{"id":917,"date":"2008-11-25T13:49:34","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T17:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/?p=917"},"modified":"2008-11-25T13:49:34","modified_gmt":"2008-11-25T17:49:34","slug":"getting-your-mind-into-the-gutter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/2008\/11\/25\/getting-your-mind-into-the-gutter\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Your Mind into the Gutter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scott McCloud said about the \u201cnon-sequitur\u201d transition between the panels of comics: \u201cNo matter how dissimilar one image may be to another, there is a kind of alchemy at work in the space between panels which can help us find meaning or resonance in even the most jarring combinations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I started to think about why it is that humans think in terms of causality; seeing one image and then another and then making an inference. I tried to apply this across mediums and realized that Hemingway\u2019s iceberg technique functions in a similar way. For instance, if you look at his short story \u201cHills Like White Elephants,\u201d he never once explicitly mentions an abortion, but it remains an essential element to the story. Through his use of language, he forces the reader to fill in gutter, and to become an active part of the story.<\/span><\/p>\n

The more I thought about it, the more I started to realize that the gutter wasn\u2019t only unique to comic books; it\u2019s just more visually defined than most other mediums. In comics, the gutter is more of a vocalized pause, where other mediums simply have a silent pause\u2014or one that is more universally ignored. <\/span><\/p>\n

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In film you don\u2019t see the space between cuts, because you don\u2019t need to. Between cuts, there is an implied gutter. Since the viewer isn\u2019t physically looking from panel to panel, there is not a need have a pause between cuts. The viewer is looking at the same location the entire time, and the cuts do all the movement. As the pictures on the screen change, it is understood that two images juxtaposed one after the other is the same as observing two separate panels, as opposed to one continuous shot. The same amount of closure\u2014a third relational idea\u2014can be drawn from two cuts in a movie as two panels of a comic book. <\/span><\/p>\n

In other static art like paintings and photography, there seems to be an elimination of the gutter, assuming that without multiple panels there can be no real progression. However, if the painter or photographer is worth their weight in jellybeans (whatever that means), the viewer will be guided through the image in a different way. By the use of shapes and colors, different parts of the image will catch the eye of the viewer first. Then, as more time is spent with the piece, different things will become apparent. While there isn\u2019t a clear, chronological progression, the piece can tell a story through the flow of the viewer\u2019s eye.<\/span><\/p>\n

In literature too there is a gutter. Takethissentenceforexample. The previous sentence is not very easy to understand because there is no gutter guiding the flow of information. Imagine a whole paragraph without spaces. Even with the correct capitalization and punctuation it would be very difficult to understand. Textually, written literature makes the most use of the gutter, separating the book into chapters, pages, paragraphs, sentences, and words. In an artistic sense, like the way that Hemingway draws his readers into the story, the gutter is present in a the actual content of the text.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The gutter can then be separated into evocative and representational purposes. Part of the gutter\u2019s purpose is to separate the content of a work, while the other part is to encourage to reader to fill in the blank\u2014to become an active part of the experience.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scott McCloud said about the \u201cnon-sequitur\u201d transition between the panels of comics: \u201cNo matter how dissimilar one image may be to another, there is a kind of alchemy at work in the space between panels which can help us find meaning or resonance in even the most jarring combinations.\u201d I started to think about why … Continue reading Getting Your Mind into the Gutter<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=917"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":918,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917\/revisions\/918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}