In this week’s reading, Blood in the Gutter by Scott McCloud, we were introduced to the concept of closure: the idea of only having parts yet being able to perceive them as a whole. This was further discussed by Liam Ward in our Media One lectorial as he gave us visual examples of how closure actually works.

Closure is what happens between shots, the gaps that allow a viewer to gauge and interpret a series of events and give them meaning. I spoke in my Reflective Portfolio about how Liam Ward showed the effect of comparing Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones and then one of Liberal MP Christopher Pyne and allowed, without commenting, the room to make an association.

We were also introduced to the Kuleshov effect: the idea of deriving a meaning or association between two consecutive shots, that would otherwise be insurmountable if the shots stood in isolation. A short film was used to illustrate this: It showed a man’s face followed by either a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin or a women lounging on a couch. Although the man’s face remained the same, the audience had to readjust what he might be looking at, thereby interpreting his expression differently: hunger when looking at the soup, sorrow when looking over the dead child and lust when looking over the woman. Illustrating how sequencing and editing different footage together allows an audience to change their interpretations and the effect closure can have to create distinct and sometimes polar interpretations of the same image.