The Moving Theatre
Hypertext and Film Montage
Delagrange discusses the importance throughout Wunderkammer that instructors and researchers must be able to represent ideas visually. When designing a visual project, the theories behind multimodality are fully realized where the “pedagogical and textual performance” become one and that through design, instructors accomplish what print is not able to do (2009, Kairos).
Delagrange confirms and connects the historical view of “Wunderkammer” as objects that can be used to think with. Through digital innovation, a space can be created in which thinking can be clicked on, and accessed through multiple experiences that encourage activity with the text and “shaping a path to rhetorical action through a technology of wonder” (2009, Kairos).
Wysocki brings McLuhan back into the equation by saying that some concepts visually are created through “disembodied design” in which the concept of a book’s design has been made translucent and unnecessary within classroom settings, as any creative decisions are ultimately handed over to the publisher (1998, Kairos).
Wysocki argues in Monitoring Order that there are two levels of meaning making when creating visuals: first that visuals can extend into the cultural and political environments in which they can become invisible to the untrained eye and secondly that visuals are experienced personally by individuals with diverse histories (1998, Kairos).
Thompson and Bordwell’s text, Film Art: An Introduction (2010), defines both mise-en-scene, known as the “what” of the shot, which includes lighting, sets/props, costume/makeup, and character expressions and movement, and cinematography, known as the “how” of the shot, which includes framing, camera angles, camera distance, and camera mobility, to show the potential for “graphic editing” in the juxtaposition of any shot meant for film assembly (p.226).
Therefore, an understanding of mise-en-scene and cinematography correlates to the elements of visual awareness and arrangement within multimedia texts which show montage theory at work. Just as the author or designer chooses how images and text appear on the page, a creative vision should be behind not only what the camera captures but also how each frame should be assembled or arranged during the editing process.
Two Visionary Pioneers: Vertov and Eisenstein
Vertov's "Kino Eye" (Cinema Eye)
“I am Kino-eye. I am builder. I have placed you… in an extraordinary room which did not exist until just now when I also created it. In this room there are twelve walls, shot by me in various parts of the world. In bringing together shots of walls and details, I’ve managed to arrange them in an order that is pleasing” (Thompson and Bordwell, 2010, p.231).
Vertov's "Theory of the Interval"
Cook also shows Vertov’s understanding of the physiological and mechanical variations of the eye through his “theory of the interval.” Cook (2007) explains that for Vertov breaks in different filmstrips represented “intervals” but in “identifying intervals rather than movements as the ‘elements’ of cinematic art,” the theory of the interval started as the technique of editing two shots together in a geometrical way thus the theory was how editing can accomplish linking frames between shots” (p.90).
Sergei Eisenstein's Film Form: Essays in Film Theory:
"The shot is by no means an element of montage. The shot is a montage cell. Just as cells in their division form a phenomenon of another order, the organism or embryo, so on the other side of the dialectical leap from the shot, there is montage" (37).
Sergei Eisenstein's Film Form: Essays in Film Theory:
montage achieves a “unity of the highest order” and through this a film achieves a natural encapsulation of one central idea which uses all parts and details of a film work (1977, p.254)
David Bordwell's The Cinema of Eisenstein:
Bordwell (1993) explains that “form” is a process to create art and that while it might aggravate certain norms of traditional editing and narrative structure, the art creates dynamics which causes the viewer to think about the film and the world in a sequential thought structure, showing that true intellectual cinema concerns itself with dialectics (p. 128).
William Costanzo's Double Exposure: Composing Writing and Film
“Viewing, filming, reading, writing – these are acts of mind, and the mind’s ability to make sense of what it encounters on the page or on the screen is based on fundamental strategies for seeing patterns, exploring options, and interpreting experience, Composing draws on basic mental predispositions for representing what is felt or thought in symbolic form, for shaping unexamined, unfamiliar events into meaningful arrangements” (p.169).
Costanzo shows the values of filmmaking by showing how much of filmmaking is based on forms of composition and modes of rhetoric such as Inventio (discovery and expression of a subject), Dispositio (the way the material is ordered into arrangements), Elocutio (the style of how someone reaches an audience) (p.171).
Mark Pearcy (2015) comments that the necessary tasks students encounter when making a film has to do with a critique of quality; if a film has value then unnecessary tools do not keep the focus, but that the purpose of “in-film activities is not to guarantee student interest, but student engagement” (p.42).
According to Paul Duncum (2004) in his article on multimodality and meaning, he also shows this fluency in student generated film by saying, “Students are asked to consider how information and mood are conveyed: is it through camera angles; point of view; length of shots; framing or cropping devices like long shot and close up; editing techniques like fade in/fade out; dissolves or wipes; or ambient sounds such as sound effects created on screen” (p.260).