Tuesday, February 20, 2018

A Discussion of McCloud and Mitchell

First, I would like to say that it took me awhile to get a grasp on Mitchell's idea of a "pictorial turn." For a while, I was definitely struggling to understand exactly what he meant, but I have come to define it as "the interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such: all media are mixed  media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no purely visual or verbal arts, though the impulse to purify is one of the central utopian gestures of Modernism (Mitchell, 5)." Therefore, in these two clips, we can see that even though these clips may seem purely visual, we will see that texts will also play a huge role in defining the message and experience. A text does not necessarily have to be on the medium, but words we associate with an image. 

Also, after reading McCloud's comic strip, "Understanding Comics," and Mitchell's Pictorial Theory, it is clear that both theorists seem to have similar consensus on of how images carry meaning. In McCloud's comic strip he separates our experiences in life into two categories, the realm of the concept and the realm of the senses, and it is very similar to Mitchell. Mitchell claims, that, within a visual exists "the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code, the one with a code (Mitchell, 284)." Mitchell then simplifies this and compares the messages as being either "connotative" or "denotative." However, it seems as if McCloud's reader-identification concept plays a role in constituting the concrete and abstract meaning within an image.

Clip 1: In the anime version of Hiroshima Bombing, we can see McCloud's concept of reader identification through the cartooning of the characters. According to McCloud, "it allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world (McCloud, 43)." This increases audience involvement and the degree in which the reader identifies with the story. For example, I was able to mask myself into the cartoon of the young girl holding the balloon and feel the pain she went through as she let go of her balloon as the bomb dropped.  However, this pain that I felt was not a concrete feeling, but a sensation or feeling created by the image. Mitchell calls this experience an "illusionism" because the point of special effects of cinema is to "trigger a responsive experience in the beholder (Mitchell, 325)."


Clip 2: The second clip of the Hiroshima Bombing was much more powerful to me because it portrayed the intimate details of the lives of the characters. By having a more realistic depiction of what went on that day, such as carrying out the simple, mundane tasks one does to start their day, an audience could see how just an average day can turn into an absolute tragedy. This allows for the "picture to show the truth about things (Mitchell, 325)" and "offer a transparent window (Mitchell, 325)" into the reality of the situation that happened that day. Thus, the clip having a more denotative or concrete meaning than the first. 




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