It’s Not As Complicated As It Sounds
One of the key concepts that
I teach is something I refer to as Literal and Non-Literal imagery. This deals
with combining words and images to communicate ideas. This is the very heart of
filmmaking and possibly the most important tool in a filmmakers kit. As
filmmakers we have to communicate ideas using sound and picture. When these two
things are working together they can communicate immensely complicated concepts
in seconds.
Foundation
To understand how this works
we need to understand how people interact with film. About 100 years ago this
Russian dude named Lev Kuleshov did an experiment. In the
experiment he alternated from a shot of Vsevolod Pudovkin, a famous actor at
the time, to a shot of a bowl of soup, to Pudovkin, then a girl in a coffin, to
Pudovkin, then a woman on a couch. Audiences were amazed at Pudovkin’s
performance. They said he expressed pensiveness over forgotten soup, deep
sorrow over the loss of a child, and lust for the woman on the couch. The trick
here was that each shot of Pudovkin was the same shot. His face was the same
each time. The audience interpreted his, intentionally blank, expression to
have meaning based on the images it was juxtaposed to. To put it another way,
two images placed side by side create a third idea. Take a look at Kuleshov’s experiment and
listen to Hitchcock
describe how it works. These guys are smarter than I am and it will make more
sense if you listen to them.
The Basic Idea
Combining images creates
ideas in the viewer. When you add audio such as music, sound effects, and
dialog it adds another element to the equation. As writers we really only have
influence over the dialog. We have some influence over sound effects, but not
much, and far less influence over the music. So how do we use what Kuleshov
taught us in writing? We use Literal and Non-Literal imagery.
Building On The Basics
Last week I asked you to consider
3 things.
- Show it don't say it.
- If you show it don't say it.
- If you show it say it.
What do these mean? First,
if it’s at all possible don’t have characters talk about something, show the
something. If they’re talking about a bank robbery, show the bank robbery. If
they’re talking about a space ship, show the space ship. Second, when you show
something, don’t describe what the audience can see. Characters shouldn’t go
around telling us what we’ve already seen. It’s tedious and shows a lack of
trust in the viewer. If you show a bank robbery don’t follow it up with the
characters saying “wow, we just robbed a bank and this is how we did it.” The
third point is tricky, showing what you say. Since film is a visual medium you
should show everything you possibly can. If two people claim to be in love,
show that they’re in love. In film words are only as good as the actions that
back them up.
Alright, take a moment to
absorb these two concepts.
·
Images
juxtaposed generate ideas in the audience that neither image can generate on
it’s own.
·
Dialog should
support what is seen but not describe it.
Here’s a break for you to let that
sink in before I move on.
Literal and Non-Literal Imagery
With those two concepts in
mind let’s discuss Literal and Non-Literal imagery. Literal imagery is when the
image is exactly what is being said. Non-Literal imagery is when what is being
said is unrelated to the image. The images and words are only connected because
they are played together.
Here’s an example. Imagine
that the words are being spoken as the image plays on screen.
“A tree in the mist.”
“I had forgotten what it was like to be home.”
“The universe is a vast and complex place.”
The first example is
literal. That is literally a tree in the mist. There’s no complexity and it
simply describes what you can already see. This fails to use the power of
juxtaposing words and pictures to create new ideas.
The second example is less
literal but it still gives a sense of what we’re looking at. The person
speaking is probably telling us that this tree has something to do with being
home. It might also generate some other more esoteric ideas in the viewer.
Maybe the mist is a symbol of lost memories and so forth.
The third example might be
the least literal since the image isn’t complex, vast, or the universe. What
ideas does this pairing of words and image conjure in your mind?
A Range Of Possibilities
So that’s Literal and
Non-Literal imagery. You don’t want to be all Non-Literal in your work and you
don’t want to be all Literal in your work. Think of it as a sliding scale. You
can go to the extremes but usually you want to keep things in the middle. You
want to keep the combination of words and images on topic but not so
Non-Literal that it’s a fight to make any sense of what’s going on or so
literal that the audience is constantly being told what they already know.
When in doubt be
Non-Literal.
Questions? Comments? Does
this make any sense? Let me know in the comments. Tell us what you think the
combination of images and words mean in the examples.
And now more pages.
