Suspense by Lois Webber & Phillips Smalley (1913)
With the aid of last week’s reading by Adam Ganz, we are looking to explore lens based writing. Ganz revisits its inception by speaking of past practice from Galileo, Darwin, Defoe, Cook, to contemporaries like Freedberg, Leeuwenhoek and Hochschild. This paper alines these scholars and scientists with a notion that the lens is the yardstick for concise explanations devoid of ornamental and abstruse language (as beautifully put by Robert Boyle) (p. 11).
I am especially interested in Ganz’s attempt to codify lens based writing and its affordances. Below, I have somewhat paraphrased his modes in order to make sense of them myself, they are as follows;
Prosthetic: the heightened perception of an object through extensions of a sense, such as a telescope for visual or speaker for audio enhancement
Historic: relaying what has been perceived before should a willing observer be unable
Analytic: cut and dry description of what is perceived
Aesthetic: viewing and framing simultaneously
Diachronic: the observation of the effects of time
Scopophilic: offering voyeuristic pleasure from examination (p.10).
For me, this made the art of lens based writing clear-cut and easier to understand and thus apply to my own practice.
However, also within Ganz’s text, I became somewhat confused by Viktor Shklovsky’s take on ‘the purpose of art’ and the defamiliarisation of the observed (p.19). Shklovsky’s factive, definitive language on such a nuanced topic as art, made me question whether this entry is a useful contribution to his argument or not. I would be interested to see what others took from this passage.
Though, instead of getting too caught up in this, I moved on with the presumption that Shklovsky was merely highlighting an artist’s ability to alter one’s perception.
Overall, this paper has given me a new appreciation for the scripts and science journals that I have read throughout my life. It has sparked a new enthusiasm for lens based writing, in particular, for the scripts that we will produce in class. It has given me some new tools to construct my ‘world’ for the next assignment, specifically, the notion of scopophilic writing which I feel could aid me in achieving visceral impact.
Ganz, A 2013, ‘To make you see’: Screenwriting, description and the ‘lens-based’ tradition, Journal of Screenwriting, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 7-24.