Visual Argumentation

We all know how to argue with words. It could be argued that argument is the most common form of communication.

Is it possible to make an argument with images so skillfully that the viewer is unaware an argument is even being made?

Yes. The name for visual augmentation in cinema is montage, and it works so well because images in sequence create an uncontestable logic of their own.

Any verbal assertion, no matter how well it is backed by fact and logic, is subject to the contentiousness inherent in language. We can define our terms in opposition, we can interpret "facts" differently, we can twist what others say contrarily as if they were proving our own point.

Images are different. They are even processed separately, in the half brain opposite the verbal half. Images in succession don't follow logic, they create logic by establishing an associative chain that invites careless inference and defies careful analysis. Rebuttal of a montage with words is always a belabored point, and therefore weak. A succession of images goes by fast enough to reach its conclusion before we have time to think verbally about what we are seeing.

We filter words by what we wish to hear. To some degree we filter images by what we want to see, but visual preconceptions are vague and easily superseded by fresh images. With words, to immediately discard what you previously believed in favor of what is now being said, is a sure sign of mental illness. And yet, this is exactly the way we process images, tossing out provisional expectations to make way for current sights. If someone doesn't look as we imagined from previously hearing only their voice, the sight of them is immediately definitive and our expectations are forgotten. Seeing is believing; our visual thinking is structured to alter our beliefs in a blink of a film edit.

We have no visual language to rebut what we see, we can only choose to doubt it or to not see it at all. We cannot readily challenge pictures we view with contrary pictures of our own, and even if we took the trouble, one selective truth told by a camera does not necessarily rebut another selective truth told by another camera. More likely, the audience accepts both as alternate views.

All this is grist for making movies by editing sequences as montages. Using my own terminology, let me distinguish an action montage from an association montage. The difference between the two is not always a sharp boundary, even though they are distinct forms.

An action montage simply jumps from one point of view to another as the action unfolds continuously. The action can be as ordinary as a conversation or as frantic as a high speed car chase. In both cases, the action montage leaps from one camera position to the next as the action maintains space-time continuity. This succession of compositional framings can, in the hands of a master, manipulate the mood of the audience as they experience the scene. Viewed with detachment, an action montage is an argument that the diverse shots pieced together chronicle continuity from multiple vantage points. This contention is, of course, a bald faced lie.

An association montage, what Eisenstein created for his movie Battleship Potemkin when he established the method, shows in succession disparate images that the audience melds into an integral scene. There need not be a sense of jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint, but rather, an impression of connection between what the images show or symbolize. The holistic effect of an association montage is psychological, a cognitive and emotional summation. Again, from a detached perspective, an association montage is an argument that a visual experience consists of many facets with many simultaneous levels of meaning. This contention is in general, true, and in particular, highly subjective.

In summary, visual argumentation gains its force from logic defined on its own terms, through associations created in sequence. It can lie, of course, but perhaps its ultimate power is that the audience knowingly submits to the lie, accepting its influence over them.