[MUSIC]
So, we spent the bulk of this week focused largely on visual storytelling
as a matter of single images and, to a great extent, monumental scale.
And we started out with that 17-foot-long
bull in the caves at Lascaux, in France,
and ended with the giant self-portrait
of Murakami as an inflatable sculpture, in 2012.
But I don't want to leave this topic
without looking at one
other set of conventions for storytelling in still images.
Which is to say, we'll look at time-based work a little bit later on in this course.
But, for now, I want to raise the question of sequential storytelling
in single images, and to go back to early antecedents, as well.
We're going to turn first to the Bayeux
Tapestry that was done around 1070 in France.
We don't know who the artists were, much
like the cave paintings
in Lascaux. We do know a lot more about the subject matter.
This is a very, very long embroidered
work, almost 270 feet in length, that tells
the story of the Norman conquest of
England, and in particular the Battle of Hastings.
It's been referred to as a precedent for modern
forms of sequential storytelling,
both as a precedent for comic books and graphic novels,
and also as a precedent for the
conventions of story-
boarding that are the foundations of cinematic storytelling, as well.
So, it's worth thinking about it, for just a little bit.
It, as I say, is one long piece of cloth that is divided up into multiple scenes.
Most of the scenes are separated into frames by a
kind of stylized architecture or trees, but not all of them.
And some of the scenes focus on major events or confrontations--
the king receiving news of the
impending battle, or the battle itself.
But other scenes focus more poignantly and unremarkably on everyday life.
Scenes of people eating.
We get information about how people dressed,
what kinds of tools and implements they used,
and, importantly, what kinds of
stories
they thought it was important to tell.
Those conventions of sequential
storytelling
persist in a variety of portable
forms and that's mostly what I want to concentrate on today.
So we're going to fast-forward from the Bayeux Tapestry, in 1070,
to one example of the kinds of Books of Hours that characterize
illuminated manuscript production in Medieval times in Europe.
And so this is an example of a Book of Hours from the 15th century.
Again, we're looking at portable works that tell a kind of story. And
Books of Hours are very cyclical
stories, tied to the seasons and
changes in activity over the course of a year,
that marry text and image on the same page.
They were drawn from the stories of the Christian Bible,
but they're highly prized as much for the window they offer onto the particulars of
daily life in the Middle Ages, as for
the familiarity of those Biblical
references and stories.
So medieval illuminated manuscripts, like this Book of
Hours, are important early examples of artists organizing
text and images on the pages of a book, in order to tell sequential stories.
And I imagine the pleasure of holding this
book in your hand was
the pleasure of encountering, year after year, the same images and the same stories,
and knowing that each year you encountered
them was another
year of your life-- another year of your life properly lived
and lived in accordance with the
spirituality of your historical
moment.
I want to turn from these works
commissioned from
within mainstream culture, if we can call it that,
to works on paper focused around
storytelling, and sequentially based,
that were produced under more
nomadic and more contested conditions.
First, fast-forwarding to the mid-19th century in the United States
to look at an example of what is called ledger art.
That is to say, works on paper, done on
mass-produced ledger composition books,
by the Lakota Sioux Indians.
The Sioux would have turned to these mass-produced ledger
composition books partly as a matter of artistic curiosity and adaptability.
It was an interesting new material to experiment with, and much different
in its handling and in the way one
could approach drawing
than the animal skins that would have been
used for drawing and painting in
traditional Sioux culture.
But, on the other hand, it was not a
matter of choice, but increasingly a
matter of imposition.
As westward expansion continued in the
United States, and U.S. military
and U.S. settlers displaced native people from their traditional homelands
and moved them into military encampments and
then, ultimately, reservations--
the Sioux would have been disconnected
from their traditional materials
and their traditional habits of life in
really traumatic form.
So these ledger drawings are both a testament to artistic curiosity
and a testament to the trauma of
displacement, as well.
