The Pre-Narrative Monstrosity of Images: how images demand narrative William Brown

Abstract (E): Andr Gaudreault (1990) has pointed out that early silent cinema screenings required a narrator in order to help audiences make sense of the images that they saw. Soon after, filmmakers began to adopt narrative techniques in order to tell stories leading to the predominance of narrative within film production. Gaudreault has differentiated the presentation of images in early silent cinema from narration by calling it monstration. That is, simply showing images. Jean-Luc Nancy (2003), meanwhile, has argued that all images are monstrous: that is, images are incomprehensible to spectators, in that they lie outside of meaning. Or rather, they do not lie outside of meaning so much as before meaning. Images are monstrous because upon initial viewing they do not make sense. In this way, images are presense, they are present.In this article, Brown will combine Gaudreault and Nancys ideas through their shared use of the term for showing, monstration. Brown proposes that images do indeed pre-exist narrative, but that they simultaneously demand narrative in order for us to make sense of them. Given the monstrous nature of images, narrative in effect serves as a coping mechanism for consumers of images, who need various narrative techniques (film narrative, spoken words, text alongside the image, or even texts relating to the images that circulate more widely, as well as theoretical frameworks themselves) in order to make sense of images. Narrative always comes after images, and images therefore exist pre-narrative.

Abstract (F): Les recherches d'Andr Gaudreault (1990) ont montr que les projections du cinma des premiers temps s'appuyaient sur la prsence d'un narrateurbonimenteur, dont les commentaires aidaient mieux comprendre ce qu'on voyait l'cran. Plus tard, les ralisateurs ont commenc adopter des techniques narratives, ce qui a conduit l'hgmonie du cinma narratif. Pour bien distinguer la part nonnarrative du cinma, Gaudreault a introduit une distinction entre "narration" et "monstration" (le fait de "montrer" des images, sans plus). Jean-Luc Nancy (2003), de son ct, a dfendu l'ide que toute image est "monstrueuse": une image ne peut tre comprise, car elle est toujours hors sens. Plus exactement: dans une zone qui prcde la signification. Les images sont monstrueuses parce qu' premire vue elles n'ont tout simplement pas de sens. En cela, elles sont "prsentes": antrieures au sens venir.
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Cet article combine les ides de Gaudreault et de Nancy, qui se rencontrent autour de la notion de "monstation". L'auteur dfend l'ide que les images sont en effet antrieures la narration, mais qu'elles rclament d'emble le recours au rcit pour accder au sens. Vu la nature "monstrueuse" des images, le rcit sert en effet de cadre la perception et l'exprience des images, les spectateurs ayant leur disposition toute une panoplie de techniques narratives (les rcits que l'on a dj vus au cinma, les mots qui sont prononcs, le texte qui accompagne l'image, des textes qui circulent autour des images, sans oublier certaines thories sur l'image) pour donner un sens ce qui se voit. Le rcit est toujours un supplment, les images prcdent toujours le rcit.

Keywords: (Andr) Gaudreault, (Jean-Luc) Nancy, image, meaning, monster, monstration, narrative

