Poetic Mode
The poetic mode was introduced into documentaries in the 1920’s as a “reaction against both the content and the rapidly crystallizing grammar of the early fiction film”. As Nichols stated, the poetic mode “moves away from the ‘objective’ reality of a given situation or people, to grasp at an “inner truth” that can only be grasped by poetical manipulation”. In other words, the audience are shown an abstract, subjective, representation of reality achieved through techniques such as emphasised visuals and a narrative organised to fit the mood of the documentarian/documentary rather than the linear, logical organisation films followed prior to this.
Leni Reifenstahl's Olympia (1938)
Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938) is a classic example of how a poetic documentary emphasizes visuals to encourage the audience to understand an “inner truth” of the text. The main focus of this documentary is on the Aryan athletes representing Nazi Germany at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Riefenstahl glorifies the athletic ability and aura of these athletes through emphasised low camera angles and slow motion editing. In addition to this, Riefenstahl manipulated the sound editing of the documentary so that the background music matched with the movements of the athletes; thus influencing an atmosphere of unity and power of the subjects. These obvious distortions of reality in fact had the intention to use the ‘documentary’ as a source of Nazi propaganda to fuel patriotism within Germany and therefore demonstrate how documentaries of the poetic mode present a biased, subjective reality.
Robert Flaherty’s “Man of Aran” (1938)
Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1938) also follows the poetic mode considering Flaherty filmed scenes intended to fit into his desired narrative and conclusion, rather than allowing reality to guide his direction. This is another example that collaborates with the idea that documentaries of the poetic mode “moves away from an ‘objective’ reality of a situation”, in which objectivity presents the audience with the bigger picture; a sort of omniscience – of seeing all, knowing all.
On the whole, the poetic mode doesn’t portray an accurate representation of the audience. Reality is instead represented through the subjectivity of the documentarian hence presenting the audience with a preferred method of reading. E.g. the emphasis of visuals such as the strength and physique of athletes in Olympia through clever editing influences the audience to believe the superiority of the Aryan’s.
On the whole, the poetic mode doesn’t portray an accurate representation of the audience. Reality is instead represented through the subjectivity of the documentarian hence presenting the audience with a preferred method of reading. E.g. the emphasis of visuals such as the strength and physique of athletes in Olympia through clever editing influences the audience to believe the superiority of the Aryan’s.
Other examples of the Poetic Mode
https://epowdocumentary.wordpress.com/documentary-modes/poeticmode/
Documentary films, just like narrative films, come in all shapes and sizes. As creators of non-fiction films, documentary filmmakers strive to present honest and truthful stories, however, the methods in which they attempt to achieve this can be varied. Because of this fact, respected documentary film theorist, Bill Nichols named six subcategories to help classify different styles of documentary. These are: Poetic, Expository, Observational, Performative, Participatory and Reflexive. These six modes are widely used by filmmakers and film theorists alike (Nichols, 2010) . It is important to note that although these modes exist, it does not mean the conventions of one mode cannot be present in another (Nichols, 2010).
In this series of articles we will be looking into each mode, identifying the features, looking into the history and highlighting notable films and directors.
The Poetic Mode
With the poetic mode of documentary, the goal is not to create a film with a traditional narrative but rather to look into presenting patterns and associations to create meaning and evoke an emotional response from the audience. This is often achieved by arranging imagery into rhythms and juxtapositions (Nichols, 2010).
When people become part of the poetic documentary as participants, they are seen more like objects or “raw material” rather than characters with complex personalities and backstories. They are often arranged by the filmmaker, just like other objects in the film to create patterns and meaning (Nichols, 2010).
Unlike other documentary modes, “mood, tone and affect” are stressed a lot more that “displays of knowledge and acts of persuasion” and there is also a lack of a rhetorical element. The poetic mode does however, in it’s own way have the ability to look into alternative forms of knowledge” that may differ to the traditional transfer of information (Nichols, 2010).
The History
The poetic documentary came into existence during the 1920s. It combined cinema with avant-garde and arose in tandem modernism as a way to represent reality as “a series of fragments, subjective impressions, incoherent acts and loose associations.” People often attribute this to the effects of WWI and the “transformations of industrialisation.” There was an interesting honesty about the poetic mode as it would often be ambiguous or puzzling and refused to provide solutions to large problems; these features became very prominent in the sub-genre (Nichols, 2010).
Ones To Watch
Sans Soleil – Argos Films
Sans Soleil (1983) Directed by Chris Marker
Sans Soleil is a French documentary shot mainly in Japan and Guinea Bissau which are identified as “two extreme poles of survival.” Other shooting locations include: San Francisco, Cape Verde, Paris and Iceland. Throughout the film we hear narration from a woman who talks about her thoughts as a world traveler as if reading a letter to a friend. The film takes the audience on a journey around the world but poses deeper thoughts about human nature. There is a heavy reliance on the juxtaposition of narrative and imagery to create meaning and does not include any synchronous sound (Sans Soleil, 1983).
In the Sight and Sound poll conducted by BFI, Sans Soleil was ranked 3rd best documentary of all time (McManus , Bradshaw and Stevens, 2014).
Koyaanisqatsi – IRE Productions, Sante Fe Institute for Regional Education
Koyaanisqatsi(1982) Directed by Godfrey Reggio
Koyaanisqatsi is an American documentary that explores “nature, humanity and the relationship between them.” With no conventional plot, the film uses stunning imagery of landscapes and the environment without narration. By combining the cinematography of Ron Fricke and music from Phillip Glass we get a powerful film that essentially shows us the effect humans have had on the world.
Koyaanisqatsi is the first film of the Qatsi Trilogy. It is followed by Powaqqatsi: Life in transformation and Naqoysqatsi: Life as war (Koyaanisqatsi, 1984).
Samsara 2 – Bali Film Center, Bang Singapore, Bullet Productions, Camerapix, Ceenema, Copacabana Filmes e Produções, FilmCrew TV Production Management Agency, Filmworks Dubai, Madarat Productions, Magidson Films, Moonlighting Films, Panorama Films, PaperKut, Semat for Production and Distribution, Teneighty Productions, Virgin Earth.
Samsara (2011) Directed by Ron Fricke
Koyaanisqatsi cinematographer Ron Fricke was evidently influenced by the films he previously worked on and went on to direct his own series of poetic documentaries. Filmed over the span of nearly five years in 25 different countries, Samara takes the audience on an intimate journey across the world where they get a special view of “sacred grounds, disaster zones, industrial complexes and natural wonders.” (Fricke, 2012)
http://www.sothetheorygoes.com/documentary-poetic-mode/
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The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception Revisited
What our Ear Tells our Mind
Stating the Problem
This paper is an attempt to integrate (with some innovations) what I have said
during the years about the rich precategorial auditory information reverberating in
the background while we read poetry. Though in my age everything I say relies on
my work during the past decades, I feel I have a few new insights too. And, I also
feel it’s time to bring together all that stuff into one corpus.
My work on this topic draws upon two different sources. One source is Anton
Ehrenzweig’s seminal work on Gestalt-free and thing-free qualities in the visual arts
and music, and the interaction of such qualities within and across the boundaries of
gestalts. When boundaries are clear-cut, colour interaction is increased within them
and inhibited across them; the more blurred the boundaries, the stronger the
interaction across them. Ehrenzweig discusses this via colour induction in the visual
domain, and overtone fusion in polyphonic music. Overtone fusion in music may
generate hitherto unheard tone colours, and enhance the gestalt-free texture. In
speech, vowels are uniquely determined by concentrations of overtones called
“formants”. I claim that in certain circumstances the musical effects of poetry are
crucially affected by similar overtone fusion. My other source is, obviously, speech
research, which explores the transmission of speech through a stream of precategorial
sound information, subsequently recoded into a sequence of speech categories.
Traditional literary scholarship has explored the versification devices which
render poetry more musical than prose: metre, rhyme, alliteration, etc. In this paper I
propose to go two steps beyond that. What I propose to explore is quite elusive, and
traditional scholarship doesn’t even have a vocabulary to refer to it. And even when
I propose one, it will be impossible to define the conditions in which the terms
apply. But, I hope, they will enable us to discuss elusive intuitions in a meaningful
way.
As a first approximation, let us make the following distinction: Sometimes we
experience the sound patterns of poetry as relatively opaque speech categories; and
sometimes as abounding in rich precategorial auditory information reverberating in
the back of our mind—in other words, alliterations may “click” or “clink”. The
reverberating background texture sometimes acts in a way that is similar to the
gestalt-free shadings, scribblings and slight variations of color in the background of
visual designs. They foreground the speech categories and sound patterns, round
them out, as it were, making them more plastic and plump. Let me clarify what I
mean by “resonance”, "lingering auditory information” and “reverberating
overtones”, through an example adapted from Leonard Bernstein: “Depress middle
C very carefully so as not to let it sound; then sharply strike and quickly release the
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C an octave below. As soon as the lower C is released what will you hear? The
upper C! It seems like magic, because you have really not “struck” this higher C,
but the lower one” (Bernstein, 2004: 198), exciting the upper C-string to vibrate
sympathetically as the first overtone of the C an octave below [listen]. Such
activation of overtones is called resonance.
