I am interested in the rhetoric game of snowclones, the special breed of phrasal templates that constantly revisit a culturally established term. “X is the new Y” is now a common to most idioms, and mostly independent of the original “Brown is the new Black”. My interest is not in the discourse of lazy journalism, I know they rely on cliches and I’m pretty sure I know why. I’m excited by the broader significance of snowcloning; cliches, punning, stock piles of linguistic collocations that are knitted into communication. Most speech is littered with snowclones or other templated orders. What we do is more like like ‘oral writing’ than true speech. My question is, and nearly always is when faced with a linguistic trope, does it occur visually?
To satisfy the comparison, and to satisfy me, the image would have to be more than a visual pun, to be somewhat detached from its meaning-origin. The template itself would need to have overtaken the referent in some way. I asked a friend for any ideas, after a pained bafflement she suggested the main image of the film Scandal - Joannne Whalley posing as Christine Keeler, sat naked on a turned-around chair. This works for me. It’s been repeated to such a degree that it’s been adopted by visual culture as a standard format. The language of its use doesn’t necessarily signify the scandalous suggestiveness of the “original”, it doesn’t signify anything apart from the re-use of itself. It is loosing its context, yet instantly recognisable. More examples (all contestable, non absolutely definite) are;
Lawrence Weschler has a new book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. It catalogues his investigation into the shared images of cultural output in history and the contemporary. Representations of moments, events and personalities follow a pattern. A photograph of the New York city-scape it matched perfectly to a painting of a 18th century harbour; while a ground-zero fire-fighter’s meeting is paired with Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, 1642. The images share more than similar scenarios or narratives, they share a schematic and aesthetic language. The formats and compositions are uncannily married. It poses the question, does visual culture borrow from itself so unconsciously and so often, or is this how we visually interpret the world, in known pre-set compositions.
a Warhol repeated portrait;
a never ending high-way somewhere in an American dessert;
a huge crown scene, just distanced enough to obscure any identifiable features of anyone;
a pieta/a crucifixion;
a hand reaching and touching another hand;
three (or more but not too many) people in a circle dancing in a natural setting.
Lawrence Weschler has a new book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences. It catalogues his investigation into the shared images of cultural output in history and the contemporary. Representations of moments, events and personalities follow a pattern. A photograph of the New York city-scape it matched perfectly to a painting of a 18th century harbour; while a ground-zero fire-fighter’s meeting is paired with Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, 1642. The images share more than similar scenarios or narratives, they share a schematic and aesthetic language. The formats and compositions are uncannily married. It poses the question, does visual culture borrow from itself so unconsciously and so often, or is this how we visually interpret the world, in known pre-set compositions.
Every story told is a re-telling at its heart, we have inbuilt narratives and myths hosting archetypal systems in our psyche. These are made manifest in the novel and cinema, reflected back at us. As we translate chaos into narratives, do we translate the world of infinite colours, angles and perspectives into framed images? Do we only see in vistas, still-lifes and compositions, (re)presented, seen and re-seen. Cinema has its own sub-universe of these continuously recycled hieroglyphs. Visual templates of Hollywood cinema feed into our broader library of icons, how we understand the world and ourselves. Different movie snowclones appeal to each of us for different reasons. Some of my favourites are;
close-ups of feet walking along;
a foreboding mansion seen through iron gates;
pan-out shot of a car driving away (always away);
a dog cocking its head or rolling its eyes from the floor – beneath all the action;
legs seen from below the water;
a busy cafe or restaurant;
the orchestra;
the boss sat at a desk in front of a large window;
whirling newspaper headlines;
the outside of a house with lights on*.
*Similarly mentioned in Michael Atkinson’s article ‘Anna Karina and the American Night’ in this months The Believer Magazine.
