon/index, I should say that I'm using them as my prof (Walter Benn Michaels) did when he made the unicorn argument, not exactly as C.S. Pierce used them. Here's another way to think of an "index": smoke is an index of fire. That is, where there's fire, there's smoke; where there isn't fire, there isn't smoke.
When we turn to photography, there's an assumption of indexicality because of the correspondence between the light bouncing off objects and the chemical effects on film/photo-plates; as I said, where there's a photo of a bear, there's a bear. That's the argument about photographic proof that WBM would make.
However, I don't buy the indexicality of film, and in fact, while digital photography certainly makes more apparent the malleability of images, the history of chemical photography is littered with clever and accidental fakes. Not only that, but since photography is as open to human choice as any other representational system, the choices that get made seem to interrupt the natural indexicality gestured towards in the smoke-fire example.
To go back to that example of how different film stocks register color differently, if I give you a photo of a woman wearing red, the common-sense/initial response is probably to think that there really was a woman wearing red, because film is thought to be indexical. However, the film isn't indexical; in the old days, she might have been wearing an orange dress that registered as red, and today, there might not be a woman at all.
4) Yes, mimesis is tied to human experience, so you don't misunderstand the concept when you ask if different resolutions are more or less mimetic; that's kind of the history of art right there -- think of the change in perspective from classic to renaissance art: different conventions being taken as sufficient models (and to be clear, "mimesis" is closer to "model" than it is to "realism," though it's often used to mean a "model of realism" (because what else can you model?) -- so it's not like the Greeks walked around not understanding perspective, they just didn't register it in their art in the way renaissance painters did -- which might in fact mean, from our pov, that the Greeks didn't "understand" it the way we do). if we had different senses, our idea of mimesis would be different.
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You misunderstood me, however, when you understood me to say that photography doesn't show a human hand. In fact, I produced the same example as you as a counter to that notion. I referred to it as "how to construct the camera" and you referred to it as "the labor that goes into making the camera." Same thing.
My point about that was that these (camera-construction, depth-of-field-control, color-correction, choice of film-speed, etc.) are simply layers on an indexical process of filtering the image of a bear into a re-viewable form, and that this does have some contrast to a traditional idea of painting, which filters the image of a bear entirely through the human mind before we get the resultant re-viewable image.
One of the key differences between the two is that with the latter swapping out the real bear with the imaginary one simply requires a good imagination, whereas with the former we must perform mechanical tricks (e.g., using a bear-icon or bear-index in the photograph, printing a bear-icon into the negative, etc.), many of which will leave traces in the final product (though certainly there are bound to be traces in a painting that can tell us whether the bear was real or imaginary, but that would require an advanced understanding of psychology or certain slip-ups on the part of the artist that would be improbable in the presence of the depicted subject).
Before we add in all of the grey area and talk about spectrums, that seems like the basic distinction between the terms and the two media, and why we view them or consider them as evidence differently comes out of that.
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I don't think I misunderstood you about photography not showing a human hand, because you say something very similar right here. that is, you're right that "how to construct a camera" (as you said) is very similar to "the labor that goes into making the camera" (as I said) -- but that's not the whole of what we said.
The really important thing that you said originally was that, "with a photograph, only certain aspects are filtered through layers of human interpretation" -- which you reiterate later by saying that the human choices involved in taking a picture are "simply layers on an indexical process."
I understood that, and I countered by saying that you were forgetting "the human labor that went into inventing photography"; my bad for using a short-hand and for putting this point in parentheses. I'll try to clarify.
By "inventing photography" I meant all of the technical and philosophical questions that have become solidified in the object of the camera -- single-aperture, film reactive to certain wavelengths, possible portable light-sources, etc. Think of it this way: what do you have to believe in order to make it worth your time to create something that takes a photo? (Note, different cameras do different things; I'm not saying all photography is monolithic, and there could be multiple answers to the questions raised by photography; but I am saying that photography makes certain questions inevitable.)
You say there are layers of human choice on an indexical process; I say that what looks like an "indexical process" is actually the sedimented layers of human choice -- and it only looks like a purely indexical and mimetic process because a) all the human intervention has been effaced (hidden by the camera), and b) we've been trained to use our eyes like cameras. (b) is a separate issue, but I thought I'd raise it. now I have to go grade some papers.
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