As screen theory was its peak in the mid-1970s, film scholars began to turn their attention to early cinema in order to see if the first films made could yield any fresh insights into film history and, perhaps most importantly, film comprehension. While most had, up until this point, concentrated on film as a narrative form, some scholars revised film history in order to establish how film narration was in fact a set of conventions that came into being some years after cinemas invention. The investigation into early cinema, undertaken by a range of theorists, many of whose work has been gathered in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barkers Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, was in part initiated by the 1978 International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) conference in Brighton, England. Since then it has been thoroughly argued by the likes of Tom Gunning that cinema in its earliest form was a cinema of attraction(s). Broadly speaking, early cinema was not the narrative form with which most viewers are today familiar, but instead was a form of exhibition that encouraged audiences not so much to follow a story that was being told as to marvel at the images on the screen before them, images that reproduced movement in a lifelike manner. Cinema was an attraction therefore, in which consciousness of the technology used to create it was key to the cinematic experience. Indeed, as Gunning says, early audiences went to exhibitions to see machines
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demonstrated rather than to view films (6). Through the development of editing techniques, it was only after this initial phase of attractions that cinema evolved from being stand-alone images that simply showed people or objects in motion, to being narratives that were structured through the use of different images and which combined not just to show, but also to tell. 1 In some respects, there is already a potential paradox in the interpretations of early cinematic images provided by Gunning and others. Film, as has often been argued (for example by Andr Bazin), draws upon photographys indexical relationship to reality: that is, the light and shadow that are impressed on to a strip of celluloid are indices or traces of real objects and people that were before the camera at the time of the images making. As a result, it has been argued that cinema is in some respects a transparent medium, with scholars like Bazin making claims to the photographic images neutrality, or objectivity. However, already such an approach potentially discounts the idea that all photographic, and by extension, cinematic images are limited by the frame: the creator of these images will at some point, whether consciously or not, curtail the totality of what they see and choose to depict the objects before the camera from a certain angle perhaps also waiting for certain light conditions in order better to capture that which they seek to represent. Film scholars, including the proponents of Soviet montage, have often argued that it is editing that begins to invest cinema with meaning, because it is through editing that cinema creates a system of narration through narrative techniques. If this is the case, however, then a paradox emerges in that a form of editing was always already taking place when even the earliest filmmakers chose to depict people or objects from a certain angle. Or, as David Bordwell has put it, all film techniques, even those involving the profilmic event, function narrationally, constructing the story world for specific effects (12). What this paradox allows us to conceptualise is that we are talking about two different types of editing. Choosing to depict objects from a certain angle, which on account of the images frame excludes from sight all that which is beyond its borders, is a form of spatial editing filmmakers delimit spatially and thus prioritise certain objects or people for the viewer. Meanwhile, putting together different images through montage and showing them one after the other, that so-called grammar that
1

For more on this see, inter alia, Gunning and Keil.

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has been deemed by some as the heart of cinemas becoming-narrative, is a form of temporal editing. While the distinction between spatial and temporal editing is an important one to make, it is also important to bear in mind that both forms of editing spatial and temporal can convey meaning, as implied by the Bordwell quotation above. And if, as Tom Gunning has argued, the early cinema of attractions brought attention to itself as a technology that shows rather than as a medium for telling, then he perhaps overlooks how even the earliest films can be interpreted as having a meaning. That is, they do not just neutrally or transparently show, but they also narrate to us a certain set of values (what I am here calling meaning), which are conveyed through choice of subject matter, angle and so on. In order to illustrate this point, I shall make two brief examples. Firstly, Larrive dun train la Ciotat/Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (Louis and Auguste Lumire, 1896) depicts a training coming toward the camera as it arrives in the southern French village of the films title. One level of meaning already at work here is that the film ties itself to (Western) humanitys changing relationship with reality as brought about through the technological developments of modernity, in particular the steam train. Furthermore, the film also implies freedom of movement, the increasing proximity that said technology brings about (the train arrives, coming towards us, rather than departs, heading away from us), and, at least tentatively, the privileging of leisure time over work time for those citizens who can afford to spend their daytimes travelling rather than working. The same can be said of La sortie des usines Lumire/Workers Leaving the Factory (Louis Lumire,1895): the workers (to whose conditions of labour we are never privy) are depicted leaving work, not arriving at work, thereby again inherently tying the technology of cinema to leisure time as opposed to labour time. Forasmuch transparent, then, and inasmuch as the figures on the screen acknowledge the presence of the camera in certain versions of Workers Leaving the Factory (and in many other films of the time), even these earliest films seem also to be narrating a story, particularly one that obfuscates labour/work. This can in turn be tied to the denial of the labour that goes into their making. Associated implicitly with leisure time (and not labour time), cinema might well foreground itself as a technology in the cinema of attractions, but it also occults the work upon which cinema is based (what do these people actually do at the Lumire factory?). In some respects, therefore, and contrary to Gunning, who sees the

