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Feature: April 3, 1996
Imaging Culture
Computer Tools Let Students "Read" Film and Art as They Would a Novel or Poem By Tom Krattenmaker Now he has a way. Their discussions continued after Levin and Keenan came to Princeton, where they are assistant professors of Germanic literature and English, respectively. The two have developed a technique that enables their students to include moving images and sound in electronic "papers" they prepare and submit for class. Known as Beyond Illustration, it takes advantage of existing technologies of word- and image-processing and a campus network that has every student wired into the same mainframe computer. The professors believe the method is a step forward in what for them is a crusade: They want students to begin to "read" the visual images that surround their lives with the sophistication and critical thinking that have long been applied to the written word. "We live in an image culture," says Keenan. "It's as foolish to protest against this or try to resist it as it would be to fight against writing in the name of spoken dialogue. People, he adds, often assume that images "communicate their meanings instantly and without demanding any interpretive work. Of course, they don't-they're complicated and labor-intensive to analyze. They present a big pedagogical challenge." Reading and grading their students' work with Beyond Illustration has become a multimedia experience for the two professors. Called up on a computer screen, the papers look much like any other text document, with what appear to be still photographs nestled between paragraphs. But with a click of the mouse, these "stills" come to life, with full motion, color, and sound. Roaring Jurassic Park dinosaurs appear on the computer screen, or a segment of network news, or pulsating images of light and dark from a film by French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. To analyze the "quoted" clip, a student clicks on arrows. By so doing, she can run it in slow motion, view it frame by frame, or play it backward, in effect doing what any literary scholar does with a written text. "This allows a kind of analysis that simply wasn't possible before," says Levin. "It's helping me as well as the students. Because I can see exactly what they're writing about now, I'm able to hold them to a much higher standard of critical investigation." If a student claims that Orson Welles is invoking a previous scene by incorporating specific formal devices from the earlier sequence, Levin no longer has to take her word for it. Since students can juxtapose "citations" of the two sequences in their papers, a mere click of the mouse can verify or disprove the substance of the analyses or point out something they might have overlooked. As Keenan puts it, "What Beyond Illustration does is insist that this image culture has to be studied with the same rigor and seriousness as traditional cultural objects. When you're writing about or teaching contemporary culture, you can't just jot down some notes about a film or recall the plot of a television show as if you were at a dinner party. If you're going to study these texts, you have to treat them as the carefully constructed, devious, and seductive rhetorical operations that they are-just like Paradise Lost or The House of Mirth. It would be silly to claim that MTV is the same as Milton, but it's a powerful force, and I see no point in throwing up our hands or trying to keep it at a distance, just when we finally have a chance to understand how it works." Levin and Keenan's multimedia approach is hardly the first attempt to join moving images with written analyses. Since the advent of the VCR, students have been able to hand in citations of moving images on videocassettes with their papers. But Levin and Keenan wanted something more precise, elegant, and user-friendly, something that would allow their students to combine the words and pictures in the same document. One formidable hurdle to any such system is the huge amount of computer memory that moving images require: a typical paper handed in by one of their students would fill 15 high-density disks. Beyond Illustration started with the two professors' successful proposal for a piece of a $200,000 grant received by Princeton from the Connecticut-based Culpeper Foundation, which promotes pedagogical use of digital images. Funds in hand, Keenan, Levin, and Wendy Chun-a graduate student in the English department with extensive computer experience-set out in the summer of 1994 to find an existing product or method that would combine word- and image-processing the way they wanted. They found nothing. Then they realized that all the pieces for their proposed system were at hand, and they just had to find some way of putting them together. The campus computer network could provide the crucial means to transport, store, and link words and pictures. With the help of the university's Office of Computing and Information Technology, they developed the technique and unveiled it that fall-Keenan in his English course, "Postmodernism and Contemporary Culture," and Levin in his freshman seminar, "Cinema and Narration." Students begin their multimedia "papers" by selecting the sequences they want to use from videotapes, laser disks, and other visual media; they can bring their own or borrow from a university collection at the language laboratory in Jones Hall. Next, they use image-processing equipment at the language lab to digitize the sequences, putting them in computer-readable form. Then, using the campus computer network, they transport the images to the university mainframe. As they write their papers in their rooms or at one of the campus computer clusters, they import the visual material from the mainframe and incorporate it into their papers. The papers they turn in are actually folders of electronic files-their essays and the several digitized clips linked to them. Rivka Galchen '98, who wrote several papers using digital images while taking Levin's seminar last fall, found