New Review of Film and Television Studies

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Suggestive verbalizations in film: on character

speech and sensory imagination

Julian Hanich

To cite this article: Julian Hanich (2022) Suggestive verbalizations in film: on character speech
and sensory imagination, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 20:2, 145-168, DOI:
10.1080/17400309.2022.2033067

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NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES
2022, VOL. 20, NO. 2, 145–168
https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2022.2033067

Suggestive verbalizations in film:

on character speech and sensory imagination
Julian Hanich
Department of Arts, Culture and Media, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

ABSTRACT
Against the background of a widespread language skepticism among film theor­
ists and practitioners, this article aims to highlight the evocative potential of
spoken words in cinema. Focusing on an aesthetic device dubbed ‘suggestive
verbalization’, it demonstrates how character speech can powerfully appeal to the
spectator’s sensory imagination: language allows film viewers to imagine – in
various sensory modes – something they do not see or hear. The article sets out to
show that the evocative power of character speech and dialogue is largely
uncharted territory in film studies and then defines the term ‘suggestive verba­
lizations’ more closely. By means of various examples, it subsequently distin­
guishes four types of suggestive verbalization along temporal lines: verbalization-
of-the-past, verbalization-of-the-present, verbalization-of-the-future and verbali­
zation-of-generalities. In the final section, several functions are discussed sugges­
tive verbalizations can have for the aesthetics of a film and the viewer’s
experience. An implicit goal is to contribute to the ongoing work on the poetics
of ‘omission, suggestion and completion’ in the cinema and the phenomenology
of the viewer’s imagination. The article thus supports attempts to define film not
exclusively as a perceptual audiovisual medium but also as a medium that
depends on and, in fact, thrives on the sensory imagination of the viewer.

KEYWORDS Character speech; sensory imagination; messenger report; teichoscopy; film dialogue

I think it’s one of the most important things for a filmmaker:

to use the fantasy of the viewer.
The audience has to make their own pictures,
and whatever I show means diminishing the fantasy of the viewer.
(Michael Haneke)

1. Film is (also) a verbal medium1

After a long and horribly detailed description of how she and her partner
kidnapped, raped and killed a 15-year old girl, the criminal Claudia
Hartmann (Nina Hoss) triumphantly and rather cynically asks the investi­
gators in the Netflix series Criminal: Germany (2019): ‘Zufrieden? Genug

CONTACT Julian Hanich [email protected]

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered,
transformed, or built upon in any way.
146 J. HANICH

Kopfkino?’ The English subtitles render her questions as ‘Satisfied? Enough

of a stroll down memory lane?’ but her reference to a common German
figure of speech literally translates as ‘Enough cinema in your head?’ This is
precisely what speech in cinema can do: It can ‘project’ a second ‘film’ on our
‘mental screen’, and often it is a character who, through spoken words,
creates this ‘cinema in our head’.
Still, the philosopher Stanley Cavell once felt the need to notice, with some
exasperation, that spoken words in film do not get nearly the attention they
deserve from cinema scholars: ‘even those who are willing to believe that the
details of every motion and position of what the camera depicts [. . .] may be
significant in determining what a film is about’, Cavell writes, ‘even among
these people it is hard to believe that the words spoken in the film should be
taken with the same seriousness’ (1981, 11, original emphasis). Indeed: lan­
guage skepticism has a long tradition among film scholars, a tradition that
neither begins with Balázs ([1924/1930] 2010) and Arnheim ([1938] 1957) nor
ends with Kracauer (1960).2 In fact, research on film dialogue and other forms
of spoken words is scarce and – barring exceptions like Sarah Kozloff’s
important work and some scholars following in its wake (Kozloff 2000;
Jaeckle 2013; O’Meara 2018) – language skepticism still holds sway in
Anglophone film studies. Equally important, mainstream practitioners, too,
sneer at those who lend weight to words in films. To cite just one such position:
According to screenwriter William Goldman, in a film ‘you do not tell people
things, you show people things’ (quoted in Kozloff 1988, 13). This ‘Show, Don’t
Tell’ dogma has long been firmly entrenched in screenwriting manuals and
screenplay classes (Remael 1998). In her analysis of screenwriting manuals,
film criticism and theoretical analyses, Kozloff found a number of dogmatic
prescriptions regarding film dialogue, among them ‘Dialogue should never
give information that can be conveyed visually’ (2000, 28).
When films do not exclusively rely on what are considered essentially
cinematic means like montage (Eisenstein) or the photographic revelation of
reality (Kracauer, Bazin), the alarm bells of skeptical theorists, media purists
and dogmatic practitioners go off. For them, film is only cinematic if the
putatively ‘essential’ or ‘unique’ capacities of cinema are employed – other­
wise they are haunted by the specter of the ‘theatrical’ or the ‘literary’. To
mention one prominent example: In his Theory of Film Kracauer unmistak­
ably claims ‘Film is a visual medium’ and ‘significant communications [of
sound films] must originate with their pictures’ (1960, 103). According to
Kracauer, verbal communication shifts the affinity of the medium away from
camera-captured reality to the theater: ‘emphasis on speech [. . .] adds some­
thing new and extremely dangerous’ (104), ‘[it] threatens to drown the
significance of the accompanying pictures, reducing them to shadowy illus­
trations’ (105).
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 147

What this media purism underestimates are the aesthetic possibilities of

spoken words in film. And, particularly important for what I am interested in
here, it ignores the powerful appeal to the spectator’s sensory imagination:
language allows and invites viewers to imagine – in various sensory modes –
something that is not shown or heard.3 This intertwinement of spoken words
and the viewer’s sensory imagination will preoccupy me in the following
pages. As we shall see, there are good reasons to draw more attention to it,
not least because it can have narrative and, more broadly, aesthetic implica­
tions for the poetics of film. But it also allows us to support recent attempts to
define film not exclusively as an audiovisual medium to be perceived but also
as a medium that depends and, in fact, thrives on the sensory imagination of
the viewer (see Hanich 2018b; Cooper 2019).
Take the wonderful scene from Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984) in
which Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) visits his former girlfriend Jane
(Nastassja Kinski) in her peep-show cabin workplace (see Figure 1). He sits
in front of the one-way mirror through which he can see her, but which
doesn’t allow her to see him. He turns away, unable to bear her sight, and
asks her if he may tell her a story. In a quiet voice, Travis slowly recounts the
beautiful past of a couple that turned into a nightmare. Although after the
many intervening years Jane does not recognize his voice, it gradually dawns
on her that the story is their story. The static camera all the while focuses on
either him or her, but never shows a single image from the past. ‘He’d come
home from work and accuse her of spending the day with somebody else.
He’d yell at her, break things in the trailer’, Travis narrates. At some point,
the soundtrack adds quiet Mexican-sounding guitar music, while Travis
continues to characterize the man as jealous and obsessed: ‘He knew she

Figure 1. Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984).

