This weeks lectorial and reading both had a heavy emphasis on relative thought processes, i.e. the idea brought up in this weeks reading ‘Blood in the Gutter’ of filling in the gaps between various scenes.
This weeks reading was based around the idea of the reader of the comic artefact playing a major role in interacting with narrative progression of a comic book, the “gutter” between scenes, being where we as an active audience make a comprehension of what is going on in either scene, what the relation between the two scenes is, and what happened between the two scenes. This notion of relative thinking can be further applied to cinema, the active audience members making a decision about what is happening with the narrative by relating how two various shots fit together in the scheme of the movie as a whole.
Factors go into relative thinking such as, context, the two various scenes or frames, and how we as humans based on prior worldly experience can relate them together. This covers an idea raised today by the first guest speaker, in which us as an active audience are looking for flow and connection, this idea is also discussed in Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art an Introduction. This “gutter” which is present in comic books, the comprehension audiences make about a film as a whole through relative thought is outlined in a Cinema Studies term called, Associational form, which is the viewer of a media form assembling together images and sounds and creating their own association with the media given.
This blog post makes reference to the following two readings:
Scott McCloud, 1993, ‘Blood in the Gutter’, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (Northampton, MA : Tundra Pub)
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s FILM ART: AN INTRODUCTION. 10th edition, McGraw-Hill, 2013. Chapter 10: ‘Experimental Film’ (including ‘Types of Form in Experimental Films’ and ‘An example of Abstract Form: Ballet Mecanique’ up to and including ‘Basic Principles of Associational Form’), pages 369 – 379
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