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Book Review |
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the rise of the image the fall of the word
Reviewed by John Thurston, PhD Gleaming images flash by your eyes at a frenetic pace. Bits of text jump out of the images at irregular intervals. A hard-driving sound track blasts at you. The experience lasts no more than a minute. You feel, however, as if you have seen a feature length film. You're not sure what it was about, but it riveted your attention for the time it was on the screen. The opening paragraph describes:
According to Mitchell Stephens in the rise of the image the fall of the word, all three answers could be correct. We have long accepted that commercials can provide more interesting television than the shows they pay for and that movie trailers are often much better than the films they promote. Stephens inadvertently explains why this is; however, the book's real intention is to explore answer c, the future of video. I was drawn to this book by a fact about contemporary life — the consequences of which have long intrigued me. The field of vision of late twentieth century citizens of the developed world is saturated with images to an extent never before known. The average 16th century peasant, for example, might have seen stain-glass images in his or her church and perhaps painted images on signs for the village tavern or blacksmith. The average worker in the early 19th century would have seen the same images and maybe a few others in books. After the invention of steel-plate engraving in 1819, images started to become more available to the majority of people. Since then, the technologies of image reproduction have developed exponentially to the point that no one can escape being bombarded from all sides by brightly coloured pictures. The historical reach of Stephens' book matches that sketched in the previous paragraph. A central source for theoretical support of his argument is a seminal essay by Walter Benjamin entitled, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The essay ponders the changed meaning of visual art in an age of mass-production. But Stephens' focus is narrower and is oriented towards the future. He speculates that the rise of the image and the fall of the word is leading to a period when video will be the dominant medium for serious communication — a medium almost entirely freed from its connection with the print media that have been dominant for the better part of the past five centuries. Stephens does not explore the social consequences of the state of transition he claims we are in. Instead, he makes a few unsubstantiated references to the contemporary period being "filled with a kind of despair": There is a sense of exhaustion in philosophy, politics and the arts. … This book will argue that these phenomena can be explained in part by the transition from a culture dominated by the printed word to one dominated by moving images. (p. xi) He makes analogies with earlier transitions (orality to writing, and writing to print) and claims: "Now, in the midst of a new communications revolution, we face a new set of shocks attributable in part to the exhaustion of print and the arrival of video." These are large claims that require more substantial argument than Stephens is willing to devote to them. Instead, he dwells on his ideas about the "new video" and how it "may be able to help us survive" our current crisis (p. 212). What Is the New Video?Stephens calls the coming medium the "new video" in order to distinguish it from television and cinema, but the new video bears little resemblance to what currently passes for experimental video. He finds evidence of the techniques he believes will create the new video in television commercials and MTV, the video productions of a handful of directors, and in movies like Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books. Anyone who has watched television in recent years, whether MTV, commercials, news reports, or a few specific drama series such as NYPD Blue, will recognize in Stephens' description of the new video something with which they are familiar: images strutting by; images bumping up against each other; images stutter-stepping to a hard beat; images that capture "splinters of events"; images mixed with sounds that mostly are not synced to lips; images sharing screens with words; images feeling their way toward new relationships with words, sounds and each other; highly kinetic moving images that reimagine, not merely re-create, the world. (p. 134) With few exceptions, the new video has been used thus far for trivial or exploitative purposes. However, Stephens predicts that it will become a new art form used for the most serious of purposes. He believes that it will be used to deal with issues, to elicit emotional responses, to tell complex stories, and to provide opportunities for seeing things from multiple, contradictory perspectives. Stephens discusses at length the artistic principles of the new video (pp. 184-97). Among these principles are pronouncements that the new video will:
The new video will deal with surfaces, not depths. It will display "psyches in action" not the "psyches themselves" (p. 214). It will seek to understand "the perspectives of people," not "the essence of a person." It will discover truths "through the deft juxtaposition of carefully selected aspects of surfaces," not "deeper truths" (p. 217). Stephens' emphasis on surfaces is common to the belief of some contemporary philosophers that the value once accorded to notions of intellectual depth and profundity was merely the by-product of a system of metaphors that outgrew its usefulness. Where Is the New Video?As any writer on the development of film must, Stephens traces the roots of the new video to the innovations of D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, two of the recognized founders of modern cinema. He finds hints of the new video in some of the work of the Marx Brothers and Jean-Luc Godard. The new video really takes off with obscure filmmakers in the 1960s, out of whose work, Stephens claims, the style of MTV and certain image-saturated television commercials developed. Stephens acknowledges that "the chain of influences" he tries to construct is not sturdy and wafts "back and forth between the avant-garde and the resolutely commercial" (p. 135). As he points out, however, it is hard to pin down the genesis of any major art form, especially before that form has truly been born. We will only be able to assess his arguments about the new video's influences and evolution after it finally emerges as a recognizable form, if it ever does. Opponents of the new video have already appeared, even if the art form has not. Among them are those who complain about fast-cutting and sound bites being anathema to thought and serious discourse. Throughout the book, Stephens counters their arguments, often effectively. The glib politician with facile slogans is not an invention of the sound bite, for instance. He is willing to acknowledge that "a kind of art ... a logic, a way of looking at the world, is threatened," but he is convinced that "the new video will mature" (p. 153) and that it will be a form more suited to its times than the forms it replaces. Stephens underpins his argument with reference to earlier upheavals in the balance of media: "the video revolution is ... humankind's third major communications revolution, and the disruptions occasioned by the first two — writing and print — are surprisingly similar to those we are experiencing now" (p. 11). He usefully brings historical insights to the support of his own theories. His devotion, however, of two of the three parts of his book to historical surveys is a bit lengthy. Part I covers the print revolution and Part II the early development of photography and film. Both parts are summaries of research performed by others that could easily be reduced without jeopardizing his arguments. Stephens faces a different set of problem in Part III when he focusses on the new video. His difficulty is two-fold: there are few examples of the new video on which he can draw and he must describe in words examples that rely on expression in another medium for their impact. For the most part, he overcomes these difficulties with imagination and the thoroughness of his own research. I won't argue with Stephens' speculations about the new video, except in one area. He recognizes that "this new video — the best new video — should also sometimes be difficult to watch. It can be expected to require and reward effort, not button pushing but a mental alertness" (p. 199). Stephens allows that television will continue to exist as mindless diversion. Where I find it difficult to follow him is in imagining the audience for the new video and how the new video will support itself. I can muster the concentration necessary to appreciate and understand films that have aspirations to art. I don't know if I could sit through two hours of new video, as Stephens describes it. Coming Soon to a Theatre Near YouEarly on, Stephens declares himself to be a lover of books and reading (p. xii) and is well aware of the irony of writing a book about a medium that he predicts will replace books. At one point he describes what a video version of his book would be like (p. 225). Another irony of which Stephens is surely aware is the irony that some of the most interesting pages in his book are those that most nearly resemble the new video. Each of the thirteen chapters begins with a two-page spread composed by one of eight different designers. The spreads are montages that use stills and other images discussed in the chapter, as well as captions and explanatory or evocative text. The spreads must be "read," in much the same way Stephens predicts the new video must be read. The spreads are attractive and meaningful in themselves, and go beyond the usual illustrative graphics for a text. They show what the book might be like as a video. the rise of the image the fall of the word is useful for understanding the current state of film
and television, and contains stimulating speculations about future directions for the new video. Its
arguments are often thin, however, and it is unlikely that the specific form it envisages will ever appear. John Thurston holds a doctorate in English. He has written The Work of Words: The Writing of Susanna Strickland Moodie (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), as well as numerous published articles on early nineteenth-century Canadian literature. More recently, he has produced several help files and computer manuals.
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FEATURE
by
Mitchell Stephens
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