Verbal Fframe-Advance: Toward a Cinematographic Sentence

Abstract

Verbal Fframe-Advance:Toward a Cinematographic Sentence Garrett Stewart (bio) Abstract Eerything here depends on the ways narrative prose can be understood to have its own induced motor functions in matters of pace, juxtaposition, overlap, and recurrence. My goal in moving between media is to locate and specify, in the operations of verbal style, the prose counterpart of cinema's twin frames: the big Frame of the moving screen picture, that is, together (always together) with the little frame of its composite photographic imprints, as those are subject to the traditional understanding of "frame-advance" in the spinning past of the celluloid reel in projection. Movies derive at base from the instantaneous replacement of these so-called photograms—and the continuous rearray of their pixel equivalents since—in generating the actual (if invisible) motion on which pictured movement depends. As with syllabic sequence in syntactic perception, within and across sentences, the two scales of screen "action" are in fact all but simultaneous—and functionally inseparable. Hence my heuristic coinage for the comparable momentum at stake in each "time-based" medium: Fframe-advance. Eerything here depends on the ways narrative prose can be understood to have its own induced motor functions in matters of pace, juxtaposition, overlap, and recurrence. My goal in moving between media is to locate and specify, in the operations of verbal style, the prose counterpart of cinema's twin frames: the big Frame of the moving screen picture, that is, together (always together) with the little frame of its composite photographic imprints, as those are subject to the traditional understanding of "frame-advance" in the spinning past of the celluloid reel in projection. Movies derive at base from the instantaneous replacement of these so-called photograms—and the continuous rearray of their pixel equivalents since—in generating the actual (if invisible) motion on which pictured movement depends. As with syllabic sequence in syntactic perception, within and across sentences, the two scales of screen "action" are in fact all but simultaneous—and functionally inseparable. Hence my heuristic coinage for the comparable momentum at stake in each "time-based" medium: Fframe-advance. The issue is not whether cinema can be construed as a language system in its own right, in the sense once influentially pursued by Christian Metz in stressing the condition of film as syntagmatic without having a real syntax.1 Nor is this essay concerned with the visual quotient of mobility as sine qua non in a phenomenology of literature's imaginative actualization by the reading mind.2 Still less is it aimed at the direct or indirect influence of cinema on modes of literary writing following after and from its invention.3 Analysis is directed instead—as much with a mid-nineteenth-century novelist like Herman Melville as with the movie-saturated work of Thomas Pynchon—at a lexical kinetics that can best be apprehended by medial analogy. In this light, even the minimal units both of prose and of celluloid's motored pictures—phonemes and photograms—are put under investigation for the part they take, or, better, play, in the inscription (imprint) of any immersive depiction, on page or screen: a manifestation into which their serial machinations tend at the same time to disappear.4 [End Page 139] Threading the Read At the dawn of the film medium, the cinematograph was a device for both record and retrieval in a single mechanism. Before the lens: light, camera, action, matched behind the lens by their intermittent trace. Later, on the reverse s/trip to the screen within the same apparatus: spool, beam, projected motion. Any imagined cinematography of the sentence is a comparable recording of segmental sequences for the purposes of their own playback. On the page: letters, lexemes, sentences. In reading: phonemes, syllabic patterning, the syntax of sense. None of this is meant to ignore the different "visualization" involved in literature and cinema. Screen image is of course automatic (whether mechanical or electronic) and normally irreversible, whereas prose is always individually paced, both in execution and reception. Yet this distinction has a way of maximizing rather than silencing the interest of any such comparison. "One necessity of movies is that the thread of...