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technology of cinema as being foregrounded in early films, the technology of cinema is here as obfuscated as it is put on display. The intricacies of the technological development of cinema are too nuanced to relate in any elaborate manner here. Briefly, however, I shall say that, even if, after Bordwell, narrational elements were always at work in spatial editing, the temporal editing of montage brought narrative more clearly into cinema. As a result there developed a system of storytelling predicated, at least initially, upon point of view and reaction shots. In certain histories of cinema, this system of storytelling further hid the camera from view, or, in Edward Branigans terms, made it invisible such that it had no causal interaction with the events which are witnessed (171). Branigan elaborates: when space is reversed we do not see a camera, sets, or technicians but only more diegetic space which seemingly is part of a consistent and unified group of spaces (44). In contrast to early cinema, which acknowledges its spectator, narrative cinema brings the system of looking into the diegetic world of the films. For JeanPierre Oudart and others, this refusal to reveal the presence of the camera sutures the viewer into the story, as opposed to making them aware of the fabricated nature of the film/of the story that they are following. Even though he disagrees with Oudart in terms of how this process of suture comes about, Bordwell also argues that the narrators (or, literally speaking, the cameras) invisibility is key to the viewers engagement with classical narrative cinema (Narration in the Fiction Film 58ff). However, if, as I have argued, the earliest films contain elements of hiding from view the work gone into them, then so too, do narrative films not so much hide the camera from view, as bring to our attention that the camera is hidden from view. In contrast to those films that, in the spirit of Louis Althusser (174ff), interpellate spectators by suturing them to lookers who observe within the films narrative, there are, of course, avant-garde, experimental and other films that make clear the site of enunciation (i.e. they make clear that it is the camera that is showing us these things as much as it is any fictional character seeing these things within the films diegesis). These films are commonly understood as doing this by refusing to follow the narrative conventions of shot-reverse shot, by acknowledging the presence of the camera, breaking the so-called fourth wall, and/or by adopting what in shorthand are referred to as Brechtian techniques. However if, as I am arguing, narrative films, while hiding the camera, also show us that the camera is hidden (i.e. if narrative films make the supposed absence of the camera present), then films that break
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narrative conventions might also in part and paradoxically make absent the presence of the camera. By which I mean to say that the apparatus of the camera is revealed within the diegesis of the film, but this revelation only further interpellates the spectator, or sutures them into the film world. By making transparent the processes of filmmaking, avant-garde cinema also makes these processes invisible literally transparent rather than apparent. Further to illustrate this point, I shall look at Kid Auto Races at Venice (Henry Lehrman, 1914), which stars Charlie Chaplin in the lead role. This film might well contain shots of racing automobiles, as well as of spectators observing them in such a way that film viewers are positioned as race viewers in line with the suturing system of shot and reaction shot typical of classical narrative cinema. However, Chaplin also keeps stepping in front of the camera in order to foreground himself as the object of view, straightening his shirt cuffs in order to make himself presentable for display. In other words, Chaplin acknowledges the presence of the camera, thereby breaking the fourth wall. As the film progresses, the first camera even becomes visible through the use of a second camera; Chaplin continues to get in the way of the first camera, but he never acknowledges the presence of the second camera that films his antics and provides the point of view from which we see him. By showing us the first camera, we are clearly reminded that the film is a construct, but Kid Auto Races at Venice also in part obfuscates its constructed nature by not acknowledging the presence of the second camera used to film the first camera. What is true of Kid Auto Races at Venice is perhaps true more generally: while the narrative of an individual film is made apparent, the more general narrative of cinema itself remains hidden. The real labour of filmmaking is occulted, leisure is foregrounded, and the myth of transparency itself remains intact. However much we are encouraged to see through the constructed nature of the film narrative, this seeingthrough relies upon the persistence of the system of interpellation, or suture, which I am classifying as a fundamental part of narrative itself. This system of narrative is in turn based upon the wider narrative of an arguably privileged and distinctly modern condition that promotes (the myth of) leisure and consumption over labour and production, and which roots us to our role as spectator (thinking or otherwise), rather than as agent. We follow the story, we do not lead it; everything comes to/towards us, we do not have to move to go to it. This wider narrative, therefore, might be understood as akin in some respects to Guy Debords notion that the dominant
