The Image versus The Word

This essay is dedicated to my beloved Sarah who has been an unfailing inspiration in the creation of it...

When I was assigned my faculty adviser (Professor William R Robinson) at the

University of Florida where I had begun studies for an MA (1973-1975) in
English, a friend informed me that WRR was a very big gun in English
Literature, and was a truly pleasant individual. Still today, I only wish I could
have enjoyed more of his friendship, but because I worked in the north-
central area of Florida during the dayonce selling insurance for The
Equitable then dealing paper products for copy machines and then trading
whisky and wine for the Fulton Distributors in Jacksonvillemy time was so
limited, and when I did have some, I had to read and read and read.

WWR and I had some things in common: he had a degree in philosophy, had
served in the US Army (paratrooper), and we both enjoyed cigars. In the
evenings when I attended his literary criticism course, instead of bringing him
a shiny apple, I brought for him a cigar from the box I had ordered every two
months from a Tampa, Florida cigar club.

WWR was a formidable literary critic. He authored Edwin Arlington Robinson:

A Poetry of the Act considered to be the best criticism of Robinson ever
written, and as the book's jacket proclaims, it traces Robinson's quest for
truth within an intellectual context as defned by such contemporary
philosophers as William James, Whitehead, Mead Santayana, and Dewey.
The book was published in 1967, and after its publication, WRR experienced
a philosophical metamorphosis, perhaps a mid-life crisis, and abandoned
literary criticism altogether to devote his intellectual energies to promoting
the Art of the Film (Movies) and making sense of the movies. It must also be
noted that WWR was one of the pioneering professors of English who
lobbied to have Film incorporated into United States' university English
Departments' curricula, and many many unemployed English graduate
students hopped on the Film bandwagon where job offerings were
unrelenting. Professor Robinson staunchly defended the concept of Film, and
attempted to create a Philosophy of the Film about which we will now
consider some of his most prominent notions taken from Seeing Beyond:
Movies, Visions, & Values: 26 Essays by William R Robinson & Friends (Golden
String Press, New York, 2001):

...We study the value spectrum so that we may become more precise about our specifc
good, with tolerance, it is hoped, as a side effect. Because the arts are habitually used to
teach history, it is customary to emphasize their temporal aspect, whereas science, a body
of constantly verifable knowledge about nature, is taught independently of history. Yet the
movies no less than science are devoted to the discovery and establishment of timeless
truth. The movies, like the other art works created in the past and accumulated as our
heritage, pass on moral knowledge from one generation to another; they thereby allow us
to possess now the possibilities of good discovered by our forebears. As a body of work on
the books, they, like the sciences, constitute an encyclopedia of knowledge. That heritage is
not suffcient, however. Movies must be constantly in the making; old stories must be
forever told anew; to remain living options, values must be continually validated within
ever-changing realityevery moment requiring a new synthesis of Beauty, Truth and the
Good. Thus the movies, when art, explore on the frontiers of knowledge, refurbishing old
values, refning discrimination in areas already chartered, and producing new insight in
areas of the moral spectrum previously ignored....

...The movies, via the moral dialogue they initiate and participate in, open our eyes to
value. At their best they excite and refresh not simply the ordinary emotions but the
profoundest feeling in our deepest moral reaches as well. To reiterate, they are one means
by which man, through the powers of his imagination, perceives for himself possibilities
without precedent in nature. Incarnations of the Good, providing opportunities to
contemplate imaginatively concrete moral truth, they enhance and enrich consciousness.
They are instruments helpful in lifting man and woman up literally by their own bootstraps
to contemplate the ideal and perhaps eventually to direct his effort towards its realization.
When properly charged, their images empower men to behold and enjoy their fnest life.
No art does any more, and on the contemporary scene none surpasses them in scope and
power, none more realistically confrms man's truth, none liberates or is liberated more
completely....

