I am not even half way through this article and I already feel compelled to discuss what the author has written in the article due for tomorrow's class. My two main issues: He has this whole metaphor of how a movies are like the written word and that its about literacy...blah blah blah. Secondly, he talks about how movies are better in the sense that they give ten times the amount of detail than a book ever could. Watch it, bud.
First off, the whole metaphor of a movie really being like words and movies is all about literacy and that sound is irrelevant seems absolutely stupid. Frankly, it sounds like some superfluous non-sense that takes the beauty out of film. Let's put movies in their proper perspective here. I can agree with the fact that movies produce literacy, as in academic literacy, although that is hard to argue these day with shows like Jersey Shore or movies like Stepbrothers. However, there is a big difference between the written word and movies. The point of a book is to bring imagination while a movie is the realized imagination. Even though a book gives us details about how a scene is suppose to look or how a person is suppose to look, everybody has a different idea of how that person should be, because words are arbitrary. Even though words have a meaning, people still have different associations with them. With film, the part of imagination is gone. It is already there. The people and plot are physically there in front of you and you cannot change it. Your eyes have given you the evidence that that is the way it is. Now, while some may argue that you have the same problem with books I beg to differ. Because with book, there is more flexibility to imagine the possibilities. Maybe I'm wrong about all of this, maybe I just missed what this guy was trying to say, but oh well.
Second, I do not see how movies are better at giving detail in a movie than a book is. I think that both are extremely effective but I don't think that you can sit there and clam that one is better than the other.Yes, a movie can give an abundance more of detail but are the people really catching all the detail or are they forced to focus on a small point made in the frame because the of abundance of detail. The information you get from a movie is like a ball of string, you can tell where the end or beginning is, and you only notice what is on the surface. However, when it come to reading about a scene or a character, the detail is more linear. It is one thought at a time. It as though that ball of string that was handed to you is not tied from one end of the room to the other. You know where the beginning is; you know where the end is, and you get to follow all the detail in between. You look at the heart of the situation.
Understanding Media (aka trying to figure out what this guy is talking about)
Sunday, October 3, 2010
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1 comments:
I actually think you get the article more than you thought. I think McLuhan would agree that the experience of watching a movie is quite different from reading about the story in the book. Each medium has its own inherent properties and therefore the way we experience them is also different. In terms of detail, what he is getting at is that with a film, much of the information is there on the screen, whether we catch it all or not, from the shade of paint on a wall to the material of a character's clothing. A book leaves much of that detail to your imagination, and so the experience is different. It's not to say one is better than the other. On the point of literacy, there are different forms of literacy at play here, one dealing with images, the other with the printed word. The field of media literacy is a broad one, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. Glad to see you have such strong opinions about it!
-Prof
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