With The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, we reached a film in which music, colour, movement, space and narrative seemed to be composing one another.
Prospero's Books takes the problem further.
Here the image can contain text.
The text can become image.
The voice can belong simultaneously to a character, a narrator and a literary text.
Bodies can become moving paintings.
Music can provide temporal organisation.
Manuscripts can appear as layers over living bodies.
Digital images can be superimposed upon other digital images.
The film can place several semiotic processes in the same visual field.
At times, it becomes difficult to say where one mode ends and another begins.
This is why the phrase indistinguishable is tempting.
But perhaps the more precise claim is more interesting:
The modes remain different, but their contributions to meaning become so deeply interwoven that isolating them can obscure rather than clarify the work.
A film made of layers
Greenaway's starting point is Shakespeare's The Tempest, but Prospero's Books is not simply a filmed performance of the play.
Roger Ebert described the film as an experiment in form and content, more like an art book or record album than a conventional narrative film. He emphasised the way illuminated pages, typography and illustrations are superimposed over the central images, sometimes in several layers at once.
The BFI similarly describes Prospero's Books as a highly multilayered visual work made possible by new high-definition video technology, with manuscripts, typography and imagery becoming part of its elaborate visual design.
The effect is extraordinary.
A page may appear over a body.
Writing may move across a face.
An illustration may occupy the same visual field as a performance.
Another image may appear above both.
Then one layer may disappear while another remains.
The screen no longer behaves like a window onto a scene.
It behaves more like a palimpsest.
The page becomes image
This immediately complicates our usual distinction between language and visual representation.
A page normally belongs to writing.
It carries words.
The words have semantic and grammatical organisation.
But in Prospero's Books, the page is also an image.
Its typography has shape.
Its layout has spatial organisation.
Its illustrations become visual objects.
Its materiality becomes part of the composition.
The written word therefore participates simultaneously as language and image.
We cannot simply read it and then look at it.
We encounter the two operations together.
The visual arrangement affects how the writing is perceived.
The writing affects how the image is construed.
The mode has not disappeared.
It has become multimodally entangled.
Prospero's books are not merely props
The books are also important at the level of narrative.
Prospero's magical power is inseparable from his books.
They contain knowledge, memory, diagrams, classifications, images and imagined worlds.
Greenaway therefore does something particularly apt.
He makes the books themselves part of the film's visual construction.
The things that, within the story, provide Prospero with knowledge and power become the things that, within the film, generate layers of visual meaning.
The books are simultaneously:
objects within the story,
images on the screen,
written texts,
repositories of knowledge,
sources of magical power,
and formal devices through which the film constructs itself.
A single object participates in several semiotic systems.
The word becomes a visual event
This is one of the most striking features of the film.
We normally think of writing as something we read.
Greenaway also makes us see it.
A word can occupy a position in space.
Its typography can resemble an illustration.
A page can appear, disappear, overlap another page or move across the frame.
The written sign therefore acquires a temporal and spatial life.
It is no longer merely a sequence of words unfolding in reading.
It becomes part of the choreography of the image.
Language has entered visual architecture.
And the image can become readable
The reverse happens too.
An image can begin to behave like text.
The viewer searches it for patterns.
Figures recur.
Objects correspond.
Numbers appear.
Pages suggest classifications.
Images refer to other images.
The film invites us to read visual form.
This is especially characteristic of Greenaway's cinema, which repeatedly turns visual composition into a system of counting, ordering, classification and recurrence. Greenaway himself has spoken of his fascination with numbers and systems, and of the way those systems flow into Nyman's music and its pattern-making.
We are therefore no longer simply watching.
We are reading with the eyes and listening with the form.
Gielgud's voice
Then there is John Gielgud.
He does not simply play Prospero.
Greenaway has him perform the speeches of the other characters as well, so that Shakespeare's voices are all filtered through the voice of Prospero. The BFI describes this as a central feature of the film, while Greenaway himself explained that Prospero's role as a puppeteer made Gielgud's voice an integral part of the film's strategy.
This creates another extraordinary coupling.
The characters are visually separate.
Their voices are not.
The body we see and the voice we hear may therefore belong to different semiotic levels.
Prospero becomes not merely a character within the story but something closer to its narrative operator.
The voice helps generate the world it describes.
Voice becomes architecture
The voice therefore does not merely tell us what the images mean.
It gives them a temporal and narrative organisation.
The spoken Shakespearean text can establish relations between scenes.
It can identify characters.
It can describe events.
But because all the voices pass through Gielgud, language also acquires a structural unity.
The film's many bodies speak through one voice.
Its many visual layers are held together by one narrative presence.
