Yesterday’s post raised a lot of discussion, so I’d like to throw a few more wood logs to keep the fire burnings. Just some topics that came to my head after I pressed the “publish” button.
Silent Movies
I was thinking of my PhD research about sound and animation, and the impact of sound and dialogue on early cinema, and then my brother also pointed it out on Twitter. The impact of synchronized sound on cinema is a matter or controversy even today, some 70 years before it’s establishment. Back then, when movies like The Jazz Singer (and many others) drove crowds to the movie theaters, critics complained that the new technology was killing the visual beauty of cinema. The Soviet filmmakers in particular were very critical of this new trend, and published a manifesto against it.
I understand why people reacted like this back then. At the same time when Hollywood movies were showing people talking and singing, people like Murnau were making filmes like “Sunrise”, which relied heavily on visual artistry and gimmickry to convey its powerful story.
But did synchronized sound really killed good-looking cinema? I beg to differ, and anyone could mention at least 10 moviemakers from the talkative era that used beautiful imagery to tell their stories, or even for more abstract purposes.
My point here: technologies and narrative possibilites are not supposed to kill anything. They are just possibilities. Options. New colours on the painter’s palette. If you want to make a 2-hour movie with people arguing, you can make it. Is it going to be bad or good? Depends on other things, not on the format of your film. Can you make a “silent” film in the XXI century? Of course you can.
Another example from Milton Caniff
I scanned this from a book. It is from a Terry & the Pirate series, when Burma dies.
In a comic divided by pages, this silence is normal, but for a daily strip, it's an eternity. Caniff extended the mourning of the beloved character for 2 whole days, leaving the readers nothing to read, in mourning silence. The impact of this experiment comes from the very fact that, normally, the strip HAS text, and the CONTRAST is causing the effect - not because lack of words is inherently powerful.
Wally Wood Learned the Lesson the Hard Way
I was reading a book the other day, “Wally Wood Sketchbook”, a collection of Wood’s scribbles and sketches and assorted texts about him written by people like Bruce Timm and Jim Steranko. It is a very nice book, if you ignore the terrible page design and some “special defects” like Photoshop drop shadows and other useless attempts to “pimp up” the drawings.
Steranko opens the book telling Wood’s story, and on page 39 he mentions something very interesting. It is one of the main reasons why I’ve been thinking so much about this image-text ratio lately. He was describing what happened when Wood became an editor and started publishing his own comics together with other artists. The comics were good, but the line didn’t last long. I quote from the book, and the italic is my own:
“Two companion books Dynamo and Noman were initiated in 1966, but the line’s 64-page 25ยข format simply couldn’t compete with Marvel’s high-powered low-priced product. The art was outstanding, but character development was minimal and dialogue sparse–a Marvel book took a half-hour to read , while a Tower comic at twice the price could be digested in five minutes. (…) By the end of 1968, Tower threw in the towel.
Of course there other factors causing the demise of Wood’s artist-driven comics, but this lack of reading material was obviously important, and a good subject for thinking and discussing.
Scott Mccloud on Text & Image
Yesterday I was re-reading Mccloud’s “Making Comics” and found the part where he talks about this relationship I’ve been writing about here. Around page 30 he talks about “the choice of words” and the things that words can do in a comic that images either would take a lot of “time” to convey, or would simply not be able to express. I truly hope you all have this book, it is very good and has been one of my greatest friends for the last couple of months!
