Creating a narrative when there is none?

Two years ago I picked up the graphic novel/artist book Une Semaine de Bonté (a week of kindess, 1934) by Max Ernst and it's still an intruiging book.

It comprises 182 collages that appears to follow some sort of storyline. It seems there are some images missing in between every collage. The reader is confronted to think of steps and events to fill in the gap, to fill in the details. Every time you 'read' the book it's possible to think of a different storyline. The static images become dynamic, it's meaning changes from time to time.

Two things happen:
1. Every single image is multi-interpretable, because there are multiple answers to the question: "What is going on in this image?"
2. The collection of images composed in a structural manner imposes a narrative. Because of the lack of a structure between one image and the other the narrative becomes multi-interpretable.



Another example is the movie Last Year in Marienbad (1961) by Alain Resnais, a somewhat incomprehensible movie featuring a confusing montage technique that actually suits the storyline. A man meets a woman and tells her he is certain he met her before last year and even tells her they had a passionate affair together, while she can't remember and refuses to believe so. The montage is done in a complex manner with a lot of flashback as if it is trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together to find truth.



Last Year in Marienbad turns the "hot" medium that is the film into a "cool" one such as the graphic novel, for the reason the movie requires active conscious participation to extract value.

Moments

Continuing on stream of consciousness, this video is a perfect example of putting and bombarding images and thoughts into the viewers' head. It also reminds me of the part of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway quoted in the link I put up in the last post:

"In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June."



This montage technique is also used in the videoclip Hurt by Johnny Cash, reaching it's climax towards the end.

So it seems that there clearly is a connection between the literary stream of consciousness technique and the movie montage technique used in the video above. There's also a strong connection between montage and collage.

As with movie montage, a collage is a montage and a construction as well, all packed inside one image. Being very layered, it's trying to tell plenty, literally and figuratively. Isn't that the power of collage? Or is being compact not always an advantage? At least collage can very well be used as a way of transferring stream of consciousness in a similar way to a movie montage.

So now we already have three mediums that can be used as a technique for adressing stream of consciousness:

1. Literature, by writing words.
2. Video, by editing moving images.
3. Collage, by assembling static images.

The difference and only problem that I see is that the literary technique could be seen as far superior, being mostly one on one. Since most people tend to think in words, it's easiest to just write the immediate thoughts down on paper. It's easy to loose the essence of the original thoughts when you start to think it over. To quote Hank from the movie Naked Lunch:

"See, you can't rewrite, 'cause to rewrite is to deceive and lie, and you betray your own thoughts. To rethink the flow and the rhythm, the tumbling out of the words, is a betrayal, and it's a sin."

Besides, it's probably hard to find the perfect images carrying the essence of the original thoughts. This is where manipulation and compromise comes in, and in this case I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, because when you are addressing an audience, it's not as much about the writers' original thoughts as it is about the reader/viewers' interpretation. When the manipulation is done well, it doesn't matter to the audience, only to the writer for deceiving his or hers authenticity.

Stream of consciousness

Stream of consciousness info link

What about stream of consciousness in images rather than words?

When this literary technique is used skillfully, it imitates the way the human brain processes images and puts them into words. The reader literally takes a look inside the characters' head. So we have thoughts painted in images by putting thoughts into words and images recalled in the reader's head and interpreted by the reader.

But what if you immediately start out with images, instead of just using words? Would it make the experience of a stream of consciousness even stronger? And what if you could see your own stream of consciousness real time in images. Besides possibly being scary, wouldn't it influence your stream of consciousness? Creating some sort of dialogue?

Am picking up As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner tomorrow!

Collages

Some collages I recently made.

The mysterious

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein