ABSTRACT
The plurality of meanings arises from internal dialectics at work within the film, one among which is the dialectical relation between on-screen writing and image, on-screen writing and sound. In their historical development, films began as images accompanied by music and words, and very soon the words entered the space of the screen. Some of the earliest on-screen writing was there simply to identify ownership of the print, rather like contemporary videos, where each copy has a specific number marked on the image track in order to identify pirate copies. Something of the complex and confusing relationship between writing and cinema can be caught in Fiona Banner's artworks, in which she laboriously transcribes the stories of Vietnam movies from screen to paper, stretching out the time of viewing into the far longer time of writing. The question of rhetoric, concerns the relationship between writing and image according to general headings of hierarchy for example, illustration, space and time.