As a kind of “ostensive definition” of what I mean with reference to verbal
structures, let me give three brief examples. First, a most elementary, nonpoetic
example. Consider the name of the German philosopher Kant, and the English word
can’t (contraction of cannot). In the former, the [n] is a full consonant; in the latter it
is attenuated into the [+NASAL] feature of the nasal vowel [ã], In the former it is
perceived as relatively opaque; in the latter as more resonant than either a nasal
consonant, or an oral vowel (e.g., [a]). Second, consider the following stanza from
FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:
Some for the Glories of this World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!
Consider the three rhyme words, some–come–Drum. Some readers report that
they are aware of a rich body of reverberating auditory information in Drum, but are
not aware of a similar richness in the preceding rhyme-fellows. To be sure, traditional
criticism has an excellent explanation for this, as far as it goes. There is an
exceptionally rich alliteration pattern in rumble–distant–Drum. The phrase refers
to reverberating sound; the consonants [r] and [m], in turn, are perceived as somehow
imitating sounds in nature. The present paper purports to go two steps further,
and invoke the rich precategorial auditory information on the one hand, and the
fusion of such auditory information on the other. The point is that in certain circumstances
such resonance is enhanced, and in some inhibited. In this stanza of the
Rubáiyát there are additional alliterations, though less resonating: Prophet’s
Paradise and Cash–Credit. Intuitively, they are perceived as less reverberating,
more “opaque”, and having a “leaner body”.
Third, let us consider another classical example, Tennyson’s notorious verse line
“And murmuring of innumerable bees”. It contains the sound cluster m‰r three
times: twice in murmuring, and once in innumerable. Now, consider John Crowe
Ransom’s transcription of this line: “And murdering of innumerable beeves”—the
reverberating background texture disappears. Ransom’s transcription contains the
sound cluster m‰r only twice; the rich precategorial information associated with it
still could reverberate in acoustic memory (just as in can’t), but it doesn’t. Obviously,
the onomatopoeia disappeared too. I will return to these examples. At the present
stage of my argument I only want to point out one more thing. The [b] of innumerable
and bees (or beeves) is part of another alliteration pattern, but not of the
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onomatopoeia. But even the [b] seems to have a fuller, richer, more resonant body in
Tennyson’s line than in Ransom’s rewriting. In course of this paper we shall
encounter a wide range of conditions that may enhance or inhibit the reverberating
sound information.
Such “ostensive definition” assumes an intuitive understanding, that is to say,
that participants have sufficiently grasped the phenomenon to recognize the type of
information being given. Alternatively, the vocabulary and theoretical framework to
be expounded here may be useful in directing attention to certain elusive aspects of
the sound dimension of a poem. Paraphrasing Morris Weitz, it can be used as a
crucial recommendation what to look for and how to look at it in a given sound
pattern.
The catch is that if someone cannot hear what I attribute to those examples, I
cannot argue with him, nor bring him any proofs. Some people may raise an
eyebrow at such an ostensive definition of my elusive topic. According to Frank
Sibley (1962: 77), however, that is precisely how aesthetic concepts are and should
be handled. “If we are not following rules and there are no conditions to appeal to”
Sibley says, “how are we to know when they are applicable? One very natural way
to counter this question is to point out that some other sorts of concepts also are not
condition-governed. We do not apply simple color-words by following rules or in
accordance with principles. We see that the book is red by looking, just as we tell
that the tea is sweet by tasting it. So too, it might be said, we just see (or fail to see)
that things are delicate, balanced, and the like”; or, “reverberating” at that. Or, as
Manfred Bierwisch (1970: 108) says, poetics must accept effects as given.
Another vantage point to approach this phenomenon is from the Jakobsonian
model of language functions. From the reader’s point of view, there is a hierarchy of
arbitrary signs: graphemes→ phonemes→ meaning→ extralinguistic referent (each
later item being the signified of the preceding one). Man, as a sign-using animal, is
programmed to reach the extralinguistic referent as fast as possible. According to
Jakobson, what differentiates the referential function is focusing on the extralinguistic
context; the poetic function focuses on the message. Figurative language directs
attention to the semantic component of language, whereas the patterning of speech
categories (versification) to the phonetic component. I have elsewhere discussed
picture poetry, that forces the reader to attend back to the patterning of graphemes
—hence perceived as so “artificial”.
