(Image: http://thebloghorn.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/collins_in_room_208-400x288.jpg)
Following Presentations on Jean Luc Godard's 'Vivre Sa Vie', there were more on the Graphic Novel, as well as John Baldessari's Goya series, as well as the video for Bob Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'.
Above is a section from Stephen Collins' 'In Room 208', a short story that perfectly blended Text and Image into a surreal hybrid that moved across the panels seemingly without any break in narrative or image. This was a good introduction into how Graphic Novels have increasingly used text as image, both within and outside of their Panel Structure.
(Image: http://www.rfc.museum/images/stories/RFC/HowSoonNow/Baldessari-J_GoyaSeries-TheSameElsewhere.jpg)
John Baldessari's Goya series clearly separates Image from Text, keeping strictly within the same format throughout the whole series, and as a response to Goya's original series of etchings (example below), it provided an interesting contrast, reducing the emotion of the original writing and images of the horrors of war to simple household objects. The work by itself proves almost frustrating to the viewer, with both meaning and connections seemingly deliberately obscured, but, in the minimal simplicity of the layout and type, appearing as if they should be connected. I wondered when looking at this whether the viewer could ever understand the meaning of this work without the original context of Goya's series? And what impact does this have on the effectiveness of Baldessari's work?
(Image: http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/disasters-of-war.gif)
Finally, we watched Bob Dylan's video for 'Subterranean Homesick Blues, originally a trailer for the 1965 documentary, 'Don't Look Back'. As a video, it proves to be well ahead of its time, and engaging in its simplicity. The slightly mischievous nature of Dylan as the song progresses, and the cards get shuffled out of order, and mis-spelt or left out gives the audience an impression of someone who knows what they are doing. The phonetic spelling on the placards, as well as the pace at which the song progresses serve to highlight the rhythm of speech and music throughout the video.
(Image: http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/screen-shot-2010-09-08-at-1-48-47-pm.png?w=269&h=244)