Image

In literature an evocation by descriptive power of a picture in the reader's mind of the scene, character or action delineated. In the theatre or cinema a powerful visual effect which may often reveal something dramaturgically essential to the viewer. This effect can be brought about by any stylistic means from realism to symbolism and abstactionism, but its hallmark is the impression it makes on interior visualization in the mind. The imagery of literature (prose or poetry) and of theatre and cinema is quite different than the imagery of the plastic arts, of painting or sculpture for example. In the former there is a dynamic succession of images with an esthetic logic whose fulfilment is the cumulative impression on the viewer. The other is static, yet because it is immobile it can be contemplated more deeply, as seen in museums by visitors' long pauses before great works of art. Images in reality do not exist in art, although produced by it. They exist in minds and arise there partly due to strong sense stimuli; but to a raw image constituted by visual sensations are afiliated the percipients affective values, and his or her own experience which is stored in the memory and in the deep subconcious. It is these deep contents, like the surfgace of a goal, that are disturbed, and which mirror the external image with an inner reality.