Space and time
Saw Friday Night Lights over the weekend. Not my typical fare, but there were several redeeming aspects. One, the team the film follows does not win the state championship. Which would not have been believable anyway, given the fact that we the audience were apparently supposed to take as given that the team, with all its bad luck and foibles, were just naturally contenders for the title. The film concentrated so fully on the bad luck, to the exclusion some might say of any implication of true skill / ability, that when the Panthers do win, it seems a contrivance of the filmmakers. But still. There was a decent soundtrack, true to the late Eighties what with the Public Enemy cuts, but also there was another band called Explosion From the Sky, which band offers up some Yo La Tengo-ish, Sigur Ros-like electronic-filigreed dirges that work & work well. Unfortunately, the film makes only amateurish use of these cuts, the filmmakers apparently preferring to rest on their haunches by resorting to quick montages of game footage - throw, completion / incompletion, a yelling Billy Bob - to the accompaniment of say like the Stooges or Jimmy Smith. Which artistes are fine by me. But c'mon, enough with the amped-up game footage.
One part of the film got me thinking about this article by Bernard & Carter about "sequential art" i.e. comics, and their ability to break into and exist in the 4th dimension, which definition of theirs is not perfect; the article's of use mainly when it distinguishes comics' ability to splice narrative moments together. These two fellows do a pretty wise job of detailing how comics do this: because each panel exists on the same page, and because one of the dominant M.O.s of comics is to overlay narration over image which may or may not relate to that concurrent narration, comics can allow the weaving-together of narrative threads in a truly simultaneous way. See especially their discussion of The Watchmen, esp. that page where the investigators are poking around the crime scene from which the Comedian was, or maybe more accurately is even now as one reads the page, pushed out of the window to his death.
This gets me thinking about other media and whether or not they have this ability as well - i.e. to fuse past and present together in a narrative "now", or perhaps more expansively to fuse disparate narrative threads together. I thought at first that, yes, comics alone have this ability going for them (you've really got to see that link; check out Section 13 if you want to get right to the matter). But strangely enough it was Friday Night Lights that reminded me that this technique has been attempted, successfully, here and there, in film and fiction and poetry; there's a scene wherein Billingsley, the abused half-back, drives home along a thatchy highway after a loss, his drunk father berating him from the backseat, and then spliced in are scenes of Coach Gains driving with his quarterback to a road stop for a season-deciding coin toss (luckily the details are not important). So Gains waxes philosophical behind the wheel of his car as they two drive, and meanwhile we are given to understand that Billingsley & dad drive home simultaneously, perhaps even on the same highway, either just ahead or just behind, it doesn't matter so much; what Gains has to say about winning, losing, etc., casts the Billingsley narrative moment into another light; the one scene informs thematically the other. This technique is different than flashback, or maybe it's more accurate to say that the technique of flashback has here, and probably elsewhere although I'm not a student of film history, evolved into a sort of flash-flashback, or flash-jump (distinct, naturally, from a jump-cut), which in aggregate allows narrative to proceed not akin to a thread but rather a sort of braid. Described visually, the former would be this
------------------- >>
with the dashes representing narrative flow (and maybe a dash equals a scene, say); the latter variety though would look like
==x==x==x==x= >>
with each horizontal line being a narrative thread and each X being an exchange between them, a weave, the points at which one informs the other.
I still suspect that although these tries for a narrative now, or confluence of narrative past & present, alternatively, exist in fiction and elsewhere - look no further than Joyce to satisfy your Modernist jones, and your Postmodern jones with some Pynchon circa 1973's GR - comics still win the Golden Goose w/r/t establishing a narrative moment of true space-time, primarily due to its nature of simultaneous panels per page. Its world does not advance without the involvement of the reader, or put more artfully, its world does not advance without the reader, period. Films flicker on. Books that pull off this technique also of course depend on the feathery caress of the reader's eye. The reader must move her eye from word to word and only in so doing can she move, if the novel is indeed trying to so move her, from word to word, world to world. But check it: "It could be argued that a novel could achieve similar results [as sequential art] (after all, all the words on a page are observable all at the same time), and by this same token, one could claim this same feat could be performed in film through the usage of split-screen. What gives comics advantage over these other mediums, however, is that while literature and film must use obtrusive techniques (ruptures in the text, split screen) to create a tangible fourth dimension, this manipulation of the space-time continuum is so much part and parcel with the very nature of sequential art that this bridging of space and time is virtually seamless" (Bernard & Carter, Section 17). The comics page in other words is absorbable all at once & of a piece; the confluence of the narratives is bam, there, on the page, with no real "jumps" needed. It establishes an instantaneous sameness between narrative times by virtue of its moves on the same page, I think is the point to mull.
