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ABSTRACT
Against the background of a widespread language skepticism among film theorists and practitioners, this article aims to highlight the evocative potential of spoken words in cinema. Focusing on an aesthetic device dubbed ‘suggestive verbalization’, it demonstrates how character speech can powerfully appeal to the spectator’s sensory imagination: language allows film viewers to imagine – in various sensory modes – something they do not see or hear. The article sets out to show that the evocative power of character speech and dialogue is largely uncharted territory in film studies and then defines the term ‘suggestive verbalizations’ more closely. By means of various examples, it subsequently distinguishes four types of suggestive verbalization along temporal lines: verbalization-of-the-past, verbalization-of-the-present, verbalization-of-the-future and verbalization-of-generalities. In the final section, several functions are discussed suggestive verbalizations can have for the aesthetics of a film and the viewer’s experience. An implicit goal is to contribute to the ongoing work on the poetics of ‘omission, suggestion and completion’ in the cinema and the phenomenology of the viewer’s imagination. The article thus supports attempts to define film not exclusively as a perceptual audiovisual medium but also as a medium that depends on and, in fact, thrives on the sensory imagination of the viewer.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. This text is a thoroughly revised version of an article originally published in German (Hanich Citation2014).
2. More on this point, see Kaes Citation1987; Kozloff Citation2000; Elliott Citation2003. Carroll (Citation2008, 35–52) opposes media purism and the thesis of a medium specificity of film.
3. Interestingly, Kracauer was well aware of this effect on imagination, but he evaluated it quite the opposite way – not as enabling, but as constraining. In a footnote, he disapprovingly quotes René Barjavel who, in 1944, claimed that ‘the imagination of the spectator watching a dialogue film “builds from the words showered down on him and replaces the images on the screen by those which the dialogue suggests to him”’ (323).
4. These descriptive verbalizations could also be called ekphrasis, as long as one understands this classical term in a broader sense and does not restrict it to descriptions of works of art. In an influential essay, W.J.T. Mitchell distinguishes between two forms of ekphrasis: (1) ekphrasis as a literary genre in which poems describe visual art; and (2) ekphrasis as the general generic term for all verbal representations of visual representations intended for the purpose of putting persons, places, pictures, etc. before the mental eye (Citation1994, 152/153). See also the recent issue of Poetics Today (vol. 38, no. 2, 2018) on ‘Contemporary Ekphrasis.’
5. Another term is proposed by Markus Kuhn in his highly detailed Filmnarratologie. Kuhn proposes a distinction between the visual narrative instance and one or more facultative linguistic narrative instances. The latter come in the forms of extradiegetic linguistic narrative instances (such as voice-over, subtitles or inserts) and intradiegetic linguistic narrative instances (such as characters or documents such as letters, newspapers, books). However, Kuhn is not concerned with spectator activity, aesthetic impact and a description of the film experience, whereas the major point of the concept of ‘suggestive verbalization’ lies precisely in its reference to the sensory imagination of the viewer.
6. The situation is different when it comes to writing in film. A number of recent studies have shed light on words on screen. See, for instance, Chion (Citation2017) or Krautkrämer (Citation2013).
7. In their critical evaluation of what they call ‘the talking witness documentary,’ Spence and Avcı (Citation2013, 299) write: ‘thanks to these women and men, the fractured stories that the younger generation grew up with and which fueled their imaginations and fantasies, but which never added up to a complete picture, are now transformed into something more concrete. And, because of the comfortable indexicality of those talking heads (the fact that the camera and microphone were present to record the witnesses’ testimony), the stories are endowed with life.’
8. In comparison to ekphrasis, which is a textual form distinct from narration that describes for the reader, listener or audience things and events in a descriptive way, enérgeia and enárgeia designate the rhetorical devices that serve to produce this effect.
9. In this essay, I will not be able to further pursue in any detail the question of how character speech becomes vivid and evocative. For some indications, see Hanich Citation2020. For a discussion of vivid and evocative language in literature, see, inter alia, Collins Citation1991; Scarry Citation1999. The most extensive and convincing study I know is Kuzmičová Citation2013.
10. Psychologists call this phenomenon ‘within-modality interference’; see Hanich Citation2020.
11. When film images illustrate the verbalization, they reduce the suggestive effect and thus the viewer’s imaginative activity. However, this does not mean that the verbalization in these cases would have no effect on the images. The accompanying verbalization, often criticized as redundant, draws attention to the linguistically emphasized aspects of the image. Like a searchlight, it illuminates certain parts; others sink into the undescribed darkness. The images threaten imagination – but the verbalization exerts power over the autonomy of the image.
12. For some examples, see chapter 4 in Hanich Citation2010.
13. On more of these cases, see Hanich Citation2020.
14. Consider also a scene in episode 9 from Too Old to Die Young (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2019) in which the character played by Jena Malone functions as medium and describes what she can see in another ‘world.’ She is explicitly asked by her companion: ‘Tell me what you see.’ Here we have a connection to a medial off in another sense of the word ‘medial.’
15. Again, although my examples are primarily from fiction films, suggestive verbalizations also play a central role in other modes. In Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), for example, there is a bloodcurdling future verbalization, in which the stepfather of a murdered boy threatens the alleged perpetrators in the deepest Southern twang and with Old Testament anger.
16. Naremore (Citation2007, 36), too, speaks of ‘vivid scatological imagery’.
17. The terms alignment and allegiance come from Smith Citation1995, 83–86.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Julian Hanich
Julian Hanich is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen. He is the author of two monographs: The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (Routledge, 2010). With Daniel Fairfax he co-edited The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions (Amsterdam University Press, 2019); with Christian Ferencz-Flatz he was responsible for an issue of Studia Phaenomenologica on ‘Film and Phenomenology’ (2016). His research focuses on film and imagination, cinematic emotions, film phenomenology, the collective cinema experience, and film style.