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narrative of modern society is that we are spectators in a society of spectacle. For this reason, I shall equate the wider narrative of cinema evoked above to what I shall term the (paradoxical-sounding) narrative of spectacle. Let us look briefly at the role that spectacle itself plays in cinema. As with avant-garde techniques, it has also been argued that spectacle as deployed in film might also diminish cinemas capacities for narrative. Steve Neale (145ff), for example, has argued that when colour was first introduced to cinema, it was believed that it would best be utilised when not too bright, because otherwise it would take viewers attention away from the human agents whose stories they were supposed to be following in the film. Forasmuch as this particular dichotomy of narrativespectacle has been used to conceptualise cinema as a form that is not inherently narrative, to argue that bright colours, musical numbers, and, today, digital special effects, disrupt film narrative remains an oversimplification. Many films may well foreground spectacular elements over character and plot development, something that can be evidenced in any number of blockbuster movies. Spectacle might also make us aware of the constructed nature of the film that we are watching (I know that is not a real dinosaur chasing those kids through that field of long grass). Furthermore, the rise of magazines, fanzines, websites and making-of documentaries suggests widespread interest in how special effects are achieved (as discussed by Michele Pierson 52-92), which in turn suggests an eagerness to perceive, understand, perhaps also to narrate the apparatuses that construct these spectacular images. However, this does not necessarily diminish the way in which a wider narrative of spectacle persists. If I am arguing that a wider narrative of spectacle does persist throughout cinemas history even during its pre-narrative and earliest days then I should like to turn my attention to the role that both spectacle and narrative play within cinema in order to perpetuate this narrative of spectacle outside of cinema. Andr Gaudreault has pointed out that early silent cinema screenings required a narrator in order to help audiences make sense of the images that they saw. In other words, while early cinema audiences might well be able to recognise human figures on screen, together with the features of the locations in which they were situated, their comprehension of those images was not complete without the help of a narrator. Or rather: implied in this history of early cinema is the idea that images are potentially ambiguous in meaning, and that a narrator not only helped the audiences to comprehend precisely what they were seeing, but that the narrator also fixed the
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meaning of the images for the audiences. That is, the narrator was arguably positioned as an authority figure who exerted power over audiences by explaining to them the meaning of the images that they were observing. This use of narrators took place before cinema developed the syntax of continuity editing, which itself allowed audiences, through further habituation, to understand or follow the meaning of the images without the help of a literal narrator. In other words, the images themselves through spatial, but particularly now, through temporal editing told the story/narrated. Branigan might suggest an implied narrator (75), but I prefer to stick with Bordwells argument that the implicit author/narrator adds nothing that could not more simply be ascribed to the narration itself (Narration in the Fiction Film 62). I should like to make clear that meaning via narration is a quality that emerges from the relationships between images in the case of temporal editing, and the relationship between what is onscreen and the implied elements that are offscreen in the case of spatial editing. In neither case, however, is meaning a quality that is inherent to the images themselves. This will perhaps seem an obscure point to make, and so I shall try to explain it in further detail below. Gaudreault distinguishes between images that narrate (through temporal editing) and images that monstrate, or show. The former narrative images can assuming some acculturation to the cinema be followed without help, as Bordwell has tried to make clear. 2 The narrative operations of cinema are not flawless, and many audiences may still perhaps not understand elements or unclear examples of cinematic syntax, as, anecdotally speaking, anyone who has been to the cinema with a pestering companion will know (who is that? how did we get to this location?). The monstrative elements of cinema, one might infer from Gaudreault, are harder to follow, for they do not narrate, but they show. Gaudreaults term, monstration, seems apt. French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that all images are monstrous: that is, images are incomprehensible to spectators, in that they lie outside of meaning (30). Or rather, images themselves do not lie outside of meaning so much as before meaning. Images are monstrous because upon initial viewing they do not make sense. That is, comprehension takes place after the conjunction of image and viewer, even if only microseconds after. Since there is a

