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.