And as we look in greater detail at this
particular example, done by an anonymous artist, and probably
around 1868 to 1876, we can see all
of the traces of that relationship between traditional and contemporary,
between Sioux culture and
European and American culture.
On the one hand, there's that beautiful figure of
the warrior mounted on horseback, with that amazing feathered headdress.
And he's being confronted by another warrior holding an American-made rifle.
These drawings, I think, are a really poignant and compelling transition to the
last example of sequential storytelling
that I want to look at today.
And that's Marjane Satrapi's <i>Persepolis</i>. We could have looked at a number of
works by contemporary graphic novelists who use the comic book form to tell
very serious and complicated historical stories.
Art Spiegelman's work on the Holocaust would be another example,
the work of a number of graphic novelists on
the events of September 11th, 2001, would
be another example.
This is the graphic novel in contemporary form, and
so we see multiple story panes on the same page.
We see the ability
to mobilize what, really, are cinematic conventions in graphic novel form.
Everything from the close-up to the great mise-en-scène set
at the bottom of this picture-- crowd scenes and individual expression.
And also the use of that kind of gap between frames, to allow a transition
from scene to scene that is not seamless, but narratively driven.
The other thing I find really powerful about <i>Persepolis,</i> and why
I wanted to use it as our final example of
sequential story telling
is, on the one hand, I think Satrapi has made an amazing
use of black-and-white to tell a story that is stark,
but not really black-and-white, because it is the story of conflict within a
culture and of the displacement of people from their homeland.
And it carries all the weight of that
displacement, and of the combined
horror for and nostalgia for the homeland that she left.
The final thing that I think is important about this
particular graphic novel, and its bridge to some of our concerns later in
this course,
is it is a graphic novel that manages to
migrate very successfully to the screen while holding onto
its graphic conventions.
And that, I think, is a tribute
to the fluency of Satrapi's drawing style,
but also to the fierceness of her resolve, that the story would migrate
from page to screen with all of its
stylistic character intact.
[MUSIC]
So, we spent the bulk of this week focused largely on visual storytelling
as a matter of single images and, to a great extent, monumental scale.
And we started out with that 17-foot-long
bull in the caves at Lascaux, in France,
and ended with the giant self-portrait
of Murakami as an inflatable sculpture, in 2012.
But I don't want to leave this topic
without looking at one
other set of conventions for storytelling in still images.
Which is to say, we'll look at time-based work a little bit later on in this course.
But, for now, I want to raise the question of sequential storytelling
in single images, and to go back to early antecedents, as well.
We're going to turn first to the Bayeux
Tapestry that was done around 1070 in France.
We don't know who the artists were, much
like the cave paintings
in Lascaux. We do know a lot more about the subject matter.
This is a very, very long embroidered
work, almost 270 feet in length, that tells
the story of the Norman conquest of
England, and in particular the Battle of Hastings.
It's been referred to as a precedent for modern
forms of sequential storytelling,
both as a precedent for comic books and graphic novels,
and also as a precedent for the
conventions of story-
boarding that are the foundations of cinematic storytelling, as well.
So, it's worth thinking about it, for just a little bit.
It, as I say, is one long piece of cloth that is divided up into multiple scenes.
Most of the scenes are separated into frames by a
kind of stylized architecture or trees, but not all of them.
And some of the scenes focus on major events or confrontations--
the king receiving news of the
impending battle, or the battle itself.
But other scenes focus more poignantly and unremarkably on everyday life.
Scenes of people eating.
We get information about how people dressed,
what kinds of tools and implements they used,
and, importantly, what kinds of
stories
they thought it was important to tell.
Those conventions of sequential
storytelling
persist in a variety of portable
forms and that's mostly what I want to concentrate on today.
So we're going to fast-forward from the Bayeux Tapestry, in 1070,
to one example of the kinds of Books of Hours that characterize
illuminated manuscript production in Medieval times in Europe.
And so this is an example of a Book of Hours from the 15th century.