See, in particular, Bordwell, 1996.

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(tiny) delay between seeing and comprehending them, images might, as Nancy argues, be deemed as pre-sense, or present (46-47). If we were to take Nancy at his word and to apply his argument to film, then we might infer that images pre-exist narrative in the cinematic sense of the word, since cinematic narrative comprehension is a meaning-making process that takes place through a conjunction of image and spectator after viewing. However, even if we did not take Nancy at his word, there is empirical evidence to support his findings. Studies of gist tend to marvel at how fast humans can understand the meaning of a scene, picking out salient details such as setting (a street, with tall vertical buildings lining it), as well as the nature, orientation and context of objects within that scene (cars parked by the side of the road), and various low-level details such as colour, all in only 100 miliseconds. 3 While the speed of human thought is indeed to be admired, that there is a delay is the detail upon which I should like to concentrate here. Not only is there a delay between exposure and comprehension, but, from the neurocognitive perspective, comprehension itself is not something that happens immediately and as a whole, but it is something that takes place over (admittedly small periods of) time. Neuroscientists Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki argue that the brain has different microconsciousnesses/a chronoarchitecture (419) that gauge/gauges colour, form, movement and other aspects of the visual field at different rates with colour seemingly the element of our visual field that is processed fastest (Viviani and Aymoz estimate that colour is processed some 50 microseconds faster than form and movement, 2909). As I have argued elsewhere, if colour does naturally capture our attention before movement, human agency, and thus the potential for narrative, then colour may well be our primary attraction to film, rather than, after Steve Neale, a potential distraction from the narrative of film. For the purposes of the present essay, however, the temporal delay between exposure to an image and comprehension, combined with the temporal nature of visual processing, suggests that images might well come to mean something when a spectator sees that image, but that the image itself/in isolation does not have this meaning. In Nancys language then, the image is monstrous, or present. The presence/pre-sense (46-47) of the image suggests that images might be understood as spectacles in a fashion slightly different from the common understanding of spectacle put forward in film studies: images can
3

See, for example, Oliva.

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here be understood as spectacles not so much because they interrupt narrative, but because they manifest themselves as spectacles before they come to form a narrative. One might legitimately ask what the point is of constructing this argument. Since images are made to be seen, it is pointless to speculate about images in isolation from viewers. Indeed, neuropsychologist Daniel Levitin argues that colour (and sound) do not exist until they are brought into contact with a viewer (or hearer), since light waves are characterised by different frequencies of oscillation, and [it is only] when they impinge on the retina of an observer [that] they set off a chain of neurochemical events, the end product of which is an internal mental image that we call colour. The essential point here is: What we perceive as colour is not made up of colour. Although an apple may appear red, its atoms are not themselves red. (24) While this might reaffirm the pointlessness of the argument I am making, it also points to the monstrous (in the sense of other) nature of images as described by Nancy: images themselves/on their own are outside of meaning (11-56). And if images on their own are monstrous (in that they simply show rather than narrate/have meaning), then this approach can have a point. This point is that a system of narrative, both spatial and temporal, not only makes clear what an image means, but, in light of the preceding argument, it also habituates us to the idea that images can mean at all. If earlier I argued that the earliest films are not mere monstrations, but that they implicitly have a meaning (Workers Leaving the Factory ties cinema to leisure time as opposed to labour time), then a contradiction seems to arise in my argument. I have argued that attractions in Gunnings sense of the word spatially edit reality and thus have a meaning that is perhaps implicit in the image. I have also argued that temporal editing/montage, as a system that replaced the silent films physical narrator as identified by Gaudreault, endeavours to make this meaning clear. And yet I am also saying that images alone do not have meaning, and that, after Nancy, they are monstrous and pre-sent/present, particularly in the light of the neuroscientific research described above. Duration and movement here come to the fore: it is because the train moves towards the camera over time that we can understand the concept of arrival in Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat and all of the modern positioning that this entails of the spectator as illusorily empowered.