...In contrast to literature, the movies and the cinematic imagination are literal. A visual
medium in which the word is complementary and dispensable, the movies illuminate
sensory reality or outer form. They are empirical revelations lighting the thing itself and
revealing change as nothing more than it appears to be. In their world there is no
becoming, only being, or pointless change, no innate potential to be realized in time; no
essence to be released from original darkness, no law to be learned and obeyed. For this
reason analysis is rarely successful in the movies, Citizen Kane being the most famous of the
very few exceptions. Even the Russian intellectual cinema, which on frst impression seems
analytical, at its very best is hortatoryit inspires the viewer to be. Or, more specifcally, in
individual frames, by composition and photographic style, it endows the lowly and
exploited with splendid being. Whatever a movie illuminates it has already celebrated,
saying, in effect, So be it. Its atomic constituents seem to have a greater life than the
enclosing forms, while order, causality, and pattern appear arbitrarily imposed. And, with
the atomistic quality so pronounced in them, the movies evoke an emotional rather than as
intellectual responsethe thing directly perceived is directly felt, and intellectual refection
follows upon the emotion, whereas in literature the emotion follows upon the word after
the mind has made the initial encounter. Understandably, movies more perfectly satisfy
Tolstoy's requirement that art appeal to the universal innate feelings in man. Consequently,
they tend to be egalitarian, and literature elitistonly those who know how to read and
think are admitted to its domain, while anyone with eyes qualifes as a citizen of the movie
world. From these differences it is clear that literature testifes, while the movies witness.
As a verbal medium, literature gives voice to the mind'd lust for meaning. In seeking to
commit the mind to what is not at once evident to the senses, literature demands belief; it
insists that its report, always an interpretation, be trusted. The movies, on the other hand, a
visual art, are immersed in the sensory, physical world, viewing it from within as a passing
parade ceaselessly coming and going. They have no way, except for words, to gain a vantage
point outside it. In this respect they are the archetype for the contemporary intellectual
predicament characterized by the twilight of absolutesthey have no revealed word or a
priori ideas, nor any criterion within experience itself, by which to ascertain reality or
value; they are face to face with what is in its full multiplicity and glory. They dwell in the
present, in a world all surface. Lacking a second level of reality, they are without
complexitywithout irony, meaning, or necessity. On the face of things appear process,
activity, energy, and behind this mask is nothingness. Whereas the word is mysterious, the
image is evident; everything it has is showing. Thus for movies the created world is good,
not fallen; they offer no salvation through belief, as Christianity and rationalism do, but
instead regard the given world as redeemed. They are existentialist, valuing the concrete,
existence, or what is....

...Once regarded as a puerile, cowardly escape from life because they begot and stimulated
dreaming, the movies are now recognizable as an extension of the supreme power inherent
in a universe of energy, chance, evolution, explosiveness, and creativity. In such a youthful,
exuberant universe the movies' kind of dreaming gives concrete probability and direction
to the ongoing drive of energy, and as a consequence what at one time was thought to be a
vitiating defect is now their greatest virtue. The new freedom they refect and extend is
freedom within the world, contingent and not absolute, a heightened vision of existence
through concrete form beyond abstraction. In a world of light and a light world
unanalyzable, uninterpretable, without substance or essence, meaning and direction
being and non-being magically breed existence. Out of the darkness and chaos of the
theatre beams a light; out of nothingness is generated brilliant form, existence, suspended
somewhere between the extremes of total darkness and total light. Performing its rhythmic
dance to energy's tune, the movie of the imagination proves, should there be any doubt,
that cinema, an art of light, contributes more than any other art today to feshing out the
possibilities for good within an imaginative universe....
 * * *

These extracts were taken from Seeing Beyond's

The Movies, Too, Will Make you Free.

I wish that my readers read more of Professor Robinson's theory of movies,

and, further, press flmmakers to embark on the discovery of more pertinent
and ehtically-orientated creations.

Authored by Anthony St. John

Calenzano, Italy
13 November MMXVII
www.scribd.com/thewordwarrior
anthony.st.john1944@gmail.com

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