Kind of a trite title, I know, but it's actually what I want to discuss.
Last year, during a discussion of Akira, I got it into my head that it was nonsensical to speak of the position of the viewer in comics panels. The prof was talking about how the angle of depiction implicitly placed the viewer at a certain position in space within the hypothetical three dimensions of the illustration. He was understandably baffled by the a suggestion that there was no implied position because it’s an illustration, and I backed off because, given a moment to think about it, I realised I was arguing a gut feeling with no actual reasoning behind it.
But it occurs to me now, with eighteen months of hindsight, that I might have been on to something, though certainly not what I thought I was on to. I suspect that we, today, talk of the position of the viewer in no small part because in photography and cinema, the viewing eye is physically locatable in the camera lens. That lens, and the machinery attached to it, had to be physically located in space in order to capture the image, therefore it's quite logical, very important in fact, to speak of the position of the viewer. The same can, by some extension, be said about the painter or other illustrator who uses a model. A painter had to have been located in front of a model and looking at it from a particular angle, from which the illustration was created.
But what about an image created wholly from the illustrator's mind? There is, of course, a point of view (literal, in this case) that logically implies a position in space. An over-head panel of Superman's Fortress of Solitude doesn't require the pencillor to fly to the North Pole, but it does implicitly place the viewer some number of meters above the Earth in that geographical region. I'm still stuck, though, with the gut feeling that viewers don't necessarily see things that way, at least not all the time.
When we see a character at an upward angle we tend to think that character is taller, as we can see in Citizen Kane, in which they actually hacked up the floorboards in order to put the camera operator at about ankle level, thus making Kane look like a giant. By the same token, a downward angle makes a character look smaller. This means that, as viewers, we tend not to assume that those angles make us different sizes. Instead, we assume that the subject is of a particular size. We can also observe this phenomenon when someone looks down from a tall building and says, "the people look like ants." We assume our own viewing angle to be objective, or at least standard, as if by instinct.
Demonstrating how this through process works would require empirical testing, but I'm going to take it as a working hypothesis for a moment, just to see how far I get. What occurs to me is that if we don't alter ourselves when our point of view is forcibly altered by film, why would we alter our position in space?
At the very least, why would we do so with a small square of illustration? An IMAX theatre can give us a sense of vertigo, but only because it fills our field of vision. A single panel, a TV, even a movie screen, aren't big enough to create that same effect. I'm totally contradicting myself now, but I wonder if the ubiquity of the television means that we are in fact less apt to wonder about the implied position of the viewer because we're so accustomed to seeing a disembodied image that, among other things, rapidly cuts from one angle to the next, and can cut from physically disparate locations, downtown LA one moment and Madagascar the next?
Even in documentary-style filming, in something like The Office, seeing the subjects interact with the camera is always a bit off-putting. I recall when Jean Cretien visited my high school just after he was elected. I was in a TV production class, which basically meant we played with cameras. One of us actually got into the ENG news scrum as Cretien left the building. Midway down the steps of our high school, he looked straight down into the lens and said, "Hallo, young man." We thought it was great. I wonder if part of the reason we thought it was great is because he, a constant subject of the camera's gaze, was actually acknowledging that gaze?
None of these thoughts are rationally, let along empirically, substantive. I'm not willing to go out on a limb and claim any of its truth value, but given the ways in which we interact with the disembodied images of television, computer, and cinema, I wonder if the average reader of comics is actually totally oblivious the implied physical position a panel puts her? And if most people don't think of it, if it's not part of their experience, what's the good in us critics worrying about it?
This feels like a dark road.
Posted by orion at February 13, 2006 12:30 AM