148 J. HANICH

had to be stopped, or she’d leave him forever. So he tied a cowbell to her

ankle, so he could hear it at night if she tried to get out of the bed. But she
learned how to muffle the bell by stuffing a sock into it and inching away out
of the bed and into the night’. Although they had by now conceived a little
boy, the man remains deeply apprehensive. One night he wakes up from
a dream and finds the trailer burning: ‘There were blue flames burning the
sheets of his bed. He ran through the flames toward the only two people he
loved. But they were gone. His arms were burning. And he threw himself
outside, and rolled on the wet ground. Then he ran’.
Here is a second example in which spoken words evocatively refer to
something not shown: the scene from Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946) in
which war crime detective Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) is playing a game of
checkers with the local shop owner Mr. Potter (Billy House) (see Figure 2).
Recurrently looking outside an unseen window to the left of the frame, the two
men comment on the clock of the church tower the suspected Nazi criminal
Charles Rankin (Orson Welles) repairs for the local community. Throughout
the scene, a long-take of more than three minutes, the bell tower stays in off-
screen space. ‘Figure it to tell time rightly?’ Potter asks, while Wilson, like
Rankin an expert on clocks, gazes intently outside. ‘Mm-hmm’, the detective
mumbles. ‘And will the angels circle around the belfry?’ Potter continues. After
having made his next move Potter asks, again looking toward the unseen bell

Figure 2. Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946).

 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 149

tower: ‘Is this a man or a woman angel, Mr. Wilson?’ – ‘I don’t know’. – ‘Well,
reckon it don’t make much a difference amongst angels’. After Potter wins the
game, they start discussing Rankin. Looking again in the direction of the tower,
Potter says: ‘Uh, he generally gets through up there about now’. – ‘Oh, yes.
I know’, Wilson answers, while staring outside. Also looking out the window,
Potter replies: ‘Gets dark earlier these days’.
While we’re at it, let’s take a look at – and listen to – a third example:
a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) (see Figure 3). Here five
gloomy-looking men sit around a table in semi-darkness. Drinking whiskey
and smoking heavily, they discuss a possible raid on a racecourse. Johnny
Clay (Sterling Hayden), the gang’s leader, describes in a quick and insistent
voice details about the security measures and the route of the money trans­
port. The racetrack guards, Clay says, usually come in an armored car: ‘That
car arrives about five o’clock and parks directly in front of the main entrance
to the club house. Two men stay in it: one at the wheel, the other with
a machine gun at the turret. Two others enter the office to collect the dough.
Now, they’re armed, of course, and so are the track detectives who cover
them from the car to the office and back . . . ’.
These three scenes illustrate different shades of an intriguing aesthetic
device I want to call suggestive verbalization. Through vivid and evocative
language, suggestive verbalizations stimulate the viewer to imagine states and

Figure 3. Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956).

150 J. HANICH

actions not shown – scenes that have taken place in the narrative past (Paris,
Texas), are relegated to offscreen space right now (The Stranger) or will
happen in the future (The Killing). With reference to speech-act theory,
Sarah Kozloff has pointed out that film dialogue can function as ‘narrative
events’: ‘Speech-act theory, first promulgated by J. L. Austin and J. R. Searle
in the 1960s, has taught us that all conversation can be thought of as events,
as actions. When one talks, one is doing something – promising, informing,
questioning, threatening, apologizing’ (2000, 41, original emphasis). But
through suggestive language characters can also do something else: they
can evoke a sensory mode of imagination among viewers.
Although suggestive verbalizations can doubtless have this astounding
effect, film scholars have been hesitant to investigate them. Among the few
who have dealt with the aesthetic upshots of extended character speeches is
Michel Chion, who usefully distinguishes between iconogenic narration and
noniconogenetic narration. Iconogenic narration refers to scenes in which the
words of a character ‘cause’, ‘evoke’, ‘suscitate’, or ‘conjure up’ the film’s
visualization (Chion 2009, 396, 397, 399 and 478). Consider the classic case
of a tracking shot closing in on a narrating character followed by a flashback:
The initial verbal description is either doubled by the following images, or
the movie completely switches to the showing mode, silencing the voice of
the character. The term noniconogenic narration, on the other hand,
describes situations in which characters tell a story and only the narrator
and the listener are seen. No visual ‘illustration’ comes into play; the narra­
tive is conveyed only through language (Chion 2009, 481). Chion uses the
erotic character speech from Ingmar Berman’s Persona (1966) as an illustra­
tion, but also mentions a number of other films in which characters talk
explicitly about sex that remains unshown, such as Carnal Knowledge (Mike
Nichols, 1971) or The Decline of the American Empire (Denys Arcand, 1985).
Importantly, for Chion (2009, 401), noniconogenic narration is accompanied
by the viewer’s individual imaginings. This makes the proximity to the
concept of ‘suggestive verbalization’ particularly evident. Nevertheless,
Chion’s term is restricted to narration, whereby vivid and lively description
threatens to be lost out of sight. My concept, in turn, not only encompasses
narration but also includes descriptive passages of objects or states.4 What is
more, the normative emphasis that comes with the adjective noniconogenic
seems problematic: Since Chion uses the negative prefix ‘non’, he deliberately
or unwittingly sets visualizing narration as the norm and thus devalues the
verbalizing mode. ‘Suggestive verbalization’ therefore seems more encom­
passing and less normative to me.5
Another scholar who has devoted attention to evocative character speech
is David Bordwell. However, in his short essay tellingly titled ‘Tell, Don’t
Show’ (2010) Bordwell exclusively focuses on long verbal accounts of the
past.6 The phenomenon is broader, though, and to show this (or should I say
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 151