From the listener’s point of view, speech sounds are transmitted by a stream of
rich precategorial auditory information, which is immediately recoded into phonetic
categories, and excluded from awareness. We only perceive a unitary, discrete
phonetic category as [i] or [u]. Some of the precategorial auditory information,
however, lingers on subliminally in active memory, and is available for certain
cognitive tasks and aesthetic effects. Such lingering auditory information normally
serves to preserve verbal material in active memory for efficient processing. It is
active, usually, in the background, unnoticed. The present suggestion is twofold:
first, that in poetic language, some or many listeners attend back not only to the
The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception Revisited 3
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patterning of speech categoies explored by traditional rhetoric and criticism, but also
to the lingering precategorial auditory information, turning it to aesthetic end in that
it is perceived as musicality, onomatopoeia, or expressive sound patterns; and
second, that in some circumstances more of the reverberating precategorial auditory
information is perceived, and in some—less.
Some Experimental Evidence
There is plenty of experimental evidence for the reverberation and interaction of
lingering auditory information. I will briefly mention only two sets of experiments.
Let us turn to a set of experiments conducted for a different purpose. Researchers at
the Haskins Laboratories (e. g., Liberman and Mann, 1981: 128-129; Brady et. al.,
1983: 349-355; Mann, l984: 1-10), investigated the possible causes of some
children’s difficulty to learn to read, and revealed a deficiency in the use of phonetic
coding by poor readers; good readers, by contrast, seem to make an excellent use of
it. In one experimental task, poor readers had greater difficulty than good readers in
tapping once or three times in response to the number of syllables in such spoken
words as pig or elephant, or once, twice or three times in response to the number of
phonemes in such words as eye, pie or spy. This has been interpreted as a deficiency
in the use of phonetic coding. In another task, they had to memorize groups of
words—either rhymed or unrhymed, as in the following ones:
chain train brain rain pain
cat fly score meat scale
Good readers did consistently better with both kinds of groups than poor readers.
However, with the rhymed groups, their performance seriously deteriorated. While
their reliance on phonetic representation increased their overall performance, the
similar sounds of the rhyming words reverberating in their acoustic memory seem to
have caused confusion. Good readers made efficient use of phonetic coding,
whereas the poor readers made inefficient use of the acoustic information in shortterm
memory, and so were not penalized by the similar sounds of the rhyming
words.
The sound patterns of poetry in general, and rhyme in particular, typically exploit
the precategorial acoustic information and, actually, enhance its memory traces. In
nonaesthetic memory experiments, this reliance on phonetic representation reveals
two typical effects. It enables verbal material to linger for some time in short-term
memory for more efficient processing, but also may cause acoustic confusion in
certain circumstances.
The disadvantage of efficient readers with rhymed words seems to contradict our
commonsense observation that versification facilitates the memorization of texts.
But the contradiction is only apparent. In the experiment, the effect depends on the
distance between the rhyming words. As Crowder (1983: 255) suggested in the set
of experiments quoted below, “if the two units are too close together, they will
integrate rather than inhibit. If they integrate, the subject will lose valuable informa-
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tion”. In poetry, by contrast, the rhyme words are further away from one another;
break up a longer text into easily-remembered chunks; at the same time, the reverberating
similar sounds unify the segmented text, and also enlist auditory memory in
the service of remembering. When in the experiment the rhyme words come in close
succession in a meaningless list, there is no intervening text to organize, nor is there
a meaningful context that would impose semantic or grammatical constraints: it
makes no difference which word comes first, which comes next; so, the fusion of
formants becomes mere confusion. What in the nonaesthetic memory experiments is
called acoustic confusion, in an aesthetic context co-occurs with a coherent text, and
may be perceived in the background as “harmonious fusion”, “musicality”.
Experimental literature suggests three possibilities in the perception of successive
speech stimuli. If a subsequent stimulus is very similar to the preceding stimulus, it
may generate an enhanced response, because of integration with the lingering
auditory information; if it is moderately similar, it will be reduced, inhibiting the
lingering auditory information (“lateral inhibition”); if there is no similarity, it will
be unaffected. In ordinary verbal communication usually one of the latter two
possibilities is the case (Crowder, 1982, a-b). As to rhyme or FitzGerald’s “rumble–
Drum” alliteration, obviously the “very similar” option is the case. Robert G.
Crowder suggests (personal communication) that there would be precedent for the
assumption that the total effect would be the larger for having had a repeated sound.
This depends on his assumption that both inhibitory and enhancing interaction takes
place within the formant energy of the words, even though they may be spoken at
different pitches (formants are concentrations of overtones that uniquely determine
vowels). Thus, such sound patterns as rhyme and alliteration not only “exploit” the
working of the auditory short-term memory, but actually enhance it.