Again, several semiotic relations have been superimposed.
Music enters the palimpsest
Now add Michael Nyman.
The music is no longer simply beneath the images.
It is one of the layers through which the film's temporal organisation is perceived.
The voice has rhythm.
The image has rhythm.
The typography has movement.
The bodies move.
The music repeats and develops.
The film therefore has several simultaneous temporal structures.
And these structures can interact.
A musical recurrence can coincide with a visual recurrence.
A spoken phrase can continue while the image transforms.
A page can appear while music maintains continuity across a visual change.
No single mode controls the whole experience.
The image as manuscript
This perhaps explains why the film feels so unlike conventional cinema.
A conventional film usually asks us to perceive a scene and then interpret the various elements within it.
Prospero's Books often gives us several scenes or levels at once.
One layer does not simply replace another.
It overlays it.
The effect is much closer to opening a manuscript whose pages have become transparent.
The viewer can see several orders simultaneously.
That means the film's meaning cannot easily be reduced to sequential interpretation.
It is stratified.
Stratification without separation
Here we encounter a distinction worth preserving.
The modes are clearly distinct:
words are not images;
images are not music;
voices are not bodies;
music is not typography.
But they are also simultaneously available within the same act of construal.
The film does not ask us to complete one semiotic operation before beginning another.
It makes them interact in parallel.
This is perhaps a stronger form of multimodality than we have yet encountered.
The modes remain separate at one level.
At another, they are inseparable in the meaning they collectively produce.
Greenaway and the body
The body intensifies this effect.
Greenaway has spoken of his desire to restore a corporeal dimension to cinema, drawing upon the tradition of Renaissance painting in which the nude body could act as the centre around which ideas circulate. In Prospero's Books, hundreds of bodies appear within the film's layered visual compositions.
The body therefore becomes another semiotic medium.
It is physical.
Visual.
Erotic.
Performative.
Symbolic.
Mythic.
The body can be read.
It can form patterns.
It can occupy a compositional position.
It can become one element in a larger tableau.
Again, no single mode dominates.
Painting enters film
This is another reason Prospero's Books feels like an art object rather than conventional cinema.
Many of its compositions resemble paintings.
The bodies are arranged.
The light is controlled.
The colours are carefully balanced.
The frame can function like a canvas.
But unlike a painting, the image can move.
Layers can appear.
Words can slide into view.
Music can alter the experience.
Voices can speak.
The film therefore turns the still visual arts into a temporal, multimodal system.
Painting has entered cinema without ceasing to be pictorial.
Cinema becomes something else
At this point, perhaps "film" itself becomes an insufficient description.
Greenaway's work draws upon:
theatre,
painting,
literature,
manuscripts,
music,
dance,
typography,
digital compositing,
performance.
The result is not simply a film containing references to these media.
Their formal possibilities have become resources for constructing the film itself.
The work is therefore better understood as a multimodal composition in which cinema is the organising environment.
The technology matters
This would not have been possible in quite the same way without digital technology.
The BFI notes that Prospero's Books made extensive use of then-new high-definition video technology to create its intricate visual layering.
Greenaway himself described how computer paintbox techniques made it possible to create layered images resembling transparent sheets in an old anatomical textbook.
The technology therefore did not simply improve the picture.
It changed what kinds of multimodal composition were possible.
New technical potential produced new semiotic potential.
That is an important point.
Technology as semiotic affordance
A medium's technology determines not only what can be displayed but what can be composed.
Digital layering makes it possible to place several visual planes together.
Editing makes it possible to rearrange time.
Synchronous sound allows voice, image and music to become tightly coupled.
Digital compositing allows text to move through visual space.
The technology becomes part of the film's semiotic ecology.
A new technical capability can therefore generate new artistic possibilities.
The book becomes the film
There is perhaps a wonderful conceptual reversal at work.
The film is called Prospero's Books.
Yet the books are not simply represented within the film.
They become a model for the film's own form.
A book contains layers of text and image.
The film contains layers of image, text, voice and music.
A book can be opened to different pages.
The film can move between different visual layers.
A book can preserve knowledge.
The film becomes an archive of knowledge, image and memory.
The object represented by the film becomes a model for the way the film itself is constructed.
The representation has become reflexive.
Prospero as a model of the filmmaker
The same reflexivity appears in Prospero himself.
He controls books.
Words.
Images.
Spirits.
Bodies.
Voices.
He constructs a world through magical knowledge.
Gielgud's Prospero therefore becomes an extraordinary analogue of the filmmaker.
He is the figure who appears to control the relations among modes.
But the film complicates this.
Prospero is also inside the world he has created.
He is both maker and participant.