tell it?), I will ask the reader to accompany me into new territory. First, I will
define more concretely what I mean by suggestive verbalization. Afterwards
I will, by means of examples, go through a series of four types of suggestive
verbalization. In the final section, I will not fail to discuss important func­
tions this aesthetic device can have for film aesthetics and the viewer’s
experience.
That my discussion focuses on narrative films depicting fictional worlds
does not mean suggestive verbalizations do not play an important role in
other cinematic modes. We can certainly find instances of suggestive verba­
lizations in experimental cinema – just think of the many evocative narra­
tions and descriptions in Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993). Likewise, in
documentary films their importance can hardly be overestimated. This is
true, no doubt, for pragmatic reasons. Since the camera often cannot have
witnessed the decisive event, it has to be presented through verbalized
memories and testimonies. Recent examples include the detailed and many-
voiced memory reconstructions of true crime cases in American documen­
taries such as Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003), Dear Zachary
(Kurt Kuenne, 2008), or Restrepo (Tim Hetherington/Sebastian Junger,
2010).7 But it is also true for ethical reasons, as some events simply must
not be shown or re-enacted. For good reason Claude Lanzmann constructed
Shoah (1985) out of linguistically conveyed memories.

2. Defining suggestive verbalizations

Through the vivid and evocative language of suggestive verbalizations, the
viewer is invited, challenged and occasionally even forced to imagine some­
thing in visual and other sensory ways that is audiovisually not present. In
order to evoke linguistically what is not presented audiovisually, all forms of
language in the cinema come into question: character speech, voice-over
narration, inserts, diegetic documents such as letters, newspapers or books,
subtitles, a silent cinema narrator standing next to the screen in the movie
theater, etc. Film-historical changes are obvious here: While language in
silent films was used suggestively via subtitles or a narrator, the sound film
featured voice-over narration that reached a climax in American cinema of
the 1940s (see Kozloff 1988). The most widespread use of suggestive language
occurs in character speech and dialogue – and it is on them that I will
concentrate. Usually the character can be seen, but sometimes he or she
can also be heard from outside the frame as a voice-off. In addition, a single
character can monologize, but in other cases several characters alternate in
narrating or describing. If several characters are involved, they stimulate the
viewer’s imagination either through a montage of monologues, as in the
aforementioned multi-voiced memory reconstructions in documentary
films, or through dialogues.
152 J. HANICH

Just as a film sometimes smoothly changes – or abruptly jumps – from

narrative to spectacle (Laura Mulvey), from absorption to theatricality
(Michael Fried), from a voyeuristic to an exhibitionist mode (Tom
Gunning), it temporarily alters the register in moments of suggestive verba­
lization. Or maybe better: the film shifts its emphasis and switches from
audiovisual presentation to linguistic evocation, from showing to telling,
from direct visualization to indirect-visualizing. Obviously, a film never
gives up its presentation mode entirely (even a blank screen would be
a form of visual presentation), and the interplay between audiovisual pre­
sentation and linguistic evocation can have mutual feedback effects. On the
one hand, the images, sounds and music accompanying a suggestive verba­
lization may influence its degree of evocativeness and even the sensory mode
of imagining (be it visual, aural, tactile, olfactory etc.). As Kozloff (2000, 90)
puts it, ‘words in a script become transfigured when they are spoken by an
actor, filmed by the camera, edited together, underscored with music’. On the
other hand, a suggestive verbalization will likely influence how we perceive
what is shown on the screen, not least because the viewer’s act of imagining
takes up cognitive resources and may lead to a backgrounding of the act of
perceiving, a point I will come back to presently.
Furthermore, there are clear differences in how long a suggestive verbali­
zation lasts. On the one hand, we find shifts of register that remain in place
for long stretches of screen time: for instance, the sexually explicit verbaliza­
tion at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) takes almost
nine minutes. Here the unhappily married Corinne (Mireille Darc), sitting
half-naked on the desk of her psychoanalyst and lover, describes in detail
a wild erotic experience she had with the newly married couple Paul and
Monique a few days earlier. On the other hand, suggestive verbalizations
often conjure up the unshown only briefly in the viewer’s imagination.
Consider a scene from David Fincher’s Se7en (1995), in which Detective
Mills (Brad Pitt) finds a bucket at the crime scene of the first serial killer
victim. He leans over it, lights it with his flashlight and suggests with his
disgusted exclamation what the film visually withholds from us: ‘Fucking
vomit!’ In conjunction with his disgusted reaction Mills’s short exclamation,
a brief description of what he sees, allows us to imagine in a sensory way what
the film does not show.
This also implies that in moments of suggestive verbalization the viewer’s
own activity switches in a decisive way. The activity of perceiving the film via
the senses of seeing and hearing loses its dominance and creates space for
visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, haptic and other sensory forms of
imagining. I say ‘dominance’, because the viewer is imaginatively involved
in moments of perception, just as he or she also remains perceptually active
in moments of imagination. What shifts is merely the focus. In short, the
spectator enriches his or her perception-dominated experience of the
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 153

audiovisual medium film through a – however vivid – imagination-oriented

experience by mentally seeing, hearing, smelling, touching etc. Since sugges­
tive verbalizations are often momentary and fleeting, the concurrent act of
imagining can remain unnoticed by the radar of reflective consciousness,
even though it leaves a mark on a pre-reflective, implicit level of conscious­
ness. In other words: During the film we usually do not reflect on the fact that
we have imagined, but afterwards we would be able to tell someone that we
have imagined something during a given scene and how – for instance, how
we have mentally visualized the revolting insides of the bucket in Se7en.
The term suggestive verbalization combines two crucial components. First,
the word verbalization refers to language as a central element, for there are
suggestive evocations without language, like the sounds of a galloping horse in
offscreen space or the chiming of Big Ben. In fact, all clearly and irrefutably
identified sounds whose source remains unseen – Chion speaks of immediately
recognisable sounds (2016, 114) – such as trains, police sirens, rain drops, foot­
steps, slammed doors etc. would qualify here. As mentioned above, suggestive
verbalizations do not only comprise the verbal narration of events and actions
but also the description of states and objects. For instance, in Ingmar Bergman’s
Vargtimmen/The Hour of the Wolf (1968), Mrs. von Merkens (Gudrun Brost)
asks artist Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) to help her remove her stockings. With
the inviting remark to look at her feet she directs the viewer’s attention to
something remaining outside the frame in the lower part of offscreen space,
while vividly describing their shape and beauty. This description does not meet
any of the minimum requirements we would expect of a narration.
Second, the adjective suggestive indicates an imagination effect and thus
brings into play the addressee of the suggestion: the spectator. The qualifying
addition suggestive is crucial because language does not necessarily put the
viewer in the mode of imagining; when films use language in a commenting,
argumentative or negotiating way, the suggestive dimension may be missing
entirely. The extent to which film addresses the viewer’s sensory imagination
therefore does not depend on the sheer quantity of what is being said – it’s
partly a question of its vividness and evocativeness. To put it in the language
of classical rhetoric: it’s a matter of enérgeia and enárgeia (or evidentia). The
term enérgeia refers to a dynamic style of animation and movement: The
absent is suggestively presentified through an energetic and vitalized lan­
guage. The term enárgeia, on the other hand, refers to a vivid and detailed
style: The absent is made manifest by a clear and detailed description.8 Both
cases involve techniques of ‘putting something before one’s eyes’. Naturally,
depending on the degree of suggestiveness, different intensities of sensory
imagination are to be expected.
For an example, let’s take a brief look at the mysterious dream Sheriff Bell
(Tommy Lee Jones) describes, with a strong accent, at the end of No Country
for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007): ‘I was on horseback goin’ through
154 J. HANICH

