My apologies for stealing that title, by the way, but if you're going to steal, you might as well steal from smart people. In this case, The World in a Frame, by Leo Braudy, is about film theory, whereas I want to talk about a different kind of frame, and I think you know what kind already. Ever since I read that interview with Mark Smylie I've been thinking about what it might mean to talk about comics in terms of mise-en-scène and montage, and then I even ventured into collage. But I've had another thought about mise-en-scène specifically.
When a film is montage-centric, the formal aspect of it that conveys the most content is the cutting itself. The images you see aren't necessarily the most important, but rather the abstract connections between those images are what's at issue. For Eisenstein, this was crucial to cinematic expression; for McCloud it is the "blood in the gutters" of comics. Eisenstein seems particularly interested in the most abstract possibilities of this so-called dialectic juxtaposition, while McCloud spends most of his time, in Understanding Comics, on the more chronological, narrative, and causal possibilities contained within montage, or what McCloud calls 'closure.'
To be fair, 'montage' is an inappropriate word to use in comics, because it's just the French word for 'cutting,' literally cutting celluloid film into a movie. Comics aren't 'cut' together in that way. As Bernard and Carter point out in "Alan Moore and the Graphic Novel: Confronting the Fourth Dimension" (ImageTexT 1.2, 2004), the comics page is markedly unlike cinematic imagery in that two pages worth of panels are not only available to, but unavoidably in the reader's field of vision at all times. It's ironic that Soviet montage-like effects are arguably more readily available to the comics artist; by McCloud's description, they're the life-blood of the medium, the way that it "just does" function.
Panels are not the same as 'cutting' in the cinematic sense of jumping from one image that occupies your field of view to another that now occupies your field of view. Aside from splash pages and two-page spreads, comics panels are simultaneously visible and take up a very small part of your field of view. They're not 'cut,' with that word's implications of separation, although I've never been entirely comfortable with McCloud's word, 'closure,' with its implications of a closed system, one that is definite and has no potential to mean alternative things than the obvious causal/chronological/narrative implications, or even more damning, "what the artist intended" (if we put it to him like that, I'm almost certain that McCloud would readily, even enthusiastically, admit that artistic meaning is always open, but his language doesn't necessarily reflect that belief).
What I really want to talk about, and have been trying to talk about for the last couple of hundred words, is how we might think about how we view what Smylie calls his mise-en-scène layout style, in which every panel has the same dimensions and they're all placed regularly on the page, as in Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen, or Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith's Fell, which Ellis specifically conceived of as a strict, nine-panel book as a way to keep the page count low, and thereby keep the price low (below US$2). I have previously, in the context of Michael Avon Oeming's fantastically chaotic panels, and extensive use of negative space, talked about what I think the 'gutters' signify to a reader, but a new way of looking at them (literally) occurred to me today.
In that entry, I thought of the white background that panels sit "on top" of as signifying less reality because they appear like pictures sitting on a piece of white paper. It occurred to me, though, that that holds only if we are paying attention to the blank spaces. If instead we mentally block them out--zoom in with our minds, as it were--then the blank space disappears and we are all the more concerned with only the panels and what's inside them (hence the literal sense of mise-en-scène: what's in the image). This layout style potentially heightens, not realism, but willing suspension of disbelief, by 'hiding' panel transitions in a formulaic, predictable pattern. More unpredictable panel patterns, whether they include negative space or not, force the viewer to pay attention to the page as a formal element of the medium, and though that formal element can signify all kinds of emotional or narrative information, there is marginally more conscious interpretation involved in extracting that information, and thus the viewer must work just that much harder to suspend disbelief.
Montage-style comics, then, are the ones that have panel structures that defy predictability and upset expectations, regardless of the use of negative space; they can communicate a great deal of information through the 'codes' contained in panel shape, size, and placement. Mise-en-scène-style comics have regular, predictable panel size and placement; they draw the eye away from blank spaces an into the panels themselves, placing more implicit importance on the 'content' than the 'form,' though it's important to remember that it was a 'formal' structure that lead the eye in that direction to begin with, so once again the form/content dichotomy breaks down and becomes, possibly, a kind of dialectic in and of itself.
Posted by orion at November 20, 2006 3:46 PM