Texture In Film

Lucy Fife Donaldson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137034786
• eBook ISBN: 9781137034809
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives of art, literature and music, Donaldson develops a stimulating understanding of a concept that has received little detailed attention in relation to film. Based in close analysis, Texture in Film brings discussion of style and affect together in a selection of case studies drawn from American cinema.

1

Introducing Texture in Film

The etymology of ‘texture’ highlights the word’s connection to making and composition, in both literal and figurative senses.¹ In its Latin roots, the literal meaning ‘to weave’ evokes the material construction of fabric, involving interrelationship of warp and weft. Figurative meanings include to devise and to contrive, linking texture to composition in the literary sense: tissue, texture, style. Definitions available in the Oxford English Dictionary expand understanding of texture beyond processes of creation – the weaving of cloth, a web or a narrative² – to a more definite relationship between the nature of a composition (its form or style) and meaning. Texture is a result of contact between warp and weft and the material used, decisions which affect the outcome of cloth in feel and function; thick, thin, fragile, sturdy and so on. This connection is made in relation to material items, the character of fabric as resulting from its making, and immaterial things, nature or quality as resulting from composition, temperament, character. Cathryn Vasseleu observes that ‘texture is at once the cloth, threads, knots, weave, detailed surface, material, matrix and frame’ (1998: 11–12), the implication being that attention to texture comprises fine detail (cloth, threads, knots, detailed surface) and the total composition (material, matrix and frame). At its core, texture offers a way of acknowledging the importance of minute compositional decisions to our responsiveness to a film and how these contribute to its patterns and overall shape.

This chapter will look at the wide-ranging ways in which texture can be understood in analysing and writing about film. First I will draw on the use of texture in other disciplines in order to explore varying ways the concept is understood elsewhere. Texture is more commonly discussed in relation to visual art and design, music and literature than film as a fundamental aspect of form, the combination of small-scale detail which holds the structure together.³ Looking to other disciplines presents an opportunity to focus attention on this wide-ranging and potentially nebulous term, to consider its potential to communicate the feeling of film style and to discuss the detail of film in more concrete terms.

Texture in visual art

In visual art, texture is used to describe the tactile quality of surface and its function, the way it works to relate content and affect. The character of material chosen is functional both in the creation of substance and meaning. Writing on meaning in art, Erwin Panofsky draws attention to the interrelationship between substance and meaning: ‘In a work of art, “form” cannot be divorced from “content”: the distribution of colour and lines, light and shade, volumes and planes, however delightful as a visual spectacle, must also be understood as carrying a more-than-visual meaning’ (1970: 205). Moreover, in the shaping of form, there are certain conventions of texture, so materials are used in certain artistic traditions and for particular affect or meaning. For this reason, the unconventional use of materials, such as the texture created by Cézanne’s ‘spontaneous’ technique,⁴ or even its absence, as in Pop Art, is something to be commented on.⁵ Jodi Cranston notes Leonardo da Vinci’s use of particular materials and how their application diverges from the typical:

Practiced in his early works, finger-painting serves as a transition from a pictorial sensibility rooted in the contour line and a saturation and contrast of colors to create relief (more often practiced in tempura paint) and to one in which shadow and highlight suggest forms through a gradual building up of the surface with an application of glazes (practiced in oil paint).

(2003: 234)

Thinking about texture in art then draws attention to the qualities of form and surface, and to the interrelation of material decisions and their functionality, expression and affect. It also underscores the physicality involved in the production of the art object, as ‘a painting is always subject to the painter’s grasp, at least while being crafted’ (Schiff, 1991: 152). The creation of art is, therefore, a tactile process: ‘the physicality that forms a picture can be contained within the movements of a hand in response to the material substance and the scale of brush, paint, and receptive but also resistant surface’ (Schiff, 1991: 154). Furthermore, it is a tactile process that seeks a tactile response, the artist operating as the mediating touch between receptive surfaces of canvas and viewer.

The importance of the interrelationship of material decisions and affect to expression is underlined by Man Ray who identifies these relationships as bringing together mind and body: ‘Working on a single plane as the instantaneously visualizing factor, [the artist] realizes his mind motives and physical sensations in a permanent and universal language of color, texture and form organization’ (1916, quoted in Antliff, 2001: 89). This comment is striking for his emphasis on the ‘permanent and universal language’, evoking the extent to which texture is internalised, intuitive; something we immediately understand and perhaps take for granted. This is not to say that the meaningfulness of texture is universal, just that responsiveness to it is. Indeed, the differences in cultural and historical meanings, conventions and understandings of texture should be noted.⁶ As an example of the historical shifts in conventions of surface and finish, we might look to the changes wrought by the modernist movement in art and architecture. Victoria Kelley addresses the rejection of ornament by modernists and the shift, led by figures like Le Corbusier, to the flat, unadorned and smooth surface (2013: 15). In doing so, she links the order of the modernist surfaces to the cultural associations of purity and dirt established by Mary Douglas ([1966] 1994) and thereby underlines connections of smooth and shiny with clean and modern, and of rough and dirty with old (2013: 16–17).

