Over the next few months we agreed on the topic of film language and drew up a list of important texts on film history and theory all dealing with the question of film as a kind of language or grammar. Another graduate student, Matt Rager, also expressed interest in joining us, and so, last August we began meeting once a week to discuss our readings.
from R. John Williams’ article on “What It’s Like to be James Franco’s Professor” at Slate.
What is interesting to me is this study of film as a grammar or language, which is something I wrote in my new introduction to my expanded thesis. A lot of the scholarly work regarding comics studies refers to the idea of using techniques from film and other cultural studies in critiquing comics, but like Douglas Wolk, I can’t see that working. Film and comics are two aesthetically different things. Film is meant to be shown on a big screen that does not have a rewind button, you can’t spend time on a singular shot as you can on a comics panel. Though in real time, in production, the composing of those shots or panels takes quite a bit of time. That is not to say that they’re completely different because most media like film, comics, television, literature, and art all have something that can relate to each other.
Regardless, the assigned reading list is interesting to me. I also like the idea of Franco publishing his first novel through Amazon’s new publishing tool, even though I’m not really sure whether I’m interested in reading it. It’s a library book, I would say. (Can I get it on my Nook? I’m guessing no.)
