Movies and Hyper-Visual Culture

Abstract

The difference between verbal and visual make believe is ultimately rooted in physiology, distinctions between hearing and seeing, but historical processes have also affected both modes (Carroll, 1980, 145). We can all see that “contemporary culture is a visual culture.” (Baetens, 45) The long historical development of Western Culture toward hyper-visuality has cogently been described by Walter J. Ong (1967, 1977), with the result, as W. J. T. Mitchell (16) astutely observed, that “spectatorship … and visual pleasures may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading … and that [now] visual experience might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality.” Motion pictures validate that insight. The invention of printing in the Renaissance, to cite perhaps the most obvious example, shifted the primary basis of literary imagining from sounds heard to sights read on the page. Since then, however, there has been no equally significant transformation in the nature of the texts that stimulate verbal make believe: we read Don Quixote in the same way we read the most recent novel. The cultural context within which we read Don Quixote, of course, is radically different from that of its original readers, and for my purposes the primary difference is the hyper-visuality of modern society.KeywordsWestern CultureMotion PictureGood MovieVisual PleasureKinesthetic AwarenessThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.