Words and meaning in the age of images The relation of cinema and language is uneasy and complex. Those terms are uneasy partners, but collectively they convey much about cinema's relationship with the written word.
Filmmakers agree that words are necessary, praiseworthy, even indispensable.
But motion pictures are . . . The image comes first, or so logic would appear to dictate. In reality, the situation has been considerably more complicated. Avant-gardists like Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton have gone further still, blurring the boundaries between language and image by filling the screen with written words. True, a parallel tradition has pushed language into a subsidiarystatus, raising the danger that visually saturated culture-consumers might let their verbal abilities atrophy.