That gives the film a strong reflexive dimension.
The medium is not simply representing a magician.
It is using a magician to reflect on the making of worlds through representation.
Meaning among meanings
This brings us very close to the conceptual language developed in our earlier work.
A sign can become a resource for another sign.
A meaning can become a resource for another meaning.
Here we see entire semiotic modes becoming resources for one another.
Text can become image.
Image can become narrative.
Narrative can organise music.
Music can organise movement.
Movement can organise image.
Voice can unify characters.
The film becomes a relation among relations among meanings.
Can the modes really become indistinguishable?
Now we can return to our title.
Strictly speaking, no.
The modes remain distinguishable.
We can still identify a musical passage.
We can still identify a line of Shakespeare.
We can still distinguish a body from an image of a body.
We can still recognise typography as typography.
The distinction does not disappear.
What disappears is the usefulness of assuming that each mode contributes a separately isolable portion of the overall meaning.
The modes are not indistinguishable as modes.
They become difficult to disentangle as contributors to the meaning of the work.
That is a more precise claim.
From contribution to co-construction
This gives us perhaps the strongest formulation yet of co-construction.
In ordinary scoring:
music contributes to the meaning of an image.
In multimodal recruitment:
music and image alter one another's construal.
In the more radical Greenaway cases:
music, image, voice, text, movement and space participate in constructing one another's conditions of meaning.
No single mode can be treated as the primary carrier.
The film's meaning is emergent from the system.
The viewer has to learn how to see it
There is one final participant.
The viewer.
Prospero's Books does not provide an easy path through its layers.
The audience has to learn how to look.
To notice recurring motifs.
To connect text and image.
To allow several layers to remain in attention simultaneously.
To hear Gielgud's voice in relation to multiple bodies.
To recognise the music as another structuring layer.
The film therefore places unusual demands upon the viewer's repertoire.
It is not simply giving us more information.
It is teaching us to construe differently.
The film expands the repertoire
This is perhaps the ultimate consequence.
A film like Prospero's Books can expand what an audience thinks a film can be.
After encountering such a work, the viewer has a new potential available to them.
They can imagine text as image.
Music as architecture.
Voice as multiple characterisation.
Digital layering as narrative form.
The film has changed not only what the viewer knows.
It has changed what they regard as possible in cinema.
A particular artwork has therefore altered the potential of the medium.
From score to co-construction
We can now see the trajectory of the series.
The conventional score accompanies.
Kubrick shows music opposing the image and reorganising its construal.
2001 shows music participating in large-scale visual structure.
Greenaway and Nyman push toward architecture.
The Cook, the Thief... shows music, colour, movement, space and bodies composing a saturated formal system.
Prospero's Books layers text, image, voice, music, bodies and digital technologies into a single complex field.
The progression is not toward the disappearance of modes.
It is toward their increasing mutual dependence.
The strange thing about multimodality
We began by assuming that different modes contribute different meanings.
That is still true.
But Prospero's Books suggests that something happens when enough such contributions become interdependent.
The question "Which mode means what?" begins to lose explanatory power.
The more interesting question becomes:
What relations among modes make this meaning possible?
This is a major conceptual shift.
We are no longer analysing a collection of channels.
We are analysing a system of co-constraining potentials.
A semiotic ecology becomes an artwork
We can therefore push our earlier idea of the film as a semiotic ecology further.
An ecology is a system in which elements affect one another.
A work such as Prospero's Books makes those relations unusually visible.
Music affects temporal organisation.
Text affects visual attention.
Images affect how text is read.
Voice affects bodies.
Bodies affect the meaning of text.
Technology makes new combinations possible.
The viewer learns the system as they encounter it.
The work becomes a self-contained ecology of meaning-making.
And this may be the furthest we need to go
We began this series by asking what happens when music ceases to be simply accompaniment.
We have now reached a point at which the question itself may have dissolved.
In Prospero's Books, it is no longer especially illuminating to ask:
What does the music do to the film?
or:
What does the image do to the music?
The more revealing question is:
What does the configuration of music, image, text, voice, body, movement and technology make possible that none could make possible alone?
That is the question of co-construction.
And it points toward our final task.
We have examined extraordinary cases.
Kubrick.
Greenaway.
Nyman.
2001.
A Clockwork Orange.
The Cook, the Thief....
Prospero's Books.
Now we need to step back.
What, exactly, have these atypical films taught us about cinema and meaning that a conventional theory of scoring could not?
Have we really moved beyond the score?
Or have we discovered that the score was never quite the right unit of analysis?
That is the question with which we will bring the series to its conclusion.
From score to co-construction.
No comments:
Post a Comment