Light and illusion

In addressing form and surface, visual art deals with the substance of three-dimensional objects (sculpture) and the conjuring of three-dimensions from two-dimensional surfaces (painting and photography). Clearly the latter’s phenomenal and perspectival dimensional shift has relevance to cinema, an art form which also centres on its power to transform space and which like painting ‘is an art which aims at giving an abiding impression of artistic reality with only two dimensions’ (Berenson, 1896: 4). While sculpture offers real-life substance that can be touched, painting offers the illusion only: ‘Touching a painting [ . . . ] will reveal none of its virtual suggestions of relief and depth, but feeling a sculpture, with its actual projections and recessions, will confirm the verisimilitude of the art’ (Tribolo, quoted in Cranston, 2003: 238). Thus, looking is the route to experiencing the substance of painting, both in its illusion of real shapes and its textured surface. In Schiff’s writing on the haptic qualities invited by Cézanne’s technique, he describes the painter’s employment of distortion as a ‘bump on an otherwise smooth surface, something that breaks the surface and interrupts, even shocks, the eye as it performs its visual scanning’ (1991: 144). Although he is using this textural reference figuratively, it does reveal how surface is perceived in a material way – it ‘shocks’ the eye.

The materiality of looking at art is accommodated by Berenson’s observation that painters give ‘tactile values to retinal impressions’ through suggestions created by form, line, light and shadow (1896). The effects of relief and substance detected here contribute to sensorial connections between looking and touching, especially as they develop the notion of an ‘impression’ as encompassing the abstract (an idea) and the concrete (an indentation). In art, a material detail (form, line, light) bears the trace of a physicalised interaction or exchange: the ‘contact of one material force or substance with another, resulting in a mark’ (Schiff, 1984: 17). The impression created by light is given physicality through its interaction with surfaces to create images. In the same way the impressions made by cinema are given texture by means of the marks made by light: ‘light is conceived as rays or particles which leave their marks or traces upon a surface, whether the photographic film’s chemical coating or the eye’s retina’ (Schiff, 1984: 17). Patrizia Di Bello elaborates on the tactile chain of surfaces in the other direction, between film surface and object: ‘the photograph as a sensitive surface touched by the light that touched the subject’ (2010: 29). So, touch is transferred from real (three-dimensional) surface to real surfaces (film/photograph and eye) via light (an immaterial or imperceptible touch).

Focusing on the two-dimensional surface, another instructive perspective on the role of light in creating or revealing texture can be found in E.H. Gombrich’s discussion of the woodcuts of Baldung Grien:

By lowering the tone of the ground the artist can now use the white of the paper to indicate light. The gain from this modest extension of range is dramatic, for these indications of light not only increase the sense of modelling but also convey to us what we call ‘texture’ – the way, that is, in which light behaves when it strikes a particular surface. It is only in the chiaroscuro version of the woodcut, therefore, that we get the ‘feel’ of the scaly body of the serpent.

([1960] 1962: 38)

Gombrich’s observation is useful to thoughts concerning the affective qualities of cinema, a medium formed by light, for the manner in which he connects the textural interaction of light and surface. Light is what connects the ‘feel’ of what is on-screen and the ‘feeling’ or affect produced by it. Despite the paper, or the cinema screen, being a flat surface, light endows objects on this surface with the illusion of material dimensions.

Evocation of feeling by means of visual illusion or, to put it another way, the association of sight and touch and their sensory mingling, is at the heart of texture’s uniqueness: ‘It is more intimately and dramatically known through the sense of touch, but we also can see texture and thus, indirectly, predict its feel’ (Ocvirk et al., 2002: 135). The feel of an artwork might even come before its appearance, as in the work of textile designer Reiko Sudo: ‘The first image that comes to mind is the feel and touch of the material, its texture. Before considering its use, I always begin with how coarse or smooth it feels. I use my fingertips’ (Millar, 2013: 29). Seeing and feeling are brought together for a viewer of art, as this conjures tactile responsiveness separate from the physical act of touching. Being unable to touch art in museums and galleries habituates this facet of experiencing art.⁷ Of course, different kinds of art evoke differing intensities of tactility. In textiles, we might expect texture to be at the forefront of our experience, and we might be most tempted to stroke or rub the surfaces of sculpture, while painting may or may not invite touch – consider the messy surfaces of Jackson Pollack’s work in comparison to the absence of texture in the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein – and the smooth surfaces of photography can evade it entirely.⁸

