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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
XV International Film Studies Conference - Cinema and Comics. Affinities, Differences, and New Forms of Interference
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Cinéma & Cie
XV International Film Studies Conference
2007/10/01
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XV International Film Studies Conference - Cinema and Comics. Affinities, Differences, and New Forms of Interference
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7
CINEMA AND COMICS
AFFINITIES, DIFFERENCES, AND NEW FORMS OF INTERFERENCE
XV International Film Studies Conference
Udine, March 3-6, 2008




  Interest in comparing cinema and comics is not new. At first glance, there are apparent affini-
ties and similarities between them. These two "media" appear to share a similar aim: to tell a story
by means of a series of pictures. Both use pictures as their primary form of representation and
both take advantage of the inexhaustible possibilities created by linking them through "montage"
- understood here in the broad sense of the term. But, although the cinema appears to create series
 of continuous images while comics create series of contiguous images, in the end their elective
affinity is a superficial one. This is true for more than one reason.
   In fact, several systems of expression share the same concern for monstration and montage: the
photo novel, photographic reportage, television, web sites, video games, etc. One might very well
wonder, therefore, what the real connection between what is called in French the seventh and
 ninth arts is, especially since their differences appear irreconcilable. To be convinced of this, one
 need only consider such crucial issues as time, which is fundamental to the way film images
 advance and are edited together but which, in comics, is only metaphorical, because the reader
 alone determines the speed at which the images are read. Space in comics is also a major stum-
 bling block to comparing the two media. What we see is, so to speak, always foreseen, to borrow
 Benoît Peters expression (prévu), because of the tabular contiguousness of the images on the
 page. And what is there to be said about the drawn line in comics, which always has a sort of sig-
 nature effect, whereas filmic monstration is greatly affected by the technology of recording the
 image.
   While the mission of this conference is to re-examine these long-standing comparisons, we are
 especially interested in considering them in light of a more diverse media landscape than was ear-
 lier the case, one that is open to intermedial hybrids which would have been unimaginable a mere
 twenty or thirty years ago. This openness, reminiscent of the effervescence of the early 20th cen-
 tury, requires us to use more empirical and speculative bases when constructing our models. In
 this context, we must re-evaluate our initial intuitions and primary categories - time, space, mon-
 tage, narrative - from a simultaneously historical, aesthetic and cultural perspective. As a way of
 becoming more attuned to this objective, we might think of a distant and particularly imagistic
 language: in Chinese, "cinema" is dian ying or "electric shadows," while "comics" is lian huan
 hua or "connected pictures". These expressions invite us from the outset to cast off our intellec-
  tual habits and the comfort of overly-rigid labels in order to bring more flexibility to our inter-
  pretation of the cultural series in question and to open them up to new models.


    The following are the principal paths of reflection which might arise from the conference:

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  CINÊMA & CIE, no. 9, Fall 2007
XV INTERNATIONAL FILM STUDIES CONFERENCE



Defining      cinema, defining comics: a comparative
of two emerging forms

   Cinema and comics have been defined as languages and been the subject of essentialist theo.
ries. But what exactly is the status of these issues today, given our awareness of intermedial rela.
tionships and the emergence of new epistemologies? Implicitly or explicitly, our definitions
change with the field they are meant to contain, to the extent that formulations which would have
been beyond reproach twenty or thirty years ago appear to us today to be obsolete, if not incom-
prehensible. The historian's task is thus not to address the validity of past definitions on the basis
of present-day concepts, nor to write the history of a genre using present-day definitions.
Wouldn't it more appropriate, instead, to analyse the practices, discourses and documents of each
era as a way of recreating, step by step, the cross-fire of partial and socially constructed defini.
tions quite different from our own which are found in the artefacts of the past?



The destiny of cinema as graphic novel and the destiny of graphic novel as cinema

  The mutual influence of these two media goes beyond mere borrowings of characters and
milieux. Just as a comics can be read like a film, so too does the cinema play with the highly
stylised approach of comics to movement and the way it connects images - quite apart from the
fact that the two art forms depict movement using singular or even perverse forms. What are the
complex phenomena of translation and deconstruction at work in this mutual attraction? Haven't
the economic relations between cinema and comics, especially since the 1970s, encouraged the
convergence of these forms of expression? From Abel Gance's three-screen version of Napoléon
(1927) to the technique of dividing the screen into several windows, shouldn't we be investigat-
ing cinema's propensity to "pigeonholing"? How do films such as Mike Figgis' Timecode (2000)
and Ang Lee's adaptation of Hulk (2003) or the video-game adaptation of XIII (Ubisoft, 2003)
exacerbate this disposition towards introducing a synchronic reading? It would also be interest-
ing to analyse the way web pages frame moving images. Conversely, we need to look at the phe-
nomenon of movie trailers and filmed versions of comics and at the Flash animation on a site such
as Coconino World (http://www.coconino-world.com/. Finally, to the extent that cinema and
comics are both fertile ground for the attraction, we need to re-examine the conventional view that
what these two cultural series essentially have in common is the goal of "telling stories through
a series of images"



