Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 43

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. J ean-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 pre-
sense, 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 narrateur-
bonimenteur, 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 non-
narrative du cinma, Gaudreault a introduit une distinction entre "narration" et
"monstration" (le fait de "montrer" des images, sans plus). J ean-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.

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 44

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, (J ean-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

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 45

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.

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 46

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

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 47

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 J ean-
Pierre 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 short-
hand 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

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 48

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 seeing-
through 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

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 49

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 narrative-
spectacle 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

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 50

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
Gaudreaults term, monstration, seems apt. French philosopher J ean-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
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.

2
See, in particular, Bordwell, 1996.

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 51

(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
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
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.

3
See, for example, Oliva.

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 52

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.

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 53

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 pre-
sense, 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

Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 4 (2011) 54

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, J ean-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 J ohn K Tsotsos. London: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005. 251-57. Print.
Oudart, J ean-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