KvL and some Puppets

(1960)

It seems that Kress and van Leeuwen (KvL) seek to "clobber a few cherished beliefs" - like the verbal text is superior to the visual, and/or that the visual does not impose any limitations on how one reads it as a text.  Instead, they argue that "language and visual communication can both be used to realize the 'same' fundamental systems of meaning" (19).  Similar to as in verbal language, the visual contains structures and combinations of various regularities (i.e. a "grammar" - p20) that may at times remain invisible to the reader, but that still influence and guide the meaningful reading of the visual.

There are lots of different visual modes of conveying meaning.  As KvL point out, "each medium has its own possibilities and limitations of meaning" (19).  An example that came to my mind while reading this passage was Jim Henson's set of innovations that he brought to puppetry.  He got into puppetry not because he liked the artform, but because it was the most immediate way that he could get a job in TV - a medium that he found fascinating.  Once on the job, he saw new possibilities for sign-making in this new visual medium that others before him did not.  Prior to Henson, televised puppetry looked just like that -- a televised production of what was already being done, puppet booth, curtain, and all:

(Kukla, Fran and Ollie c.1954)

 Henson saw that there were many more "semiotic resources available" with this medium, so he made some changes when he started his first show:

(Sam and Friends - "Visual Thinking" 1959)

(I love the content of the particular Sam and Friends clip as it pertains to this discussion - the most famous remnant of that largely forgotten show).  The puppet booth was removed so that the characters could be seen as characters, not as puppets being controlled by people hiding behind a booth.  By removing the frame, Henson infinitely expanded their world, allowing for the inclusion of all sorts of semiotic "stuff" to happen.  


Part of understanding the grammar of visual communication involves recognizing how ideas or "things" are represented through a reproduction of "criterial aspects of the object" (7).  For the small boy that KvL mentioned, it was that "wheelness" was sufficient for "carness."  For Henson, in order to represent "life," the eyes had to appear focused.  Henson and his design team keyed in on that cultural understanding - the eyes are the window to the soul and all - and used it to communicate meaning (as part of what KvL would call the Interpersonal Metafunction).  By making the eyes slightly cross-eyed (their "magic triangle"), they were very conspicuously taking part in sign-making, making it appear that the puppet was focused on a particular point, an action that denotes life.

(Kermit and Henson)

These examples demonstrate that the "old" (?) belief in the supremecy of text is not a viable belief in all circumstances.  Puppetry is a very visual and very meaning-laden enterprise, certainly not merely an illustration of or addendum to verbal text.


I think I could go on for a while with examples from puppetry as it relates to these foundational beginning pages of KvL... but perhaps I'll stop at this for now.