the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was
cold and there was snow on the ground and [my father] rode past me and
kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past . . . and he had
his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past
I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see
the horn from the light inside of it.’
Bell’s description contains a number of elements typical of the style of
Cormac McCarthy, whose novel the Coen Brothers adapt: the warmth-
coldness contrast of a winter mountain pass and a warming blanket wrapped
around his father or the light-dark contrast of the nocturnal landscape and
the snow. More importantly, almost every sentence contains verbs of move­
ment (four times ‘going’, three times ‘riding’). They lend the story
a particular liveliness. And finally, with the contrast of a moving light source
against the dark background of the night an element emerges that philoso­
pher Elaine Scarry (1999, 89) calls ‘radiant ignition’ and which she considers
to be particularly conducive to imagining movement: ‘What is extraordinary
about radiant ignition is the ease with which a point of light can be moved in
one’s mind, and the fact that by pairing this easily moved object with a solid
object – a person or a horse say – we are able to move the latter mentally’.
The sheriff’s dream can be vividly imagined based on the precise portrayal of
light, movement and cold.9
But the degree of suggestiveness also depends on various facets of the
actor’s performance and his or her voice. Think of the speed and clarity of
articulation, but also how strongly the acting itself is foregrounded: an actor
who rushes lines, an actress who mumbles almost incomprehensibly,
a performer who overacts – all can interfere with imagining. The more the
content of what is verbalized and must be imagined recedes, the less sugges­
tive the verbalization will be. With regard to comparable cases in theater,
Collins (1991, 2) notes: ‘perceptual and verbal data both lay claim to visual­
ity: what we see on stage and what actors’ words evoke in our minds compete
for visual attention. They are not merely concurrent; they are
counteractive.’10 This is why a film often tempers its audiovisual showing
mode when it changes into the linguistic mode, thus enabling the viewer to
imagine more easily the absent in a sensory way. On the level of perception,
against the background of the rarefied image the figure can stand out on the
imaginary plane as a Gestalt.
In addition, to be suggestively effective, what is narrated or described must
not be seen simultaneously as a film image or in the film image. The object
mentally visualized by the spectator should remain a visual spot of indeter­
minacy (to borrow Roman Ingarden’s term), which is only substantiated by
the supplementary activity of the spectator. If the film provides the viewer
with illustrative images, they may hinder the act of imagining or even block
it. This is because we cannot perceive one and the same intentional object and
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 155

imagine it at the same time, as philosophers like Wittgenstein or Sartre have

pointed out.11 However, it should be stressed that in principle the range of
potential imaginings evoked by suggestive verbalizations is identical to the
range elicited by ordinary verbalizations outside of film contexts. The words
uttered in a film are thus not distinctive in their imagination-eliciting
capacity compared to ordinary verbalization.
This, in turn, implies (and this is where media purists like Kracauer get
particularly nervous): suggestive verbalizations are not unique to film.
Although film can put a different emphasis on them through close-ups,
zooms, particular types of voice recording, acting styles, music or other
stylistic devices, they are transmedial and can be found in all kinds of
media in which language plays an aesthetic role. In fact, they are as old as
Western literature. Just think of the messenger reports in dramas like
Aeschylus’ The Persians or Euripides’ Medea (see, for instance, Zeppezauer
2011). Or consider the role that teichoscopies play in Homer’s Iliad and later
in ancient drama. Both the messenger report and the teichoscopy are forms
of suggestive verbalization. However, this transmedial dissemination has not
been acknowledged appropriately: Neither are film scholars keen on empha­
sizing the connection to literature and theater, nor do theater scholars always
succeed in viewing over the walls of their own discipline. Theater scholar
Peter Eversmann (2005), for one, writes in an essay on messenger reports
and teichoscopies: ‘in the . . . novel and in the film we do not find these kind
of stories. . . . not even with film adaptations of theatre plays’. As I will show
in the following section, messenger reports and teichoscopies certainly do
appear in film, and particularly the former occur much more frequently than
acknowledged.

3. Four types of suggestive verbalization

Now, if we scan the various instances of suggestive verbalization, what might
be useful distinctions? I propose to differentiate suggestive verbalizations by
their temporal reference and to divide them into four types. The crucial
question is: Does the suggestive verbalization refer to something already
past, simultaneously happening, lying in the future, or something ‘super-
temporal’ that either persists in a stable state or returns regularly? The main
reason for this distinction is that it allows me to relate suggestive verbaliza­
tions to the two aforementioned categories from drama theory which also
differ according to their temporal reference: While the messenger report
alludes to an action or a state of affairs from the past, the teichoscopy
presentifies a concurrent event or condition. To be sure, other forms of
categorization could have been imaginable – for instance, according to the
various sensory modalities evoked. Nevertheless, I have settled for these four
types to make both the historical roots and the transmedial character of
156 J. HANICH

suggestive verbalizations more recognizable. As we shall see in the final

section, suggestive verbalizations share some of the pragmatic, narrative
and aesthetic functions with messenger reports and teichoscopies. And
although this is not something I will pursue here, it opens the possibility to
compare differences between evocative character speeches across media.