A chapter in one of my books is called “Musicality in Verse, and Phonological
Universals”. I took the first part of this phrase from Kenneth Burke, the second from
Roman Jakobson, and combined them. It took months before I discovered that I had
created a most powerful alliteration: the word “verse” recurs entirely in the word
“universals”. It would appear that in prose discourse our pronunciation of the same
sound sequence in two words tends to be moderately similar, so as to reduce the
lingering auditory information, directing attention away from the sounds to the
referents. One may attend back to the alliteration by lengthening the sequence [vɜrs]
of “universals” and slightly raising its pitch, so as to render it more similar to
“verse”. Likewise, the following sentence occurs in Ehrenzweig’s account of
Chevreuil’s colour-induction experiment quoted below: “On a green ground the
grey square would turn a distinct pink”. I have quoted the passage numberless times
during the past four decades or so, but only now, when writing the present paper I
noticed the exceptionally powerful alliteration.
Crowder raises the question what the lateral inhibitory process is good for. “In
vision, a system of recurrent lateral inhibition […] has the obvious adaptive consequence
of edge-sharpening. Something quite similar may go on in speech
perception. For example, in rapid fluent speech, people rarely achieve the ‘target
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values’ of vowels, in terms of formant frequency. A system that could enhance the
discriminability of adjacent vowels with high spectral overlap would be handy,
especially if it operated at a very early, sensory, level of processing” (Crowder,
1983: 256). For our purpose, probably another function of lateral inhibition in
speech perception would be to prevent the sound stratum from distracting attention
from the extralinguistic referent in the referential function. And conversely, we must
carefully articulate the ‘target values’ of formant frequencies, if we want them to
enhance rather than inhibit the lingering auditory information. This may illuminate
the phonetic mechanism underlying the “poetic function”.
Speech Mode, Nonspeech Mode and Poetic Mode
Speech researchers distinguish between a speech mode and a nonspeech mode of
auditory perception, which follow different paths in the neural system. In the speech
mode there is typically a lack of correspondence between acoustic cue and perceived
phoneme: we hear a unitary phoneme that is very different from the stream
of auditory information that conveys it. In the nonspeech mode (natural noises,
music, sonar etc.), by contrast, the shape of the perceived sound is similar to the
shape of the sound wave. We seem to be tuned, normally, to the nonspeech mode;
but as soon as the incoming stream of sounds gives the lightest indication that it
may be carrying linguistic information, we automatically switch to the speech mode.
In certain artificial laboratory conditions we may hear the phoneme in one ear, and
the inarticulate noise in the other. We may also see it by converting speech into
colour patches in images called sonograms or spectrograms.
Figure 1 Sonograms of [∫] and [s], representing the first and second formant, and
indicating why [s] is somehow “higher”
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I have suggested that there is a third, “poetic mode”. In the poetic mode, you
hear the phonetic categories as in the speech mode; but some of the lingering
precategorial auditory information becomes available too. Pronounce [∫] and [s] and
try to determine which one is higher. Most people find that [s] is higher. Or pronounce
[i] and [u] on the same pitch; you will probably find that [u] is lower and
darker than [i]. As figures 1 and 2 show, the second formant of [s] and [i] is higher
than that of [∫] and [u]. The first two formants of [u] are nearer together than those
of [i] and, as Delattre et al. (1952) demonstrated, the human ear can even be fooled
into hearing an [u] carried by two formants, when, in fact, generating one formant at
an intermediate pitch. This indistinctness of [u] is perceived as darkness, as it were.
Figure 2 Spectrograms of [i] and [u]. The second formant is higher and the distance
between the first two formants greater in [i] than in [u].
We must consider yet another distinction, that of relative “encodedness”. Ask
someone to pronounce [ba], [da] and [ga] on the same pitch and tell which one is
higher. Not as with [s] and [∫] or [i] and [u], most (but not all) people will have
difficulty to tell this. The only difference between [ba], [da], and [ga] is the onset
frequency of the so called second formant transition, in this ascending order. But
stop consonants are highly encoded, that is, little or no lingering auditory information
reaches awareness.
One may make two successive distinctions in the acoustic structure of speech
sounds. Some speech sounds (as [p, t, k]) are abrupt; some are continuous. Continuous
speech sounds may be periodic (as [l, m, n, j]; or aperiodic (as [∫, s, f]). [r] is
continuous, periodic, and multiply interrupted. Abrupt sounds are usually highly
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encoded; continuous aperiodic sounds somewhat less encoded, and periodic sounds
relatively unencoded. Even among vowels, as we have seen, nasal vowels are less
encoded than oral vowels. Voiced stops are an interesting case in point: stops are
abrupt, whereas voicing is periodic. I have used above the pair of onomatopoetic
verbs click and clink. The word-final [k] in click is exceptionally sharp and abrupt;
the nasal vowel in clink is periodic and reverberating, and quite readily available to
awareness.
