Content area
Full Text
Academics who regard films as movies and professors of film as charlatans will probably find the subject of this paper equally suspect, although I have tried to give it a title as compelling as anything in PMLA. Isn't film narrative the story line, they might ask? Or, if they've read Kracauer, the story line as emulsion, strips of celluloid pieced together to produce a structure of events? In short, plot in its most elementary form, and therefore a question answered, as most questions have been, in the Poetics. But a literary text does not solve a visual problem; nor, for that matter, does a shared vocabulary. One can understand why some academics bristle when three John Ford westerns are called a trilogy if they think the title should be reserved for the Oresteia; or why they become livid when King Kong is called a racial allegory. "But these are movies," they insist. Yet film, to dignify the medium by its rightful name, has a greater narrative potential than literature because it maintains a closer connection with myth. Actually, it is film, not literature, that truly deserves to be called mythic or archetypal. The language of myth is the language of the dream - picture language, not words; images, not arbitrary vocal symbols. In a sense, a mythic novel like Robbe-Grillet's Erasers or Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head is a contradiction in terms; one is taught to read this kind of fiction the way one is taught to pass the College Boards or to excel at double acrostics. Myth originally was a tale told, a story transmitted orally through epic, visually on walls, vases, bowls, wine vessels; since it was oral and visual before it became verbal, myth was the original cinema ear, cinema eye; and oral epic was the first cinema with the audience shooting the picture from the poet's words.
Film is the natural habitat of myth because it is the only medium where myth can exist as a talking picture. Visualized action is picture, and even when the pictures began to talk, they spoke two languages - a conventional tongue and one more ancient, one known to hieroglyphs and iconographs where, standing behind the picture like some vaporous presence, was the history of...