3.1. Verbalization-of-the-past: imagining what has been

In the first category the time vector points back to the past: here the state
described or the action narrated is already complete. Think of confessions,
testimonies, self-revelations, stories, dream portrayals or actual messenger
reports. The character or narrator must not necessarily have witnessed the
past him- or herself, but can recount something he or she has been told or
has found out by investigative means. The commissioner at the end of
a whodunit or the lawyer in the final plea of a courtroom drama would be
cases in point. The suggestive verbalization answers the question: how was it?
Consequently, its dominant grammatical time form is the imperfect or
perfect.
Of the four major forms, the verbalization-of-the-past seems the most
widely used, and many of the examples mentioned so far – from
Criminal: Germany and Paris, Texas to Weekend and No Country for
Old Men – fall into this category. Past verbalizations usually have
a narrative rather than a descriptive character. The figure can assume
a witness position and report what he or she has observed. An example
would be the harrowing account of the nurse Pat Archer (Cara Seymour)
in Hotel Rwanda (Terry George, 2004), in which she reports on atrocities
she was forced to observe in the Rwandan civil war. But often characters
also report what has happened to them personally. Consider the extensive
description that Signora Vaccari (Hélene Surgère) recounts of her deflora­
tion in Pasolini’s Salò (1975) or the sobering scene from Peter
Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) in
which Georgina Spica (Helen Mirren) tells how she was beaten, humi­
liated, and sexually abused by her husband.

3.2. Verbalization-of-the-present: imagining what is important right

now
The second type refers to events not shown that take place concurrently or
unseen objects and states that are important at this moment. The verbaliza­
tion gives an answer to the question: how is something right now? The
temporal vector refers to the diegetic present; the grammatical tense is the
present. Verbalizations-of-the-present often remain brief; examples
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 157

comparable to the long monologues in some verbalizations-of-the-past are

rare. But this does not mean that they cannot have a vivid effect. Especially
horror movies make affective use of it.12
In most verbalizations-of-the-present, the things or events not shown are
located in offscreen space. In a much-cited essay, Burch (1981) points out
altogether six ways how filmmakers can bring offscreen space into play: from
characters or objects entering or stepping out of the image to camera move­
ments that inevitably bring something from offscreen space into the frame
and at the same time relegate previously seen elements into the off.
Interestingly, Burch forgets to mention character speech that narrates or
describes – much like in a classical teichoscopy – what currently lies in off-
screen space and that viewers therefore have to imagine.
To be sure, teichoscopies in the true sense of the word – ‘viewing from
the walls’ – are comparatively rare in film. Apart from the example from
Welles’s The Stranger mentioned at the beginning, we come across tei­
choscopies in Josef von Baky’s Münchhausen (1943), Duck Soup (1933) by
the Marx Brothers, Nicht versöhnt oder Es hilft nur Gewalt, wo Gewalt
herrscht/Not Reconciled (1965) by Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet, Jim
Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), Roy Andersson’s Sånger från andra
Våningen/Songs from the Second Floor (2000) or an episode of the ani­
mated television series South Park (2005, season 9, episode 4), to which
I will come back below. Less literal forms of teichoscopy include narra­
tions of actions that are blocked or descriptions of objects seen from the
backside. Here we could think of descriptions of unseen paintings or
photographs in Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla (2008), Fallen Angels (1995) by
Wong Kar-Wai, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991),
Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf, Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember
(1957) or the Henry James adaptation The Innocents (1961, director: Jack
Clayton).
In most of the examples mentioned so far, we are dealing with forms of
offscreen space in which something is either hidden inside the frame, is
adjacent to the image field or could be found at least in its environment.
But there are also cases in which things or events in distant spaces are
illustrated by characters speaking to us from far-away places. These include
telephone conversation partners or radio messaging transmitters, who verb­
ally clarify absent states or events and who are themselves visually absent.
Think about the radio reportage in the famous final sequence from Rainer
Werner Fassbinder’s Die Ehe der Maria Braun/The Marriage of Maria Braun
(1979), in which Herbert Zimmermann’s live reportage of the 1954 World
Cup final between Germany and Hungary is heard in the background for
about ten minutes. Here a voice whose source lies in what I call the ‘medial
off’ recounts or describes an event or condition that also lies in off-screen
space. Thus, we are dealing with a double visual absence here: neither the
158 J. HANICH

verbalizing character nor the event or object are visibly present in the
image.13 These cases show us that the classical concept of teichoscopy is
too narrowly construed for our purposes.
This becomes even more evident when we think of verbalizations-of-the
present that bring into play intangible and imaginary spaces. An effective
case can be found in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) when the
clairvoyant ‘precog’ Agatha (Samantha Morton) describes to John Anderton
(Tom Cruise) for almost two minutes a vision of his deceased son: ‘He’s on
the beach now, a toe in the water. He’s asking you to come in with him. He’s
been racing his mother up and down the sand . . . ’. Here we are dealing with
the metaphysical realm outside the image that Gilles Deleuze has called the
‘absolute off’ to demarcate it from the more conventional ‘relative off’. For
Deleuze the absolute off is a radical elsewhere, beyond homogeneous space
and time, with which the spiritual comes into play and which therefore no
longer belongs to the realm of the visible (1986, 17).14 Thus comparable to
verbalizations of past dreams, in verbalizations-of-the-present the ontologi­
cal status of what is currently not shown is not decisive: what is absent
onscreen can comprise things hidden in offscreen space that actually exist
within the diegesis; but it can also refer to the content of immaterial visions,
daydreams, hallucinations or drugged perceptions that a character is then
experiencing and describing.