Coarticulation increases the encodedness of speech sounds. There is experimental
evidence that in isolated vowels and continuants more precategorial information
reaches awareness than when pronounced with another speech sound (Rakerd, 1984;
Repp, 1984). In [∫. s] it is easier to discern which one is higher than in [∫a, sa].
Symbolist poets sometimes capitalize on this fact, enhancing the reverberation of
speech sounds. In Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” the vowels [a. e. i, ü, o] are directly named,
with no consonantal context, yielding a stream of acoustic energy. The Hungarian
poet Kosztolányi wrote a poem inspired by his wife’s name, Ilona, all continuous
periodic sounds. In one of the stanzas he enumerates the isolated sounds of her
name: “Csupa l,/ csupa i,/ csupa o, csupa a”—all continuous streams of periodic
sounds.
We have been exploring the question, why in some poetic contexts one may
discern reverberating auditory information in the background, bestowing on the
speech sounds plasticity and a “fuller body”, whereas in other contexts speech
sounds are perceived as relatively “lean” and sharply defined. Lingering precategorial
auditory information is the clue. One distinction we have made concerns
“encodedness”. In some speech sounds the precategorial auditory information is
more readily available than in others.
This by itself, however, would be a quite rigid phenomenon, insufficient to
account for the experience we set out to explain. But, in certain circumstances,
readers and poets may switch attention from one aspect of the speech sounds to
another. Consider our example “And murmuring of innumerable bees” as opposed
to “And murdering of innumerable beeves”. I have suggested that the [b] of
innumerable is no part of the onomatopoeia, but even the [b] seems to have a fuller,
richer, more resonant body in Tennyson’s line than in Ransom’s rewriting. In
murmuring and innumerable the meaning directs attention to the rich precategorial
auditory information available in the continuous periodic consonants [m], [n], [r],
and [l]. The voiced stop [b] is perceived in the murdering context as a unitary
speech sound that typically blocks, so to speak, the passage of reverberating
acoustic energy. The murmuring context, by contrast, separates the periodic
“voiced” feature in [b] and activates it, blending its voiced, periodic element with
that of [l]. Such an “aspect-switching” will appear less incredible if we note that one
of the most effective cues for voiced consonants is an articulatory gesture plus voice
onset time: that is, how much time passes between the articulatory gesture and the
beginning of voicing.
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There are indications that this is not a mere freak of an artificial rewrite exercise.
Thus, for instance, Iván Fónagy (1961), in his study of the expressiveness of speech
sounds compared the relative frequency of phonemes in ten especially angry poems
and ten especially tender poems by a variety of poets in French, German and
Hungarian. Such voiceless stops as [p, t, k] are “angry” for most poets. I interpreted
this fact as having to do with their abrupt and highly encoded nature. Tender moods
are more open to uncategorized sensory information than aggressive moods. Now
consider the relative frequency of /g/ and [d] in Victor Hugo’s and Paul Verlaine’s
poems. /g/ occurs over one and a half times more frequently in Verlaine’s tender
poems than in his angry ones (1.63: 1.07), whereas we find almost the reverse
proportion in Hugo’s poems: 0.96% in his tender poems, and 1.35% in his angry
ones. As to /d/, again, the same sound has opposite emotional tendencies for the two
poets, but with reverse effects. For Verlaine it has a basically aggressive quality
(10.11: 7.93), whereas for Hugo it has a basically tender quality (7.09: 5.76)—again,
in almost the same reverse proportion. The reason seems to be similar to the one we
have offered for the shift of perceived qualities of [b] in the murmuring and murdering
contexts: “aspect-switching”. If you attend to the [g] or [d] as a unitary abrupt
stop consonant, it may have a strong aggressive potential; if you attend to the
periodic voiced ingredient, it may contribute to a tender quality. Obviously, Hugo
and Verlaine applied to these voiced stops the same cognitive mechanism, but with a
reverse focus.
Colour and Overtone Interaction
As I mentioned above, in this paper I make an attempt to apply to poetry Anton
Ehrenzweig’s work on colour and overtone interaction in the visual arts and music.