the new method critical for her study of an avant-garde performance group called Emergency Broadcast Network. EBN produces videotape montages exploring social and cultural themes to a hip-hop beat-and often at breakneck speeds. One clip Galchen analyzed sends 45 cuts past the viewer's overwhelmed eyes in a mere five seconds. Bull's-eye targets, lizards, and printed text rush by, and though they leave a subliminal impression, it all happens too fast for much analysis. "Because the images come so rapidly in the EBN video, and because it's so difficult to fully comprehend what is being viewed, it was especially helpful to have software that would allow me to examine a clip shot by shot, in slow motion and at full speed," says Galchen, a prospective chemistry major from Norman, Oklahoma. Another student in the seminar, Palmer Pearsall '98, devoted one of his papers to an analysis of the thematic play of light and dark in Godard's Alphaville. "With this program, one can essentially do in a paper what film teachers love to do in class-that is, play small segments over and over again to demonstrate key features of the text," says Pearsall, of Richmond, Virginia. "This ability to focus on a single shot helps the writer to construct a much tighter and specific thesis." Pearsall found the technique useful, too, in juxtaposing different films to compare and contrast techniques or scenes. The biggest drawback to writing a paper this way, Pearsall notes, is that "you can't take it home to show your friends." Actually that's only partly true, since the text portions can still be printed out or transported on a disk. Moreover, at the end of the semester, all the papers from both professors' classes-visuals included-were downloaded onto a CD-ROM, which, in effect, archived the Beyond Illustration project. Anyone with a CD-ROM drive and a sufficiently powerful computer could show the papers and all the visual citations to their pals, parents, or other professors. However exciting the gadgetry, Keenan and Levin are quick to emphasize a deeper purpose to their efforts-one that goes to the core of a debate over the place of film and popular culture in an Ivy League education. Says Keenan, "We're trying to avoid the 'gee-whiz' attitude about computers and cyberspace. We're simply putting a new tool to use for very classical aims. It's time we finally started reading images as carefully as we read books and poems." Are Emergency Broadcasting Network, Terminator II, or a Pepsi commercial worth the kind of analysis scholars traditionally have given to the likes of Shakespeare and Milton? Only in the last decade, Levin and Keenan assert, have those answering "yes" clearly won the debate. As recently as the late 1980s, cultural conservatives like Hilton Kramer, the editor of The New Criterion and an art critic for The New York Times, were decrying the entry of movies and other forms of popular culture into the curriculum-at the expense, they lamented, of the cherished classic texts. To teach movies at a university, Kramer has written, "is to blur and destroy precisely the kind of distinction-the distinction between high culture and popular culture-that is now one of the functions of a sound liberal education." Yet it need not be such an either-or proposition. "I teach Milton, and Levin teaches Kant," Keenan says, "and we go to work on them with more or less the same presuppositions and methodology as we do with Godard and Peter Jennings." Levin and Keenan have now developed a new course. Conceived by Marvina White, the acting director of the university's writing program, it explores such nontraditional "new media" as CD-ROMs, the Internet, and television. Taught this spring by Keenan as a joint offering of the writing, humanities, and English programs, "The Rhetoric of New Media" examines how information technologies are changing our experience of language, reality, memory, and knowledge. Although classicists might object to such a course in a humanities curriculum, Keenan and Levin believe the importance of new media demands this kind of attention. The two professors have embraced this point of view in their other courses and their research. Keenan explores new media in "Postmodernism and Contemporary Culture," a perennial favorite among undergraduates, and he makes use of Beyond Illustration in his course "The Literature of Witness." Levin teaches film theory as well as seminars on the history of aesthetics and postmodern cultural theory. A new focus of Keenan's research is television coverage of recent "humanitarian" interventions by the United States in Rwanda, Somalia, and Bosnia, a subject that he is currently teaching in a freshman seminar. (See Faculty File, page 7.) He notes the war-as-photo-opportunity quality of the Marines landing at Mogadishu in 1992, when the soldiers were met not by grateful Somalians or hostile enemy fighters but by swarms of reporters and cameramen. "Organizing public opinion has always been important in the conduct of war," Keenan says, "but cameras can be just as powerful a weapon as guns and planes." As for the place of popular culture in the college classroom, Levin notes that professors of art history teach students how to look at a painting in a deeper way: to cull meaning from its formal makeup, the artist's use of paint, and the painting's relationship to other images. He argues that, considering their power to persuade and manipulate, television and movies-whether or not they constitute "great art"-should be viewed with the same sophistication. In the classroom, Levin says, "When you take a group of freshmen and show them how film works-when you slow things down and let them take the film apart-there's a light-bulb moment. They'll tell you they can never look at media the same way again. It's absolutely empowering. It's a revelation to them that they don't have to passively absorb what they are watching. We are teaching people how to see with critical, media-literate eyes." Tom Krattenmaker, a former writer in the Office of Communications, is the director of communications at Swarthmore. |