3.3. Verbalization-of-the-future: imagining plans and prophecies

The third type of suggestive verbalization points to the future and leads the
viewer to imagine something that is expected to come, regardless of whether
this actually happens later in the film or not. Here we can think of plans,
intentions, visions, prophecies and threats. Also, in commands, orders and
demands, the time vector points to what might be coming, and they, too, may
hold the future vividly ‘before our eyes’. In these cases, the suggestive
verbalization answers the question: how will (or could) it be later?
Grammatically the future tense predominates. In drama theory, there is no
term for character speeches directed to the future comparable to messenger
report and teichoscopy, but they can certainly play a vivid role in films.15
For example, at the beginning of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987),
Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) spews out drastic exclamations of violent
or scatological content.16 At one point the drill instructor yells at a GI: ‘You
had best unfuck yourself or I will unscrew your head and shit down your
neck!’ Or: ‘I will gouge out your eyeballs and skull-fuck you!’ More extended
examples are the motivational speeches Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) gives to his
Jewish American guerilla troupe in Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino,
2009) and General George S. Patton (George C. Scott) addresses to an
invisible audience of soldiers at the beginning of Patton (Franklin
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 159

J. Schaffner, 1970). The latter, which is peppered with drastic and suggestive
passages, points to both the near future of the struggles against the Nazis in
Europe and the distant future in which the soldiers will look back on the
battles of World War II: ‘We’re not just going to shoot the bastards. We’re
going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our
tanks. . . . Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside
with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you, “What did you do in the
great World War II?” – you won’t have to say, “Well, I shoveled shit in
Louisiana”’.

3.4. Verbalization-of-generalities: imagining the universal and the

recurrent
While the time vectors of the three preceding categories point in a specific
temporal direction, this is different in the less frequent verbalizations-of-
generalities. In this case the temporal reference is either switched to
a permanent state, or the vector refers to recurring points in time. It is
not important for the audience to imagine how it once was, how it is right
now or how it will be at some point. Rather, the viewer is called to
imagine something general, either because it is permanently like this or
because it recurs. Hence what is said does not evoke the particular but
what is universally valid, not the special case but what is recurrent, not
the token but the type. The suggestive verbalization answers the question:
How is it in general or again and again? Sometimes it is above all the
context that determines whether a character speech is to be categorized as
a verbalization-of-generalities. Consider a character who vividly describes
an oak tree. This character can refer to the oak as a type: What do oak
trees typically look like? But he could also describe a specific oak in
offscreen space as a token: What does this particular oak tree look like
right now? In the latter case we would deal with a verbalization-of-the-
present.
One might think that verbalizations of something general or regular could
hardly be suggestive. The following brief examples refute this. In Se7en, Wild
Bill (Martin Serene), the owner of an S/M store, says of his client John Doe
(Kevin Spacey), ‘I thought he was one of them performance artists, that’s
what I thought. You know the sort of guy who pisses in a cup onstage and,
uh, and then drinks it. Performance art’. Wild Bill does not refer to a concrete
performance artist. Rather, he puts John Doe in the category of performance
art and explains what he thinks is typical for it. Similarly, in Meet John Doe
(Frank Capra, 1941), Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper), in his long
populist radio address, describes in alternate degrees of vividness and liveli­
ness the characteristics of the average American: ‘He’s inherently honest, but
he’s got a streak of larceny in his heart. He seldom walks up to a public
160 J. HANICH

telephone without shoving his finger into the slot to see if somebody left
a nickel there. He’s the man the ads are written for. He’s the fella everybody
sells things to’.

4. Functions
At the end, I would like to mention at least some of the functions we can
ascribe to suggestive verbalizations, functions that go beyond what Sarah
Kozloff discusses with regard to film dialogue more generally (see chapter 1
in Kozloff 2000). This discussion seems necessary because a die-hard fol­
lower of the ‘show, don’t tell’ dictum might still object: Why not show
everything directly? Why resort to suggestive language, when the film
could show it in a vivid way?
First of all, there are a number of pragmatic reasons (see Hanich 2010,
111/112). These can have a political-legal background: Where the explicit
representation of violence or sexuality is taboo or even legally prohibited,
suggestive verbalizations can ask viewers to imagine the forbidden.
Moreover, economic reasons can play a role: By not directly showing states,
objects, acts or events but indirectly illustrating them, the filmmakers can
address a larger audience which would otherwise be limited by censorship or
age restrictions. In addition to the higher revenues thus obtained, the very
economic and technical reasons apply which gave the messenger report and
the teichoscopy an important role in ancient theater: Shifting to language
makes it easy to visualize things that are either costly or require substantial
technical effort – battles with numerous extras, natural disasters with high
amounts of CGI wizardry, war scenes with challenging stunts, etc. (on the
‘talk is cheap’ slogan in US independent cinema, see O’Meara 2018).
Aesthetic intentions often play a crucial role as well. For one, suggestive
verbalizations allow one to keep the tempo high: ‘The adage attributed
apocryphally to Hitchcock, that you should never use dialogue when you
can show it in pictures, is often reversed in the genre film – even in
Hitchcock’s films. Whenever it takes too long to show it, say it instead’,
Thomas Sobchack points out (2003, 107). Moreover, suggestive verbaliza­
tions allow for a unity of space and time. Referring to Alma’s highly erotic
verbalization of the past in Persona, Bordwell (2010) notes: ‘by presenting
this monologue wholly in the present, Bergman gives us two layers of action
simultaneously, a charged sex scene and its long-range emotional conse­
quences. But there’s more. Had he given us flashbacks, he could not preserve
the flow of the present-time action. The staging and cutting during Alma’s
confession use simple film techniques, but they add another layer to the
scene’. This simultaneity of two actions can create interesting tensions:
between the narrowness of the diegetic space in a room where the past is
recounted and the expansiveness of the imagined scenery at a beach (as in
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 161