According to the gestalt psychologists, “colour interaction increases within the
boundaries of a good gestalt while it is inhibited across its borders” (Ehrenzweig,
1970: 172). In the visual domain, the process was demonstrated experimentally, in a
most dramatic way, back in the early nineteenth century. Ehrenzweig (1970: 170–
171) describes a demonstration of colour induction by Chevreuil (which I attempted
to replicate in figures 3, 4 and 5). “The experiment which demonstrated interaction
most clearly was to place a small grey square on a large ground of colour. On a
green ground the grey square would turn a distinct pink”. I have found that it takes
the square a few seconds to turn pink. “A few years later a most paradoxical
phenomenon was observed; when a sheet of semi-transparent tissue paper was
placed over the whole area the saturation of the green ground was of course severely
diminished. One would have expected that the colour induction in the grey would be
reduced to the same extent, that is to say that the induced pink of the grey square
would also become much paler. But the opposite happened: the pinkness of the grey
square became more pronounced”. It was Helmholz who found an explanation for
this paradox: the tissue paper made the outline of the grey square fuzzier and this
weakening of its form increased colour interaction across its boundaries. “A
The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception Revisited 9
10 Reuven Tsur
The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception Revisited 11
comparatively crude weakening of the line was sufficient to compensate—indeed
more than compensate—for the enormous loss in the saturation of the colours,” says
Ehrenzweig. “As in all relationships between form and colour the reverse effect can
also happen. Strong colour interaction tends to make sharp outlines seem much
softer than they are.
http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsurxx/Poetic_Mode_Revisited.pdfDOCUMENTARY MODES: REPRESENTING THE ‘TRUTH’
Picture by B.S. Wise
Like cinema itself, my love for cinema has been divided between the fascination for ‘reality’ and the craving for ‘fantasy’. While Méliès chose to embark us on fantastic voyages the likes of Flaherty and Grierson chose to explore the reality of our world instead. The line between fiction and reality is seldom sharp. Mockumentaries exploit the conventions of factual programming to present fiction as reality. Biopics and docudramas ‘steal’ from reality to dramatise real world events. The word realism has been associated with a large amount of different cinematic movements and a multitude of genres have been devised to describe the various realms of human fantasy. We could argue that documentaries claim to describe the real, to tell the truth. Yet, we could also easily argue that many of them do not deliver on such claims. One needs to start by asking a simple question: What is a documentary?
According to Google:
documentary dɒkjʊˈmɛnt(ə)ri/
noun
noun: documentary; plural noun: documentaries
a film or television or radio programme that provides a factual report on a particular subject. synonyms: factual programme, factual film;
I prefer the more poetic definition by John Grierson:
“A Documentary is the creative treatment of actuality.”
What is actuality? Actuality in this case is footage of real events, places, people and things. That’s it. There is no creative treatment of the footage; no creative editing, no creative use of sound, no creative use of the camera, no staging and no directions just a simple raw recording of “reality”, if that is possible. It is what the Lumiere Brothers first started recording, simple actuality footage.
Probably the most popular perspective on the study of documentaries is the one presented by Bill Nichols in Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Nichols outlines the Documentary Modes of Representation (see an excerpt here) a popular yet debatable way to categorise documentary films based on their organizational patterns. Even though it is inaccurate to think of these modes as historical representations of the evolution of documentary style, as it is wrong to interpret them as being mutually exclusives, they can help understanding the values and problematics attached to various techniques commonly used by documentary filmmakers. If the filmmaker is committed to a statement of ‘truth’ surely he or she would not ‘lie’ to me, right?
The Poetic Mode
The poetic mode of documentary is not concerned with the “objective” reality of a given situation or people and instead aims at grasping an inner “truth” that can only be attained by poetical manipulation. It does not use continuity editing and sacrifices sense of time and location. It explores association and rhythm, and does not concentrate on specific/main ‘social actors’. Its codes emphasise visual associations, tonal or rhythmic qualities. Its formal organisation favours mood, tone and texture. By presenting a set of images with a specific soundtrack the filmmakers attempt to reveal an hidden truth about the presented media.
Examples of Poetic Documentaries:
But, wait a minute. Are they ‘lying to me’? They are presenting images in an extremely subjective way where artistic expression seems to matter more than a truthful representation of the real world. We demand the truth.
The Expository Mode
This mode is what we most identify with the documentary and is most characterised by its ‘voice of God’ commentary. The structure reminds us of the one of written essays. It offers a series of arguments presented by a verbal commentary and supported by visual ‘evidence’. It addresses the audience directly and suggests the preferred meaning or interpretation of its content. The narration is often presented by an ‘authority’ or by someone we have learned to trust (see Sir Attenborough and Morgan Freeman). The aim is quite clearly to support the validity of a point of view.
Examples of Expository Documentaries:
But, wait a minute. Are they ‘lying to me’? They are presenting a carefully structured sequence of arguments to support a specific perspective on a subject. Are we being lawyered? We demand the truth.
The Observational Mode
Also known as a fly on the wall approach. It attempts to capture objective reality. There is no visible influence from the filmmaker. It often relies on long takes to minimise the impact of editing and avoids the use of non-diegetic sound (sound coming from a source outside the story space).
