Tag Archives: closure

Lectorials, Media 1

In Seth Keen’s Lectorial presentation this week he mentioned that narrative films are generally governed by temporal relations, but in non-narrative film the governing force is often spatial. That is, rather than following a cause-and-effect procession, the various elements of an experimental film can work together to create a “space” in the audience’s mind.

A couple of years ago I read a reddit AMA with some of the crew that work on David Attenborough’s nature documentaries. Attenborough’s films aren’t strictly non-narrative, because they have such prominent narration and they’re generally constructed as a narrative film with characters, settings, etc., but the material they shoot could easily be compiled into an observational documentary in the style of Frederick Wiseman if they so choose.

Anyway, I’m a huge Attenborough fan so I read the entire AMA with glee, but one thing in particular stuck out to me: I discovered that in Attenborough’s films (and most nature documentaries) the sound is recorded entirely separately from the video. So when you see amazing video of a bird imitating human noises, chances are it’s actually a bit of a cheat and they’ve just layered audio of one bird over footage of a different bird.

I’d never really given this a conscious thought before but it makes sense in hindsight, because unless you have an incredibly sensitive directional microphone attached to each camera there’s no way you can record the sound of, say, a lion from 300m away and have it sound as crystal clear as it does in the finished product. I guess you could consider it a kind of foley, in a way… where the foley artist is an animal.

Anyway, the point of all this is that the result is a spatial relationship between all the pieces of material (audio and video), which is put together into a whole by the audience in their minds. This is another example of closure, which was discussed early in the semester.

One of the main things I’m learning in Media 1 so far is that so much of the work in making a text coherent is actually done by the audience. Very strange.

Cheating spatial relations

Aside
Lectorials, Media 1, Readings

Michael’s extreme closure

Part of the reading this week, the comic Blood in the Gutter by Scott McCloud, explains that people are very good at filling in the blanks when given partial or incomplete information. For example, if in one image we see a woman riding a bicycle, and then in the next image the bicycle is upturned and the woman is lying on the ground, we can infer that between the two images the woman fell off the bicycle, even if we don’t actually see this part of the scene occurring. This is called closure.

Closure is a really intriguing phenomenon, and when reading McCloud’s piece I was reminded of an incredible example I discovered at the Melbourne International Film Festival a few years ago.

The film is called Michael, it’s a relatively obscure Austrian film from 2011 that follows an insurance salesman as he quietly and unassumingly goes about his mundane daily existence. It’s all very boring, but for the fact that he has a 10-year-old boy, Wolfgang, locked in his basement. The relationship between Michael and Wolfgang, on screen at least, is basically parental: they have breakfast together in the morning, Michael goes to work (having locked Wolfgang away), they play musical instruments together at night, watch television, etc.

The film never actually portrays Michael abusing Wolfgang in any way, but that is clearly the subtext of what’s going on. Amazingly, this aspect of the story happens entirely in the mind of the audience. The viewer has to realise and understand what’s happening off screen, and how awful it is, using closure. And because of this, in many ways Michael is a far more disturbing film than if it had shown the abuse on screen.

This is an extreme example, obviously, but it’s interesting how editing can force a viewer to imagine things in their own mind against their will.

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