A round Renaissance balloon is
threatened by an extinct fossil skull that bears down on it. But the balloon is
the imagination, which presages the technological society which itself, is
rising. So although the balloon looks vulnerable, it is the wild animal,
however fierce in countenance, that is to be the victim. The balloon is a
temporary 'goal' that leads upwards to the 'participants' on the top right
facing page, which are other late medieval characters.[2]
A bald monk toasts the rise of technology, which, ironically, is shifting the
control of knowledge away from the monasteries. His head is bowed before the
inevitable rise of a secular materialism but his downward gaze may suggest
superiority. The vector of his gaze leads our reading path to an aristocratic
hawk, which looks on, proudly from its branch. It has survived an earlier
transition from hunting to agriculture and will, in Britain at least, survive
the transition to capitalism.
The 'new' pinnacle of
technological success is ironised in the lower half of the right-hand page. A
television set in the place the hawks droppings might land. A TV family with a
'background' which is reduced to banal horizontal lines, look away passively
from their settee to a exuberant woman on the screen. Are they any more
powerful than the little frog on the left-hand page, which looks up from its
corner?
The two pages are
unified by a complex grammar of vectors, which guide our reading. The text has
little relation to the images, although it is difficult to avoid the top left
heading 'Life in this Society' as an 'anchor'. The computer generated
typography is in a Fifties hand-lettered style which makes an ironic connection
to the monks implied function as scribe and the birth of the TV nation.
2. 8th July 1995, pages
4/5 (See
illustration
4)
Two
vertical compositions face each other across the page spread. On the left is a
vulgar form of high art, on the right a high form of popular art. Both share a
surreal representation with Freudian resonances of anxiety. At the top of the
left-hand vertical, the naked girl bears a smile, which masks her resignation.
Lower down an open-mouthed vulva screams the reality as ants carry their huge
eggs threateningly towards each mouth. On the top of the right-hand vertical is
a domestic 'kitty' cat' at the bottom a wildly prancing zebra carrying the
column of tumblers - The domestic as ideal and the wild as real.
On the left-hand page, the
status quo of high art is represented by the visual disturbance of Op Art and
the mental disturbance of Surrealism. On the left is hope for renewal is to be
found in popular art represented as the three old fashioned acrobats. Here is
an example of the reversed grammar that is common in underground visuals.
The captions work closely
with the images: choking; County Girls; Jaunt; LOVE IS DEAD; which all seems to
illustrate the images - in another reversal of the normative.
Between the two parallel
verticals there is produced a spine of obtuse tension as our minds oscillate
between the two meanings and their reversals. We are reminded of Barthe's
third, obtuse, level of meaning and the need for an active audience not weighed
down with aesthetic baggage.
3. 9th May 1998, pages 4/5
(See illustration
5)
No collage is used
on these pages. Two contrasting iconic images face each other. On the left a
photograph with a dark background, on the right a classic image from Marvel
comics. The 'given', two women wearing only fishnet tights, are locked in a
passionate embrace. The 'new' is the violent ejection of The Thing, a dark
hairy creature, by a vast scaly arm (The Hulk?).
A strong syntagmmatic vector
transverses both pages from top left to bottom right - BLAM! The implied source
of this vector is the open mouthed kissing of the women - A movement from the
emotive to a useful confrontation. Does this connote a powerful downward
rejection of machismo powered by women being together? Or is it a consequence
of forbidden love - a violent expulsion to the margins, with its implied moral
uncertainty?
Again an oscillation of
meanings provokes a challenging uncertainty. The words 'deliverance', 'Rachel +
Maria', 'X minutes', and the phrase 'What is this thing?', all seem to
lubricate the action and anchor the reading above.
4. 17th April 1993, pages 10/11 (See illustration
6)
The hairy face of Freddy
Krueger[3]
fills the screen with a terrifying grimace. His rough gouged face looks down
and meets the readers gaze head on. The centre being the place of the divine
ruler according to Kress and Van Leeuwen, a divinity that is here ousted by a
good god's primal negative. The tilt of the head creates a diagonal vector
across the eyes, which leads us across the spine to the picture on the right.
Here a contrasting scene of
apparent classical repose shows a woman braiding the hair of a naked girl with
silky skin. The girl looks around and out towards us, her anxious gaze turned
towards an apple, which hovers in the lower foreground. She stands on a vector
from Krueger's threatening mouth. Below her feet are steps leading down to a
lower level - which is in heavy shadow.
Freddy's face is
unframed. In contrast the two women are framed by dark marble and stone. On the
left a modern icon of horror, on the right an icon of classical repose. Horror
arises from our subconscious, from the underground, to challenge the detachment
of the classics as a veil covering abuse. Civilisation is a mask for
oppression. The classical scene represents an ennobling civilisation with a
sense of its foundation, but the appearance of Freddy produces 'a spasm of the
signifier' which displaces the benign faŤade that is given by the classics. His
intuitive cry of outrage displaces the rationalisation of desire.
The obtuse level of meaning
unsettles the normative reading. The text adds to this sense, perhaps even
anchoring meanings and syntax too firmly.
The contextual meanings
provided by the historical precedents of the programmes format were considered.
This was long associated with low culture and radical activity. A broad subject
classification of the imagery contained within this frame allows us to see the
range of concerns expressed by the collective. This amounts to a dissection of
the counter culture as it refracted through the prism of the Exploding Cinema
collective. Four aspects of this taxonomy are selected for further discussion
intended to uncover aspects of the collective mind-set not detailed in other
parts of the thesis. Finally a semiotic analysis of a few selected page
openings illustrates the kind of statements these images are making.
In spite of its scientific
pretensions semiotic analysis is still an artform that bears the subjectivity
of its author. It is rational to the extent of being systematic, theoretically
considerate, and so to a degree transparent in method. With this in mind I
hesitate to 'prove' things about Exploding Cinema by this partial analysis - I
have no doubt different interpretations could be made.
What such an analysis does
signal is a sympathetic in-depth reading of Exploding Cinema activities is
possible. It is the representation of this aesthetic depth that is my primary
aim rather than any attempt to over-determine meaning.
Kress and Van Leeuwen's visual grammar allows
us to order pictorial meaning in the way that exposes narrative and even
argument. A richly structured picture plane may contain a few choices of paths
and sequences but this may be true of a written text. Nonetheless a visual
grammar asks the viewer to be active and responsible for the validation of her
own reading. This only mirrors the Exploding Cinema ethos of an active
audience.
[1] Pages in the programmes are unpaginated. The page
numbers given here are counting pages from the front cover as page one.
[2] I have occasionally used the terminology adopted by
Kress and Van Leeuwen as defined earlier, which is initially put into inverted
commas - e.g. 'goal' and 'participants'.
[3] Freddy Krueger was the lead character in, 'Nightmare
on Elm Street', directed by Wes Craven (1994).