earticle

영어

This paper examines three categories of visual information—action, dialogue, and props—through Leaving Las Vegas, which is directed by Mike Figgis and based on the autobiographical story of John O'Brien. Though the two competing story modes of “showing” and “telling” have long discussed in such literary fields as fiction, literary nonfiction, and journalism, with various terms and emphases by critics such as Percy Lubbock, Gerard Genette, Gerard Prince, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, and Wayne Booth, the same subject matter on the “showing” mode may find different terms and emphases in a visual story. In film studies, the delivery of story information based on its formal and cognitive texture is rather taken for granted because a movie is literally a “showing” of a story world, whereas a novel is essentially a “telling.” The delivery of visual information in film studies focuses on the categories of action, character, dialogue, props, and setting, which are roughly tantamount to those of narrative, description, and speech in a verbal story. Leaving Las Vegas is a good example of “showing”-type cinema with carefully regulated expository information. Though often disconnected, incomplete, and fragmentary, the series of props, dialogues, and actions form in the mind of the audience a discernable perspective that approximates the truth of the story world.