Authorial impression: Touch and intention

While sensory expressivity can be linked to the artist’s intentions, as with Man Ray, and tactility with their process, as with Reiko Sudo, texture’s affect can directly evoke the artist, and the material processes of art itself: ‘the texture of sculpture, the working of the rough block, demonstrates not only the art, but also the way in which the art works toward simulating the natural world – that is, the invention and labor involved in the art’ (Cranston, 2003: 237). The linking of artistic labour with touch ensures the artist’s physical presence in the work’s fabric or constitution: the maker’s ‘touch is imprinted within the work’ (Millar, 2013: 28). At the most extreme end of this is textile artist Maxine Bristow’s account of her process: ‘The laborious working of row upon row of stitching, the hand turning of buttonholes and cracking of gesso encrusted cloth, every centimetre of the surface within my work, bears the trace of my own DNA trapped within the fibres of the cloth’ (quoted in Millar, 2013: 28). As well as existing materially within the work’s texture, the artist’s touch can contribute to the tactility of surface, as with the example of Leonardo da Vinci (Cranston, 2003: 234).⁹ In his writing on Cézanne, Schiff posits three aspects the artist’s touch ‘represents’: (1) an authorial effort via the painter’s mark as impression or imprint; (2) a visible trace, the paint mark that reveals the application of a touch; and (3) tactile sensation, experience of painter and viewer in making/seeing the mark. Schiff’s suggestion that ‘in a straightforward way, touches, not vision, make a picture’ interrelates authorship, effort, form, experience and meaning (1991: 135).

Di Bello describes how the touch of the artist was ‘valorized in the nineteenth century as a hallmark of creativity and individuality’ (2010: 9), and then later problematised by the sale of sculpted and photographic reproductions. However Di Bello echoes Schiff’s sense of the tactile exchange between artist/work/viewer in her account of the dynamic between vision (in the sense of sight and of artistry) and touch reconfigured from artist to beholder, as the desire of art-viewer to touch was ‘mobilized to stimulate sale of reproductions’ (2010: 9) and the sensuality of the original transferred to copies. Understandably these perspectives on the role of touch in art raise ontological questions along with those about authorship and artistic vision. The very texture of the work, especially that of its surface or finish, indicates the creativity and labour involved and therefore value in both artistic and monetary terms. Smoothness equates to manufactured and mass-produced object (featuring no authorial mark) whose status as art can be questioned. In contrast, roughness, or what Schiff might refer to as ‘coarse-grained’ resonates as individual and ‘special’, therefore a piece of ‘art’, authenticated by the marks of its author’s creativity and labour. Artistic movements both confirm and trouble these equations. For instance, Marcel Duchamp’s found objects or ‘readymades’ undermine the value of artistic labour, a gesture underlined most dramatically by Fountain (1917), an art piece consisting of a mass-produced urinal on a plinth, the smooth outside of which is defiantly resistant to authorial impression. The absence of texture in Pop Art, is not just a subversion of the conventional use of materials, but also a rejection of the value placed on traditions of artistic skill, especially the visibility of labour and effort.

The links between texture and authenticity/specialness left by the authorial mark is further undermined by Stephen Bann’s examination of an engraving marked by several authors. The relations between intention displayed by an authorial mark (literal or not) and meaning is complicated in a different way, as while the authorial mark indicates labour and creativity, the presence of more than one erodes individuality: ‘in this case, the work is enmeshed in a close texture of relationships which make it virtually impossible to separate out the stake of an individual authorship’ (1996: 93). In this intertwining of impressions, interpretive possibilities are complicated, as the engraving ‘misinterprets’ the original painting and alters its meaning. These complex issues of texture as authorial imprint raise questions about how stylistic intention and its affect can be accounted for in a collaborative medium. Or to put it another way, looking at texture offers a way into thinking further about the many ‘touches’ that make up a film, and thus the collaborative nature of the design of film space (director, cinematographer, production designer and sound designer) or fabrication of narration (director, screenwriter, editor). While theories of authorship seek to underline visual style as important, drawing attention to the mark of the director, it is worth keeping in mind that as a collaborative medium, a film is touched/imprinted by numerous impressions.

Texture as process

Texture is not only the mark left by the artist but also indicative of the process of making. Placing form as the subject, the creative process itself is the figure of attention in certain artistic movements. The Productivist movement draws attention to how things are made using the texture of the artworks themselves, as does Abstract art, exemplified by de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, whose paintings’ dribbled surfaces ‘display traces of [their] processes of making’ (Smith, 1996: 251). Work which foregrounds technique or the mode of artistic production offers another connection between the artist and the viewer, whereby the nature and quality of the artist’s touch dictates the viewer’s experience, their movement put into paint translates to energy and flow on the surface. The surface of a painting has rhythm and movement, showing the eye how to look, as in Cézanne’s technique which ‘concentrated on the movement and rhythms of his hand across the painted surface rather than projecting the passage of his eye from one level of depth to another’ (Schiff, 1991: 159). This example points to the haptic visuality of some forms of visual art as a result of the surface texture precisely directing attention across the surface rather than into the depth of a composition.

Artist’s touch, texture as process, and direction of look comes together in Tactilism, an art movement that centres on touch. As outlined in his manifesto, F.T. Marinetti’s desire was to go beyond artistic impulses to a new discovery of the senses, to ‘achieve tactile harmonies and to contribute indirectly toward the perfection of spiritual communication between human beings, through the epidermis’ ([1972] 2005: 331).¹⁰ Taking texture as the medium of communication, rather than as labour or authenticity, Tactilism directly engages the surfaces of art, artist and observer in its meaning making.

In visual art, textur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Introducing Texture in Film
• 2. Textural Worlds
• 3. Experiencing Space
• 4. Sound
• 5. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index