Persona), between the static now and the kinetic turbulences of the verba­
lized future (as in Patton), between the frugal now and the erotic then (as in
Weekend) etc.
In addition to these synchronic discrepancies, suggestive verbalizations
also allow the use of diachronic contradictions – that is, fruitful discrepancies
between what came first and what follows. A preceding suggestive account
can later turn out to be wrong because of a single unreliable character. Take
the scene in Game of Thrones (2011, season 1, episode 2) in which the evil
queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Heady) recounts the death of her son while
standing at the bed of little Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright), whose
coma and potential death she is partly responsible for. She had urged her
brother Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) to throw Bran from
a tower when he had caught them red-handed in an act of incestuous
intercourse. Bran’s mother Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley) listens intently
to Cersei’s story, not knowing that Cersei may not tell the truth. Here the
verbalization-of-the-past avoids lending too much objectivity to Cersei’s
potentially made-up story. Had the film shown what happened in
a flashback, we could assume Cersei tells the truth. Because of the reliance
on a suggestive verbalization the past can remain ambiguous. Should the
story turn out to be wrong later into the series, it would not be the narration
as a whole that is considered unreliable but only the character.
Moreover, when viewers are forced to acknowledge that how they had
sensorily imagined a specific scene turns out to be wrong, an effect of
irritation, surprise or frustration can arise. Even comic effects are conceivable
if the film first suggestively verbalizes the present, but a little later offers
illustrative images that conflict with the viewer’s mental visualizations. In the
episode from South Park mentioned above, the Archangel Michael stands on
the walls of the Celestial fortress and describes, much like a sports reporter,
the ultimate battle between the divine legions and Satan’s hellish army (see
Figure 4): ‘My god, this battle is epic! . . . Oh, they’re bringing in their demon
dragons. Look at the size of them! My god, this is even bigger than the final
battle in the Lord of the Rings movie. It’s like ten times bigger than that
battle’. During the teichoscopic verbalization the battle cannot be seen. But
a short time later, after the Archangel has declared the forces of heaven
victorious, we see the battlefield: There are only seven angels and a few small
pools of blood.
Conversely, a subsequent report can prove to be wrong in an effective way
if it runs counter to what has been shown before. For one, in Ingmar
Bergman’s Tysnaden/The Silence (1963) Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) describes
to her ill sister Ester (Ingrid Thulin) an event in a variety theater previously
shown in the film. However, her report and how we imagine it is only half in
line with what we could previously see. The second half of her narrative
deviates clearly: While Anna had fled in shock from the theater after
162 J. HANICH

Figure 4. South Park (2005, season 9, episode 4).

watching a couple having sex, she now claims that a man had come to her in
the box and had sex with her on the floor. This narrative construction gives
the viewer an advantage over Ester, because the information surplus makes
Anna’s sadism more graspable. Anna tells the story to shock and repudiate
Ester, because Anna cannot handle the fact that her sister is in love with her.
These are only some of the many functions suggestive verbalizations can
have on the narrative level in the narrower sense. However, with reference to
the media-theoretical reflections of Walter Ong and Mary Ann Doane’s
Lacanian interpretation of the pleasure of hearing, Kozloff (1988, 128) has
also emphasized a particular impact of the character’s (and actor’s) voice:
‘There seems to be widespread agreement about the voice’s power to create
a feeling of connection and intimacy’. This touches upon the manifold effects
suggestive verbalizations can have on the level of the characters. Even more so
than audiovisual ‘illustrations’ of events and states, suggestive verbalizations
can produce closeness and attachment – as well as distance and aversion – to
the characters through voice and extended close-ups. They therefore play an
important role in terms of focalization (alignment) and taking sides for or
against characters (allegiance).17 For example, suggestive verbalizations often
include moments that social psychologists call ‘social sharing of emotion’:
those who reveal intimate emotional states create a stronger connection with
the public and tend to be liked more than others (Rimé 2009, 73). In
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 163

addition, if a character tells or describes something verbally the content can

be more easily influenced by his or her subjective psychological state; it can
contain comments, evaluations, opinions and wishes, something more diffi­
cult to achieve were the film to show the content directly. And of course, the
voice not only transmits semantic content but also emotions and affects: the
anxious whisper of the threatened, the heavy breathing speech of the agi­
tated, or the confused stuttering of the embarrassed. As the phenomenologist
Bernhard Waldenfels writes: ‘The voice appears as something in which the
psyche of a living being expresses itself, while noises and sounds are generated
by mere force’ (2010, 180, my translation).
In addition, suggestive verbalizations often allow a view of the speaker and
the addressee. Thus, they can make possible a high degree of emotional
ambiguity. Just think of the detailed description of a nightmare in Eyes
Wide Shut: We can see both the highly emotionalized Alice Harford
(Nicole Kidman) recounting an erotic dream in which she cheated on her
husband Bill (Tom Cruise) and his irritated, even shaken reactions (see
Figure 5). By bringing together verbalizing and reacting characters in one
shot, or at least one scene, contradictory tendencies clash: Alice’s fears and
guilt, on the one hand; Bill’s jealousy and agonizing, on the other. In both
cases, we get important information about the characters that are critical to
our empathizing. Additionally, in Bill’s case we even see him imagining
Alice’s nightmare, which might lead to a rapprochement between character
and spectator activity.
Suggestive verbalizations can also have a concentration effect on viewers –
in the best case, they focus attention. Chion (2009, 401/402) points this out in
his discussion of noniconogenic narration:a

Figure 5. Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

164 J. HANICH

It has long been evident for the sound film that . . . with noniconogenic
narration, something important is at stake. It gives a particular density and
gravity to what is spoken; it creates a specific real time, that of the storytelling
accompanied only by our own individual mental imagery. . . . In each case the
absence of visualization of what the character recounts focuses our attention as
if to say, ‘Get serious, listen up, you have to remember this’; it’s as though the
cinema were laying itself bare and saying, ‘This is all you get, words with the
image of the person saying them, believe them or not.’

By switching to the linguistic register, the film emphasizes what is not shown,
thereby giving it special weight. This is particularly true in cases of extensive
suggestive verbalizations: the longer the verbalization proceeds without
illustrative images, the more it contradicts the expectation of the audience,
at least in mainstream film. Thus, there is a formal foregrounding in the sense
of the Russian formalists.
Incidentally, an additional effect of suggestive verbalizations is revealed
when we consider the phenomenological differences between the acts of
perceiving and imagining. What is verbally suggested by the film and senso­
rily imagined by myself feels, in a certain way, ‘closer’ to me than what the
film audiovisually shows and what I perceive as ‘outside’ of me on the screen.
In other words, when I watch a scene that the film shows directly, I always
experience it as there on the screen, even in moments of strong immersion;
instead, when I imagine the scene that is verbally suggested, it does not lie
somewhere outside of me and cannot be localized in an external filmic world,
but is experienced as a ‘cinema in our head’ on our ‘mental screen’.
Moreover, suggestive verbalizations give me the opportunity to concretize
what is only alluded to with my own imaginings and memories, which in
turn can result in a greater phenomenological closeness to the film. Thus,
potentially not only the degree of attention, but also the degree of mineness
increases (Hanich 2018a, 436–439).
This leads us to yet another important aesthetic effect: If suggestive
verbalizations stimulate us to imagine sensorily, indeed force us to do so,
we can escape these imaginations less easily than the filmic images on
the screen. Since looking away would be of little help in these moments,
we would have to cover our ears or actively think of something else –
which often comes too late when we decide to do so. In a sense, indirect
visualization through suggestive verbalizations can affect us more
directly than the direct visualization through audiovisual moving images.
Horror films and thrillers often use this effectively (see chapter 4 in
Hanich 2010).
Moreover, with Markus Kuhn we could refer to the high narrative
economy of linguistic narrative instances (2011, 99): Suggestive verbaliza­
tions simply allow for a certain aesthetic parsimoniousness and alluring
simplicity. Following Kozloff (1988, 128; 2000, 56), we could point out
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 165

