Why non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training

From The Gutenberg Galaxy page 41

Prof. John Wilson, of the African Institute of London University had a paper where he relates the experience he had been through when trying using film to teach natives to read, or to understand a point, that is very difficult to be understood by literate societies:

The next bit of evidence was very, very interesting. This man - the sanitary inspector - made a moving picture, in very slow time, very slow technique, of what would be required of their ordinary household in a primitive African Village in getting rid of standing water - draining pools, picking up all empty tins and putting them away, and so fort. We showed this film to an audience and asked them what they had seen, and they said they had seen a chicken, a fowl, and we didn't know that there was a fowl in it! So we very carefully scanned the frames one by one for this fowl, and sure enough, for about a second, a fowl went over the corner of the frame. Someone had frightened the fowl and it had taken flight, through the right hand, bottom segment of the frame. This was all that had been seen. The other things he had hoped they would pick up from the film they had not picked up at all, and they had picked up something which we didn't know was in the film until we inspected it minutely. Why? We developed all sorts of theories. Perhaps it was the sudden movement of the chicken. Everything else was done in slow technique - people going forward slowly picking up the tin, demonstrating and all the rest of it, and the bird was apparently the one bit of reality for them. For them there was another theory that the fowl had religious significance, which we rather dismissed.

Question: Could you describe in more detail the scene in the film?

Wilson: Yes, there was very slow movement of a sanitary laborer coming along and seeing a tin with water in it, picking the tin up and very carefully pouring the water out and then rubbing it into the ground so no mosquito could breed and very carefully putting this tin in a basket on the back of a donkey. This was to show how you disposed of rubbish. It was like the man in the park with a spiked stick, picking up the bits of paper and putting them in the sack. Al this was done very slowly to show how important it was to pick up those things because of mosquitoes breeding in standing water. The cans were all very carefully taken away and disposed of in the ground and covered up so there would be no more standing water. The film was about five minutes long.
The chicken appeared for a second in this kind of setting.

Question: Do you literally mean that when you talked with the audience you came to believe that they had not seen anything else but the chicken?

Wilson: We simply asked them: What did you see in this film?

Question: Not what did you think?

Wilson: No, what did you see.

Question: How many people were in the viewing audience of whom you asked this question?

Wilson: 30-odd.

Question: No one gave you a response other than ~We saw the chicken~?

Wilson: No, this was the first quick response - "We saw a chicken ".

Question: They did see a man, too?

Wilson: Well, when we questioned them further they had seem a man, but what was really interesting was they hadn't made a whole story out of it, and point of fact, we discovered afterwards that they had`t seem a whole frame - they had inspected the frame for details. Then we found out from the artist and an eye specialist that a sophisticated audience, an audience that is accustomed to the film, focuses a little way in front of the flat screen so that you take in the whole frame. In this sense, again, a picture is a convention. You've got to look at the picture as a whole first, and these people did not do that, not being accustomed to pictures. When presented with the picture they began to inspect it, rather as the scanner of a television camera. and go over it very rapidly. Apparently, that is what the eye unaccustomed to pictures does - scans the picture - and they hadn't scanned one picture before it moved on, in spite of the slow technique of the film.

The key facts are ate the end of the passage. Literacy gives people the power to focus a little way in front of an image so that we take in the whole image or picture at a glance. Non-literate people have no such acquired habit and do not look at objects in our way. Rather they scan objects and images as we do the printed page, segment by segment. Thus they have no detached point of view. They are wholly with the object. They go empathically into it. The eye is used, not in perspective, but tactually, as it were. Euclidean spaces depending on much separation of sight from touch and sound are not known to them.

Further difficulties which these natives had with the film will help us to see how many of the conventions of literacy are built into even non-verbal forms like film:

My point is that I think we've got to be very wary of pictures; they can be interpreted in the light of your experience. Now, next we thought that if we are going to use these films we've got to have some sort of process of education and we've got to have some research. We found also some fascinating things in this research process. We found that the film is, as produced in the West, a very highly conventionalized piece of symbolism although it looks very real. For instance we found that if you were telling a story about tow men to an African audience and one had finished his business and he left the scene, disappearing from the screen, the audience would like to know what have happened to him, they would not accept that his part was finished and that in the story there would be no more interest in him. They would want to know what have happened to this person and we have to re write the story adding a lot of material which for us was not necessary. We had to follow him to the street until he naturally turned around the corner, because he simply could not disappear out of the scene.
It was acceptable that he could disappear turning around the corner, but the action had to take a natural course.
Panoramic views disturbed the audience very much, because they wouldn't know what was happening. They imagined that the objects and details in the scene were literally moving. As it could be seen, they could not accept the convention of such presentation. Also could not accept the idea of a person sitting quietly while the camera would come closer for a "close-up"; it was weird, that thing of an image starting to grow up until it would fill up the entire scene. We know the usual manner to start a movie; a city is shown, in its entirety, them you plunge into a street, getting to a house, finally you take the camera inside the house through a window, etc. This was interpreted literally as if you were walking ahead and doing all these things until your were introduced through the window inside the house..
The resulting effect was that if it was to use films as a really effective way, we had to start by a process of education teaching certain useful conventions and make movies that teached those persons to use such conventions, for ex., learning to see a character leaving out of scene. We had to show the audience that there was a street, the man would go through it and then, in the next part of the movie, cut the scene, immediately after he left.
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But there is more to this point than Wilson supposes. Had TV been available He would have been amazed to discover how much more readily the Africans took to it than they did to film For with film you are the camera and the non-literate man cannot use his eyes like a camera. But with TV you are the screen. And TV is two-dimensional and sculptural in its tactile contours. TV is not a narrative medium, is not so much visual as audile-tactile. That is why it is empathic, and why the optimal mode of TV image is the cartoon. For the cartoon appeals to natives as it does to our children, because it is a world in which the visual component is so small that the viewer has as mach to do as in a crossword puzzle.
More important still, with the bounding line of a cartoon, as with a cave painting, we tend to be an area of the interplay of the senses, and hence of strongly hapatic or tactile character That is to say, the art of the draughtsman and the celator (concealer)alike is a strongly tactile and tangible art. And even Euclidean geometry i s by modern standards very tactile.
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The twentieth century encounter between alphabetic and electronic faces of culture confers on the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to THE AFRICA WITHIN

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It is the purpose of the present book to study primarily the print phase of alphabetic culture. The print phase, however, has encountered today the new organic and biological modes of the electronic world. That is, it is now interpenetrated at its extreme development of mechanism by electro-biological as Chardin has explained. And is this reversal of character which makes our age "conatural" as if were with non-literate cultures. We have no more difficulty in understanding the native or non-literate experience, simply because we have recreated it electronically within our own culture. (Yet post-literacy is a quite different mode of interdependence from pre-literacy) so my dwelling upon the earlier phases of alphabetic technology is not irrelevant to an understanding of the Gutenberg era.
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Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outered senses. They are a technology of explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols, the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.
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