Again, we're looking at portable works that tell a kind of story. And
Books of Hours are very cyclical
stories, tied to the seasons and
changes in activity over the course of a year,
that marry text and image on the same page.
They were drawn from the stories of the Christian Bible,
but they're highly prized as much for the window they offer onto the particulars of
daily life in the Middle Ages, as for
the familiarity of those Biblical
references and stories.
So medieval illuminated manuscripts, like this Book of
Hours, are important early examples of artists organizing
text and images on the pages of a book, in order to tell sequential stories.
And I imagine the pleasure of holding this
book in your hand was
the pleasure of encountering, year after year, the same images and the same stories,
and knowing that each year you encountered
them was another
year of your life-- another year of your life properly lived
and lived in accordance with the
spirituality of your historical
moment.
I want to turn from these works
commissioned from
within mainstream culture, if we can call it that,
to works on paper focused around
storytelling, and sequentially based,
that were produced under more
nomadic and more contested conditions.
First, fast-forwarding to the mid-19th century in the United States
to look at an example of what is called ledger art.
That is to say, works on paper, done on
mass-produced ledger composition books,
by the Lakota Sioux Indians.
The Sioux would have turned to these mass-produced ledger
composition books partly as a matter of artistic curiosity and adaptability.
It was an interesting new material to experiment with, and much different
in its handling and in the way one
could approach drawing
than the animal skins that would have been
used for drawing and painting in
traditional Sioux culture.
But, on the other hand, it was not a
matter of choice, but increasingly a
matter of imposition.
As westward expansion continued in the
United States, and U.S. military
and U.S. settlers displaced native people from their traditional homelands
and moved them into military encampments and
then, ultimately, reservations--
the Sioux would have been disconnected
from their traditional materials
and their traditional habits of life in
really traumatic form.
So these ledger drawings are both a testament to artistic curiosity
and a testament to the trauma of
displacement, as well.
And as we look in greater detail at this
particular example, done by an anonymous artist, and probably
around 1868 to 1876, we can see all
of the traces of that relationship between traditional and contemporary,
between Sioux culture and
European and American culture.
On the one hand, there's that beautiful figure of
the warrior mounted on horseback, with that amazing feathered headdress.
And he's being confronted by another warrior holding an American-made rifle.
These drawings, I think, are a really poignant and compelling transition to the
last example of sequential storytelling
that I want to look at today.
And that's Marjane Satrapi's <i>Persepolis</i>. We could have looked at a number of
works by contemporary graphic novelists who use the comic book form to tell
very serious and complicated historical stories.
Art Spiegelman's work on the Holocaust would be another example,
the work of a number of graphic novelists on
the events of September 11th, 2001, would
be another example.
This is the graphic novel in contemporary form, and
so we see multiple story panes on the same page.
We see the ability
to mobilize what, really, are cinematic conventions in graphic novel form.
Everything from the close-up to the great mise-en-scène set
at the bottom of this picture-- crowd scenes and individual expression.
And also the use of that kind of gap between frames, to allow a transition
from scene to scene that is not seamless, but narratively driven.
The other thing I find really powerful about <i>Persepolis,</i> and why
I wanted to use it as our final example of
sequential story telling
is, on the one hand, I think Satrapi has made an amazing
use of black-and-white to tell a story that is stark,
but not really black-and-white, because it is the story of conflict within a
culture and of the displacement of people from their homeland.
And it carries all the weight of that
displacement, and of the combined
horror for and nostalgia for the homeland that she left.
The final thing that I think is important about this
particular graphic novel, and its bridge to some of our concerns later in
this course,
is it is a graphic novel that manages to
migrate very successfully to the screen while holding onto
its graphic conventions.
And that, I think, is a tribute
to the fluency of Satrapi's drawing style,
but also to the fierceness of her resolve, that the story would migrate
from page to screen with all of its
stylistic character intact.
[MUSIC]