that suggestive verbalizations betray a yearning for simple oral storytelling

and the intrinsic gratifications that come with it. Last but not least,
suggestive verbalizations – and verbalizations-of-the-general in particular –
make it easier to incorporate the abstract or the universal. According to
Berys Gaut (2010, 248/249), a disadvantage of photographic images
derives from the fact that they necessarily present particulars instead of
generalities: They always have to show a specific John Doe and not the
average John Doe American in general. Instead, the verbalization-of-the-
general can easily refer to such generalities – as we have seen in the
example precisely from Meet John Doe.
Here an analysis of the functions of suggestive verbalizations certainly
does not come to an end. The preceding remarks could only indicate
cursorily what eventually has to be worked out in more detail: the manifold
uses of suggestive verbalizations in film.

Notes
1. This text is a thoroughly revised version of an article originally published in
German (Hanich 2014).
2. More on this point, see Kaes 1987; Kozloff 2000; Elliott 2003. Carroll (2008,
35–52) opposes media purism and the thesis of a medium specificity of
film.
3. Interestingly, Kracauer was well aware of this effect on imagination, but he
evaluated it quite the opposite way – not as enabling, but as constraining. In
a footnote, he disapprovingly quotes René Barjavel who, in 1944, claimed that
‘the imagination of the spectator watching a dialogue film “builds from the
words showered down on him and replaces the images on the screen by those
which the dialogue suggests to him”’ (323).
4. These descriptive verbalizations could also be called ekphrasis, as long as one
understands this classical term in a broader sense and does not restrict it to
descriptions of works of art. In an influential essay, W.J.T. Mitchell distin­
guishes between two forms of ekphrasis: (1) ekphrasis as a literary genre in
which poems describe visual art; and (2) ekphrasis as the general generic term
for all verbal representations of visual representations intended for the purpose
of putting persons, places, pictures, etc. before the mental eye (1994, 152/153).
See also the recent issue of Poetics Today (vol. 38, no. 2, 2018) on
‘Contemporary Ekphrasis.’
5. Another term is proposed by Markus Kuhn in his highly detailed
Filmnarratologie. Kuhn proposes a distinction between the visual narrative
instance and one or more facultative linguistic narrative instances. The latter
come in the forms of extradiegetic linguistic narrative instances (such as voice-
over, subtitles or inserts) and intradiegetic linguistic narrative instances (such
as characters or documents such as letters, newspapers, books). However,
Kuhn is not concerned with spectator activity, aesthetic impact and
a description of the film experience, whereas the major point of the concept
of ‘suggestive verbalization’ lies precisely in its reference to the sensory imagi­
nation of the viewer.
166 J. HANICH

6. The situation is different when it comes to writing in film. A number of recent

studies have shed light on words on screen. See, for instance, Chion (2017) or
Krautkrämer (2013).
7. In their critical evaluation of what they call ‘the talking witness documentary,’
Spence and Avcı (2013, 299) write: ‘thanks to these women and men, the
fractured stories that the younger generation grew up with and which fueled
their imaginations and fantasies, but which never added up to a complete
picture, are now transformed into something more concrete. And, because of
the comfortable indexicality of those talking heads (the fact that the camera
and microphone were present to record the witnesses’ testimony), the stories
are endowed with life.’
8. In comparison to ekphrasis, which is a textual form distinct from narration
that describes for the reader, listener or audience things and events in
a descriptive way, enérgeia and enárgeia designate the rhetorical devices that
serve to produce this effect.
9. In this essay, I will not be able to further pursue in any detail the question of
how character speech becomes vivid and evocative. For some indications, see
Hanich 2020. For a discussion of vivid and evocative language in literature, see,
inter alia, Collins 1991; Scarry 1999. The most extensive and convincing study
I know is Kuzmičová 2013.
10. Psychologists call this phenomenon ‘within-modality interference’; see Hanich
2020.
11. When film images illustrate the verbalization, they reduce the suggestive effect
and thus the viewer’s imaginative activity. However, this does not mean that
the verbalization in these cases would have no effect on the images. The
accompanying verbalization, often criticized as redundant, draws attention
to the linguistically emphasized aspects of the image. Like a searchlight, it
illuminates certain parts; others sink into the undescribed darkness. The
images threaten imagination – but the verbalization exerts power over the
autonomy of the image.
12. For some examples, see chapter 4 in Hanich 2010.
13. On more of these cases, see Hanich 2020.
14. Consider also a scene in episode 9 from Too Old to Die Young (Nicolas
Winding Refn, 2019) in which the character played by Jena Malone functions
as medium and describes what she can see in another ‘world.’ She is explicitly
asked by her companion: ‘Tell me what you see.’ Here we have a connection to
a medial off in another sense of the word ‘medial.’
15. Again, although my examples are primarily from fiction films, suggestive
verbalizations also play a central role in other modes. In Joe Berlinger and
Bruce Sinofsky’s documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin
Hood Hills (1996), for example, there is a bloodcurdling future verbalization,
in which the stepfather of a murdered boy threatens the alleged perpetrators in
the deepest Southern twang and with Old Testament anger.
16. Naremore (2007, 36), too, speaks of ‘vivid scatological imagery’.
17. The terms alignment and allegiance come from Smith 1995, 83–86.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES 167

Notes on contributor
Julian Hanich is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen.
He is the author of two monographs: The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema
Experience (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and Cinematic Emotion in Horror
Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (Routledge, 2010).
With Daniel Fairfax he co-edited The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre
Meunier: Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions (Amsterdam
University Press, 2019); with Christian Ferencz-Flatz he was responsible for an
issue of Studia Phaenomenologica on ‘Film and Phenomenology’ (2016). His research
focuses on film and imagination, cinematic emotions, film phenomenology, the
collective cinema experience, and film style.

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