A significant third perspective

  What if the relationship between cinema and comics was better understood through an external
paradigm? Wouldn't it make sense to examine the encounter between these two media from the
perspective of another significant term, media or art form which played a major role in the 20%
century? This could be print media, photography, opera, literature, painting, theatre or the ani-
mated film - anything capable of introducing into the cinema/comics equation something that
would distinguish them: Pop Art and 1960s comics and their influence on Godard, Antonioni and
others; the mosaic style of page layout in illustrated newspapers in the late nineteenth century; the
drawings of Eisenstein and Fellini and their connection to caricature and animated films; the the-
                                                                               CINEMA AND COMICS


atrical model as the guiding metaphor (as opposed to cinema) in the work of Pfeiffer, Copi.
Herriman, etc.


The range and spectre of montage: from composition to compositing

  Montage, in the cinema, has long been the art of organising a film's shots in time and space.
But we must admit that much has changed since the arrival of digital technologies. Non-linear
editing software and information and communications tools have transformed the way we think
about connecting images. Temporal editing is no longer the only way to organise them. It has
become possible to place different images of potentially different sizes and scales on-screen at the
same time. Lev Manovich, in The Language of New Media (2001), calls this spatial montage. It
thus becomes difficult not to look to comics and the whole question of tabular images to under-
stand this kind of montage. How do the concepts of découpage, framing and temporal and spatial
connecting help us to better delineate the often hybrid practices found in cinema and comics, inso-
much as montage, as Manovich remarks, remains the key technology of the twentieth century for
creating false realities? Doesn't the concept of spatial montage, which re- introduces the questions
of composition and transparency, enable us to revisit, among other things, the famous examples
of depth of field in the films of Renoir, Welles and Wyler and to relate them to the stylised depth
of field found in comics? In addition, we must focus our attention on the series of digital opera-
tions used to employ various sources as a way of creating a seemingly homogeneous compound
image. Shouldn't we be thinking about the ways in which different visual layers are fused within
a single space? Here, we invite discussion of the entire range of special effects, from the early
optical tricks found in King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) to the pres-
ent-day digital effects of Star Wars.



The dizzying heights and graphic destiny of the image

  The Chinese expression for cinema, "electric shadows" (dien ying), demonstrates the medium's
profound affinity with shadow plays, its fixation with strong, emblematic images and its use of
silhouettes, projected shadows and graphic compositions, as seen in German Expressionism, the
work of Eisenstein and the avant-garde films of the 1920s. The arrival of colour rendered these
multilateral relations even more complex. In this sense, cinema could be considered a full-fledged
graphic art and a source of inspiration for young drawers today.



Intermedial hybrids: when cinema and comics cross with other cultural series

  The connections we make between cinema and comics often rest on such falsely obvious and
deeply encrusted forms of media visibility that we forget their complexity and temporary and
changing nature. It is thus necessary to broaden and redirect our enquiry into cultural series whose
hybridity played a part in the "construction" and transformation of the two media. Comparing cin-
ema and comics thus consists in following the trail of the cultural series which run through them,
at times bringing them closer to each other and at others setting them apart. We might think here
of the Luna Park vaudeville and the music hall, modes of transportation (cars, trains, etc.), fairy

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XV INTERNATIONAL FILM STUDIES CONFERENCE


plays or sports, but also of these two media's relations with current events, news reports f
abroad, satire, caricature, story boards, etc.



The neo-baroque and seriality

  Cinema and comics enjoy privileged relations with other emerging narrative forms (usually tied
to the growth of digital technology): films made up for the most part of special effects,
hypertext, etc. These new configurations, for example the super-slick images in the film adapta.
tions of Sin City (Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, 2005) and 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006), seem to
be leading contemporary production in the direction of an aesthetic which, according to Angela
Ndalianis in Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), shares a number
of traits with the baroque: a distinct taste for intertextual labyrinths, technologi
going outside the screen and the frame, a fascination with the fragment and repetition, polycer.
trism and, above all, seriality. So many features and trends to define the parameters of new form
of cultural literacy!


Deadline for paper proposals: October 26, 2007



For more information, please contact:
Dipartimento di Storia e Tutela dei Beni Culturali
Università degli Studi di Udine
Palazzo Caiselli, Vicolo Florio 2 - 33100 Udine, Italy
fax: +39/0432/556644
e-mail: udineconference@gmail.com
        www.damsweb.it/udineconference