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However, herein lies an important distinction that we can now make. While in a shot with duration an image that is cinematographic as opposed to being photographic there is always already temporal as well as spatial editing. It is not that these stand-alone attractions (which, translated into single shots, remain the building blocks of cinema) embody entirely this state of pre-sense and monstration that I am trying to explain, but they help to point to it. To return to the neurocognitive approach, if images first show and then, through cognitive processes, they come to tell, then there is a temporal gap that emerges between spectacle and narrative. Early films may monstrate, but as I have tried to suggest, there is also always, because of spatial and temporal editing, a narrative element that historically has been occulted by film scholars. However, this oversight is useful in opening up space for us to theorise the delay between showing and telling, a delay that is not necessarily privileged in the monstrous cinema of attractions, but which the cinema of attractions helps us to comprehend. Rather than inhering only in a certain type of cinema, neuroscientific research into perception would suggest that showing inheres in all images that we see (cinematic or otherwise), while narrative is something that emerges as we receive more information about the time and space in which what we see takes place. Images alone do not necessarily make sense, but when combined with other images or when considered over time, images begin to have narrative qualities both in terms of stories that are told and in terms of the implicit ideological messages that may have been coded into the images. Given that humans in part derive their sense of existence from their linear perception of time (in that if we did not perceive reality in a linear-temporal manner, then nothing would change and it would be hard for us to define ourselves in relation to anything else), narrative necessarily follows perception. From the point of view of images themselves, monstrations demand narratives to follow them. Without narrative, the inherent senselessness or pre-sense of images would overwhelm us, something that avant-garde cinema has at times tried to make clear. It is in this sense that I have tried to argue that images display a monstrous presense, but that it is the processing of images, inherent in most, probably all, humans that demands that we make sense of these images, that demand from images a narrative. In conclusion, it is not that cinema shows or tells. Cinema, rather, always shows before it tells. Even when it tries to emphasise showing over telling (via
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monstration, spectacle or other means), cinema is always telling us something nonetheless. The pre-narrative monstrosity of images suggests not that cinema was destined to become a narrative form following its early monstrative iterations, although it is of course tempting to construe such a teleological argument from film history. Rather, cinema was always telling/narrative even before the conventions of temporal editing came to predominate. It was telling: not instead of showing, but, as per the argument outlined above, precisely because it was showing.

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 121-176. Print. Bartels, Andreas, and Semir Zeki. The chronoarchitecture of the human brain natural viewing conditions reveal a time-based anatomy of the brain. NeuroImage 22.1 (2004): 419-33. Print. Bazin, Andr. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Print. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Routledge, 1985. Print. ---. Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Eds. David Bordwell and Nol Carroll. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. 87-108. Print. Branigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Brown, William. Neuroscience, digital imagery, and colour. Colour and the Moving Image. Eds. Sarah Street, Simon Brown and Liz Watkins. London: Routledge/AFI, Forthcoming. Print. Debord, Guy. La socit du spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967. Print. Elsaesser, Thomas, and Adam Barker, eds. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, London: British Film Institute, 1990. Print. Gaudreault, Andr. Narration and Monstration in the Cinema. Journal of Film and Video 39 (Spring 1987): 29-36. Print. Gunning, Tom. The Cinema of Attraction: Early Cinema, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde. Wide Angle 8:3/4 (1986). 63-70. Print.
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---. DW Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Print. Keil, Charlie. Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking 1907-1913. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Print. Levitin, Daniel. This is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession, London: Atlantic Books, 2006. Print. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Au fond des images. Paris: Galile, 2003. Print. Neale, Steve. Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound and Colour. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985. Print. Oliva, Aude. Gist of the Scene. Neurobiology of Attention. Eds. Laurent Itti, Geraint Rees and John K Tsotsos. London: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005. 251-57. Print. Oudart, Jean-Pierre. Cinema and Suture. Trans. Kari Hanet. Screen 18:4 (Winter 1977/1978). 35-47. Print. Pierson, Michele. Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Print. Viviani, Paolo, and Christelle Aymoz. Colour, form, and movement are not perceived simultaneously. Vision Research 41 (2001): 2909-18. Print.

Dr. William Brown is a Lecturer in Film at Roehampton University. He has published work on a number of topics and has a monograph forthcoming with Berghahn entitled Supercinema: Film Theory in the Digital Age. Browns research focuses upon digital technology in cinema and cognitive studies of the moving image. He is also interested in the tension with spectacle and narrative in cinema.
wjrcbrown@googlemail.com

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