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Sol Worth and the Study of Visual Communications

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Sol Worth and the Study of Visual Communications Studies in Visual Communication Volume 6 Issue 3 Fall 1980 Article 2 1980 Sol Worth and the Study of Visual Communications Larry Gross Recommended Citation Gross, L. (1980). Sol Worth and the Study of Visual Communications. 6 (3), 2-19. Retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/svc/vol6/iss3/2 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/svc/vol6/iss3/2 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sol Worth and the Study of Visual Communications This contents is available in Studies in Visual Communication: https://repository.upenn.edu/svc/vol6/iss3/2 Sol Worth and the Study of Visual Communications Larry Gross The central thread that runs through Sol Worth's research This concern proved unfounded. The students suc­ and writings is the question of how meaning is communi­ ceeded in making films and the workshop technique cated through visual images. 1 Coming to academic life seemed to engage them in the process Worth deemed after careers in painting, photography, and filmmaking, appropriate to a school of communications: Worth was imbued with the conviction that visual media were forms of communication that, while fundamentally The process of changing back and forth from conception as different from speech, could and must be seriously paramount, to the actual visual document as paramount, examined as ways human beings create and share mean­ seems to me the key learning process in the Documentary ings. Focusing on film he began with the question, "What Film Workshop. It is the way in which the students learn to does a film communicate, and how does this process see. It is the process by which they train themselves to find a meaningful visual image in relation to a concept which is work?" (1966:322). The answers he began with grew out usually literary or philosophical in nature. The purpose of the of his practice as a teacher of film. Workshop is not to produce films (this is our pleasure), but rather, to provide an environment in which students learn to see filmically; to provide an environment where they can learn about the techniques and the thinking necessary to com­ Teaching Film as Communication municate ideas through the filmed image. [1963:56f] In Worth's initial experience in teaching film, as Fulbright Professor in Finland (1956-1957) , he had utilized a It was the final stage in the Workshop, however, that led method he later described as follows: "The teacher would Worth to the next set of questions. When the films were make a film; the students would work along with him, completed, they were screened before an audience of learning and doing at the same time. Class discussions students, friends, and faculty. "It is in the period after the would be held in which the various aspects of the film lights go on, when the comments are made, that the stu­ were developed and demonstrated" (1963:54). The film dent begins to know how very complex and difficult the he made during this process of teaching was Teatteri, art of film communication is" (1963:57). The students now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Mod­ weren't alone, as Worth himself became increasingly in­ ern Art. When he came to the Annenberg School of trigued by a pattern he found in the responses of diverse Communications at the University of Pennsylvania to set audiences to the films made by his students: up and teach a course in documentary film, however, Worth adopted a different approach: the students would The greatest involvement, identification, and understanding make a film. This choice was decisive in orienting him seems to come from the young and the untrained. The toward questions and perspectives that influenced all his greatest hostility and incomprehension seems to come from subsequent work. It led Worth to consider problems few the adult professional in the communication fields .... Ado­ lescents find these films easier to understand than do adults. film scholars had posed or pursued. [1965:12] The most immediate consequence of this pedagogical decision was a concern over the inexperience of his stu­ dents: The young men and women in my class were bright, but they The Bio-Documentary had never before made a film. They had never used a camera, edited a shot, or written a script. There was not enough time. In trying to make sense of this unexpected pattern of And I was worried. If I made a film, I could control it; if I let thE responses Worth first clarified the nature of the films he students make their own films, they could fail. The films migh1 was screening. He realized that the inexperience of the be bad or unfinished, the cameras and equipment might be student filmmakers (their lack of socialization in tradi­ ruined, film might be wasted. [1963:55] tional film codes), and his insistence that "the subject ~atter evolves from the student's own interests and expe­ nences" (1963:56), lead to a particularly subjective kind Larry Gross is Associate Professor of Communication at of film. Worth called this kind of film "bio-documentary": The Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and is co-editor of Studies in Visual ... a film that can be made by a person who is not a profes­ Communication. sional filmmaker; or by someone who has never made a film before. It is a film that can be made by anyone with enough skill, let's say, to drive a car; by a person of a different culture or a different age group, who has been taught in a specific ' way to make a film that helps him to communicate to us, the world as he sees it, and his concerns as he sees them. [1964:3] Sol Worth and the Study of Visual Communications 3 In posing the concept of a bio-documentary Worth was Second, he understood that his experience with novice clearly concerned with analogies between subjective fi-lmmakers suggested a radical innovation in the way films and dreams as forms of visual imagery: the film medium could be used as a research tool. If anyone could be taught to make a film that reflected his A bio-documentary is a film made by a person to show how he or her own world view, and the values and concerns of his feels about himself and his world. It is a subjective way of or her group, then the direction of the film communication showing what the objective world that a person sees is really process could be reversed. This meant using the medium like . .. In addition ... it often captures feelings and reveals "to see whether the visual world offers a way of communi­ values, attitudes, and concerns that lie beyond the conscious cation that can be used not only for us to communicate to control of the maker. [1964:3] them, but so that we might make it easier for them to talk to us" (1965:19). But it wasn't enough to see the bio-documentary as a Although these two sets of questions were pursued in subjective, individual statement by a novice filmmaker. tandem, and their interconnections formed the basis of That might explain why adults could not "understand" much of Worth's intellectual development, it will be nec­ these films, and especially why "hostility seems to be essary for the purpose of exposition to discuss them sep­ found most frequently among filmmakers, film critics, and arately. communications professionals . .. (e.g. 'I think you are intellectually irresponsible to teach young people to make films like this ... I think the whole thing is a hoax .. .')" (1965:7) . After all, it is hardly a novel observation The Navajo Project that those most engaged with a set of conventions in art are the most outraged at innovations or variations that The first fruits of the bio-documentary approach and the ignore, challenge, or undermine these conventions. realization of the potential it offered for communication by It still remained to ask why young viewers responded "them to talk to us" were not long in coming. In his first with enjoyment and understanding; after all, even if they exposition of the bio-documentary film concept, at the were not professionals, they were used to seeing "con­ 1964 Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, ventional" films. Worth decided that there was something Worth already saw the possibility of using this method to in the subject matter and the structure of the films that explore the world view of another culture. was comprehensible to young viewers because it was closer to their way of talking and thinking. In particular he In a documentary film about the Navajo you look for an objec­ felt that the films used ambiguities and hints in a fashion tive representation of how they live as seen by an outsider. In a Bio-Documentary about the Navajo, the film would be made that adults were no longer comfortable with, but which by a Navajo. One would not only look to see how the Navajo younger viewers found "safer and more c.omfortable fo~. live, but one would also look to see how a Navajo sees and certain themes than [they] would an outnght statement structures his own life and the world around him. [1964:5]2 (1965:18). 0 • Although he himself probably d1d not see the Implica- In this capsule "proposal" for a research project, Worth tions of his inquiries at this point, Worth was laying some later realized he was obeying Malinowski's injunction that of the foundations for an important analytic shift that "the final goal, of which an Ethnographer should never gradually became explicit in his thin~ing.
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