Monoforme

The Monoforme is a concept developed by the Cinéaste Peter Watkins to express the narrative diagram dominating in the current audio-visual production.

Characterization

The characterization of the monoforme can take place on the basis of following element:

a sequence rate/rhythm and repetitive of short sequences which can be schematized in the following way:

|--|-|--|---|-|-|-|--|

where the vertical bars correspond to the cuts carried out at the time of the phase of Montage of film or the documentary one;

the recourse to parallel sequences, without close connection between them, giving the impression to the spectator to pass quickly from the cock to the ass;
the abrupt passage in various plans of prospect: close-up, broad plan, etc
a camera which “whirls” and does not cease being moving thus leaving little place to long fixed plans;
a limited place being granted to the expression of the characters intervening in film or the report;
the massive use, over this flood of images, musics saturated as well as an automatic appeal with many sound effects.

The television news count among the emissions more impressed monoforme. The short plans, composing the reports, can there only have an intermediate duration from three to four seconds.

Incidence on the spectator

Peter Watkins will use the image of a doctor coming to strike of his hammer the knees of tens of spectators, learnedly aligned, in order to obtain, on their premises, the same simultaneous reaction: a strident noise and it is a whole room which is drawn up horrified on its chair.

Combine for these fast sequences, these technical purposes, a very directing narrative diagram, and the spectators will feel all then same feelings - fear, sadness, feeling of justice or injustice - where the interpretation of the spectator could perhaps have been more ambiguous or moderate.

Alternative narrative diagrams

The Watkins way

“the whole without another innovation that a spacing of the reading”

Foreword with a blow of Des.

In film of Peter Watkins on the Common of Paris, one can see the long ones and slow displacements of a camera which goes from group in newsgroup, like as many glances, each time partial, on the historical event. A shore where would come to throw new waves continuously, like as many adventures of the glance, seizing each time a new angle of the situation, each time building a new difference with the preceding glances. Each one of these waves does not have as a claim to reach totality or to carry a truth in oneself. If a direction emerges with the final one, it is accumulation of all these waves, of all these differences which it is born in the spirit from the spectator .

See too

Internal bonds

External bonds

Monoforme on the personal site of Peter Watkins: the French version of these texts was published by the Homnisphères editions in 2004 pennies the title Media Crisis .
Discussion with Peter Watkins on the “Monoforme”

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