Text on screen – what does that entail?

Everything we have been asked to read on a cinema screen since its inception: titles, intertitles, subtitles and credits; all the texts that can appear between or over images, but also in the images: letters, notes, posters, billboards, traffic signs, words on computer screens; writing drawn in the air, on mirrors, in snow or in sand — not to mention the human skin.

But the combining of an image with text within that image is not an obvious pairing.

As soon as we recognise a visual element as writing — even if we cannot read it — that element ceases to belong to the tangible universe of things.

We are no longer merely looking at something; we are required to decipher something. The image temporarily becomes a surface on which a linguistic act must be performed.

Does the image make way for the written word?

It has not asked for it. It is not even aware of its existence.

The written word, in turn, denies the three-dimensional space constructed by the film image. It also functions outside the time of the film: spoken language unfolds in time; written language must be taken in by the eye.

The referential nature of language is problematic, and raises a question: can text on screen, as a cinematic device, be ’soluble’ into the film as a whole ?

Film editor and coach at SIC, Jan De Coster ventures to guide you through a labyrinth of films and delights in getting lost in remarkable examples of words on screen that are sometimes inappropriate, sometimes bold, sexy, political or unsettling.

Together, we explore a cinema that tells its own story through the role it assigns to the written word, by incorporating writing without fully integrating it; making its materiality visible; and turning the act of reading itself into a cinematic experience.