Verbal Fframe-Advance: Toward a Cinematographic Sentence

Abstract:Eerything here depends on the ways narrative prose can be understood to have its own induced motor functions in matters of pace, juxtaposition, overlap, and recurrence. My goal in moving between media is to locate and specify, in the operations of verbal style, the prose counterpart of cinema's twin frames: the big Frame of the moving screen picture, that is, together (always together) with the little frame of its composite photographic imprints, as those are subject to the traditional understanding of "frame-advance" in the spinning past of the celluloid reel in projection. Movies derive at base from the instantaneous replacement of these so-called photograms—and the continuous rearray of their pixel equivalents since—in generating the actual (if invisible) motion on which pictured movement depends. As with syllabic sequence in syntactic perception, within and across sentences, the two scales of screen "action" are in fact all but simultaneous—and functionally inseparable. Hence my heuristic coinage for the comparable momentum at stake in each "time-based" medium: Fframe-advance.