Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Schotter, Jesse

Titel

[graphic character omitted] = I: Conrad, Welles, and Narrative Form

Ist Teil von

• Literature film quarterly, 2013, Vol.41 (1), p.29

Ort / Verlag

Salisbury: Salisbury University

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• For Welles takes from Conrad's works not only die structuring use of frame narratives and multiple perspectives, but also Conrad's concern with the relationship among speech, writing, and image, a relationship being transformed in the late nineteenth and early twentiedi century by Welles's own new medium of cinema and new technologies of sound recording.4 The increasingly common understandings of these new media as "hieroglyphic" forms of inscription that blurred die line among the oral, the visual, and the lexical shaped the ways in which Welles, influenced by Conrad, conceived of language and of cinema.5 These technologies threatened to supplant the medium of writing, turning the natural phenomena of sound and images into grooves inscribed in wax or shadows on a screen, forms of "natural" or motivated writing that were frequendy seen as akin to Egyptian hieroglyphs.6 For hieroglyphics had been misconceived for centuries in die West as a mystical language diat represented die "Book of Nature," with a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, between language and physical reality.7 Yet Jean-François Champollion's decipherment had proven that hieroglyphics were not primarily visual, but were largely phonetic.