Words' Worth

"A picture's worth a thousand words." A very famous saying, and quite true. It's one of the major reasons I love comic books: their ability to use a single image, usually an action frozen in time, to represent so much more than the space it takes up. Comics' use of pictures made of drawn art can be complex or subtle or profound. To give just one example, British writer Alan Moore (see Updating an Old Superhero) has an astonishing ability to express one thing in the dialogue while having the artwork demonstrate something else entirely, often the exact opposite of the words. It's hard to describe this technique; you'd really need to see it in action. And that's a beautiful example of how visuals can do what endless words cannot. So, that old saying is true--to a point.

The best critics of sequential art have said that pictures and words are necessary to create the medium called comics. Just words, and you've got a prose story. Just art, and you've got a picture. Therefore, when I was explaining that I like comics because the art can tell so much, I was still talking about something that requires words even to exist.

Movies are not constrained by the same requirements; cinema doesn't need words to be cinema. After all, that medium started out with no audio capabilities, and, though most early silent films carried title cards, the filmmakers made sure that audiences could understand the story even without those. That's one of the reasons cinema was so internationally popular: pictures require no translation. Silent films could have huge scenery and action, and, even before the days of dialogue-replacement technology, the actors could be far from the camera because it wasn't necessary to record them delivering dialogue. So, moviegoers of the time got rousing Westerns, historical epics, and sweeping dramas. There were even a number of filmed Shakespeare adaptations.

But why? Is a silent movie version of Shakespeare really Shakespeare? What makes a play "Shakespeare," besides his name on the cover of the script? Oh, right: it's the words. There's an experimental theater company in DC, not far from me, run by a Russian couple, and they have put on silent adaptations of Shakespeare. The first thing I thought was, what's the point? Without Shakespeare's unique prose and poetic dialogue, it's just a story that the Bard borrowed from other sources. He wasn't known for his originality of plot, because he got them from books he'd read, from folktales and epic poems, from history, even from earlier plays. What makes Shakespeare "Shakespeare" is his unique and stunningly gorgeous use of language. Therefore, theater--most of it--is much like comics in that it is intricately woven of words and pictures.

Sure, there are plenty of images that require no spoken or written language at all. But think about this: how many times have you seen a piece of art in a museum or gallery, and someone has said, "But what is it saying?" Then someone verbally explains. Pictures are definitely worth a thousand, or more, words. But words are worth their weight in gold.

#movies #language #comics #drama