Since nothing is staged for the camera, the camera rushes about to keep up with the action resulting in the rough, shaky and often amateur-looking footage that have characterised the Cinema Verité and/or Direct Cinema of the 50’s and 60’s. The intent is to remain hidden behind the camera, ignored by the surrounding environment and neither change nor influence the actions/events being captured.
Examples of Observational Documentaries:
But, wait a minute. Are they ‘lying to me’? When you see a fly on the wall you are tempted to squash it. Your behaviour has been changed because of the filmmakers presence, sorry I meant to type: ‘the fly’. ‘Reality’ was altered by an element that has been kept hidden from the audience. We demand the truth.
The Participatory Mode
The participatory mode welcomes direct engagement between the filmmakers and the subject matter. The filmmaker becomes part of the events being recorded. The filmmaker asks, the filmmaker questions; we follow the filmmakers’ interactions with the real world. The impact on the events being recorded is acknowledged through the evident participation of the makers. It can be characterised by direct interviews and a personal narration. The intent is to acknowledge the ‘fly’ and its search through the real world.
Examples of Participatory Documentaries:
But, wait a minute. Are they ‘lying to me’? They intrude into people’s lives, meddle with it, shape it, take the ‘best bits’ and assemble them to satisfy the representation of their interpretations. We demand the truth.
The Reflexive Mode
The Reflexive Mode acknowledges the constructed nature of documentary and displays it proudly. The presence of directions, cameras and lights is emphasised. The making of the documentary is at the centre of the documentary along the subject matter. There is an intentional display of the filmmakers activities. It strengthen the relationship between the makers and the audience and suggest a transparency. But, at the same time it gets audiences to consider and question the ways that documentaries shape the vision of reality.
Examples of Reflexive Documentaries:
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Turn On Your Readerly Poetic Mode of Speech Perception for This Indispensable Eric Baus Lecture
A more informal lecture by Eric Baus at this year’s Summer Writing Program at Naropa has turned into a must-have resource for your reading/listening pleasure. In “Granular Vocabularies: Poetics & Recorded Sound,” Baus talks about, as he puts it, “the micro-level (or at least the relatively small-scale) elements of sound and language in recorded performance.” Using sources that range from Barthes to Xenakis to French composer Michel Chion to poet Harmony Holiday, there’s much of interest, samples included. A brief excerpt follows, but be sure to indulge your archival bent further, especially if, say, a subtitle like “Paratextual Comments as Poetic Speech” gets you. It does us:
Paratextual Comments as Poetic SpeechI want to make a bit of a jump now to consider an experience that often happens if you’re spending a lot of time listening to archives of recorded poetry readings. Certain aspects of the writer’s speech that aren’t part of the poem start to strike you as poetic fragments. I will play some examples I have come across: Eleni Sikelianos (“You might take a cue she’s laying down to listen.”) & Eileen Myles (“I started writing the skies and I never wrote the stories.”)I won’t dwell on these small samples very long, but I think what happens is that while listening to a recording of an entire reading, we are primed for patterned language, and this blurriness into everyday speech creates an interesting gap or overlap.Reuven Tsur, a scholar of cognitive poetics, argues that there is a “poetic mode of speech perception” that we can switch into when listening. Tsur writes: “When the acoustic signal is processed in the nonspeech mode (by the right hemisphere of the brain), we hear it as if we heard music sounds or natural noises. We attend away from overtone structure to tone color. When the same signal is processed in the speech mode (by the left central hemisphere), this tone color is suppressed. We attend away from formant structure to phoneme. In the poetic mode, the main processing is identical with the processing in the speech mode. However, some tone color from the processing in the nonspeech mode faintly enters consciousness” (What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive 18).So, we experience a more pronounced overlap between the material qualities of the language as a kind of productive noise, that enhances the meaning. In this passage, Tsur is in the middle of a very nuanced explanation of a phenomenon unrelated to the one I just mentioned, but I think it is useful to know that there is a concept of the “poetic mode of speech perception.” When I listen to the drift between the end of Eleni Sikelianos’s poem, her address to the child in the audience, and her uniquely lyrical phrasing of an idea, I can tune into that part of my brain that hears speech as poetry. By framing these moments in comments between poems, I hope to point to another way of listening, and by emphasizing their status as segments I want to say something about poetry in general.
Much more where that came from. Also, Baus gives advice and experiments for listening to recordings and engaging with archives; and provides a comprehensive list of additional resources. Have fun!
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/07/turn-on-your-readerly-poetic-mode-of-speech-perception-for-this-indispensable-eric-baus-lecture/
Mahmood, how did this research help you. We need the research to be annotated.
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