Is this something for poets to ape? Would I bring it up if I didn't think so? There's a way I think to scrub down the seams Bernard and Carter note in other mediums' attempts to establish a narrative now - the jump cut, the rambling stream-of-consciousness-style or pomo textual palimpsests (see sections of House of Leaves by M.Z. Danielewski) - such that the reader's has simultaneous access to this, that, and the other thing as comics occasion and that prose and film try but by virtue of their in-time-ness can't quite realize to the same extent.
One part of the film got me thinking about this article by Bernard & Carter about "sequential art" i.e. comics, and their ability to break into and exist in the 4th dimension, which definition of theirs is not perfect; the article's of use mainly when it distinguishes comics' ability to splice narrative moments together. These two fellows do a pretty wise job of detailing how comics do this: because each panel exists on the same page, and because one of the dominant M.O.s of comics is to overlay narration over image which may or may not relate to that concurrent narration, comics can allow the weaving-together of narrative threads in a truly simultaneous way. See especially their discussion of The Watchmen, esp. that page where the investigators are poking around the crime scene from which the Comedian was, or maybe more accurately is even now as one reads the page, pushed out of the window to his death.
This gets me thinking about other media and whether or not they have this ability as well - i.e. to fuse past and present together in a narrative "now", or perhaps more expansively to fuse disparate narrative threads together. I thought at first that, yes, comics alone have this ability going for them (you've really got to see that link; check out Section 13 if you want to get right to the matter). But strangely enough it was Friday Night Lights that reminded me that this technique has been attempted, successfully, here and there, in film and fiction and poetry; there's a scene wherein Billingsley, the abused half-back, drives home along a thatchy highway after a loss, his drunk father berating him from the backseat, and then spliced in are scenes of Coach Gains driving with his quarterback to a road stop for a season-deciding coin toss (luckily the details are not important). So Gains waxes philosophical behind the wheel of his car as they two drive, and meanwhile we are given to understand that Billingsley & dad drive home simultaneously, perhaps even on the same highway, either just ahead or just behind, it doesn't matter so much; what Gains has to say about winning, losing, etc., casts the Billingsley narrative moment into another light; the one scene informs thematically the other. This technique is different than flashback, or maybe it's more accurate to say that the technique of flashback has here, and probably elsewhere although I'm not a student of film history, evolved into a sort of flash-flashback, or flash-jump (distinct, naturally, from a jump-cut), which in aggregate allows narrative to proceed not akin to a thread but rather a sort of braid. Described visually, the former would be this
------------------- >>
with the dashes representing narrative flow (and maybe a dash equals a scene, say); the latter variety though would look like
==x==x==x==x= >>
with each horizontal line being a narrative thread and each X being an exchange between them, a weave, the points at which one informs the other.
I still suspect that although these tries for a narrative now, or confluence of narrative past & present, alternatively, exist in fiction and elsewhere - look no further than Joyce to satisfy your Modernist jones, and your Postmodern jones with some Pynchon circa 1973's GR - comics still win the Golden Goose w/r/t establishing a narrative moment of true space-time, primarily due to its nature of simultaneous panels per page. Its world does not advance without the involvement of the reader, or put more artfully, its world does not advance without the reader, period. Films flicker on. Books that pull off this technique also of course depend on the feathery caress of the reader's eye. The reader must move her eye from word to word and only in so doing can she move, if the novel is indeed trying to so move her, from word to word, world to world. But check it: "It could be argued that a novel could achieve similar results [as sequential art] (after all, all the words on a page are observable all at the same time), and by this same token, one could claim this same feat could be performed in film through the usage of split-screen. What gives comics advantage over these other mediums, however, is that while literature and film must use obtrusive techniques (ruptures in the text, split screen) to create a tangible fourth dimension, this manipulation of the space-time continuum is so much part and parcel with the very nature of sequential art that this bridging of space and time is virtually seamless" (Bernard & Carter, Section 17). The comics page in other words is absorbable all at once & of a piece; the confluence of the narratives is bam, there, on the page, with no real "jumps" needed. It establishes an instantaneous sameness between narrative times by virtue of its moves on the same page, I think is the point to mull.
Is this something for poets to ape? Would I bring it up if I didn't think so? There's a way I think to scrub down the seams Bernard and Carter note in other mediums' attempts to establish a narrative now - the jump cut, the rambling stream-of-consciousness-style or pomo textual palimpsests (see sections of House of Leaves by M.Z. Danielewski) - such that the reader's has simultaneous access to this, that, and the other thing as comics occasion and that prose and film try but by virtue of their in-time-ness can't quite realize to the same extent.
posted by Wil at
1:19 PM
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