Persuasive narratives: evaluative images in picture books and animated movies

Introduction

As the English curriculum in schools takes account of the increasingly multimodal nature of literature and other text forms in paper and digital media, explicit pedagogic attention is being directed to the role of images in creating evaluative stance. For example, in the new Australian Curriculum: English, students in the seventh grade are expected to ‘Compare the ways that language and images are used to create character, and to influence emotions and opinions in different types of texts’ (Australian_Curriculum_Assessment_and_Reporting_Authority, 2012, ACELT1621). The curriculum distinguishes informative, imaginative and persuasive texts, but there is a tendency to present these as discrete categories, without taking into account the persuasive nature of many imaginative narratives. Furthermore, while students are expected to learn about various aspects of visual semiosis (students in the seventh grade, for example, are expected to ‘analyse how point of view is generated in visual texts by means of choices, for example gaze, angle and social distance (ACELA1764)’, there is no mention in the curriculum of the ways in which images communicate evaluations about ethics or propriety. This article discusses examples of picture books and animated movies as persuasive narratives and proposes a systematic view of ways images in these texts communicate ethical judgements. What is proposed here seeks to extend emerging visual semiotic work extrapolating from systemic functional linguistic (SFL) accounts of evaluative language (Martin and White, 2005), and contribute to an accessible critical visual semiotics that can be deployed in the English classroom.

Narratives De-Naturalizing Discourses of War and Armed Conflict

The persuasive narratives discussed here are picture books and animated movies that challenge discourses that naturalize war and armed struggle as ways of addressing conflicts among communities and nations (Martin, 2006, 2008). A substantial number of picture books oriented to older children and adults have, and continue to be, potent vehicles for re-focusing readers’ understanding and evaluation of armed conflict (Briggs, 1984; Coerr, 1995; Gallaz et al., 1985; Jorgensen and Harrison-Lever, 2002; Mattingly, 1985; Morimoto, 1990; Wild and Vivas, 1991; Wolfer and Harrison-Lever, 2005). Animated movies at least as far back as the 1939 Peace on Earth cartoon short (Harman, 1939), about a post-apocalyptic world inhabited only by animals, have also sought to challenge discourses naturalizing war. Of the very substantial number of animated films dealing with this issue in recent years, several have been highly acclaimed and recognized with national and international awards. For example, Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008), depicting Ari Folman’s search for his lost memories of his experience as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War, won a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, an NSFC Award for Best Film, a César Award for Best Foreign Film, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and an Annie Award for Best Animated Feature. The animated movie 9-11/9-11 (Chin, 2008), distributed by IndiePix (www.indiepixfilms.com), is based on the bombing of the Presidential Palace in Chile in 1973 as part of the coup against the Allende government, the subsequent installing of the Pinochet dictatorship, and the terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York exactly 28 years later, to the day, on the 11th of September. In 2008, the Chilean Arts and Cultural Council honored 9-11/9-11 with the Sienna Award – the ‘Oscar’ of Chile – for Best Animated Short Film; 9-11/9-11 also received awards from FeSanCor – the Santiago International Short Film Festival, and the Southern Appalachian Film Festival.

Evaluative images from two picture books and one animated movie form the main data for this article.

The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (Briggs, 1984) is a picture book, that satirizes the political leaders who instigated the Falklands War. It presents the story of the war initially with large brightly coloured caricatures of the then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the Argentine dictator, General Galtieri, as a pair of toy metal monsters who send men to fight over a ‘sad little island’ populated by a few shepherds who eat nothing but mutton. Neither the Falkland Islands, the UK, Argentina, nor their leaders are named in the text. In the second phase of the book, monochrome pencil sketches accompany a listing of several ways in which soldiers (who were ‘all real men, made of flesh and blood … not made of Tin Pots or Iron’) were killed or maimed. The final phase of the book depicts the celebrations following the victory by the soldiers of the old iron woman, to which the maimed were not invited in case their appearance detracted from the celebration.

Photographs in the Mud (Wolfer and Harrison-Lever, 2005) is set in World War II in 1942 on the island of New Guinea just north of Australia. The picture book tells the stories of an Australian soldier, Jack, and a Japanese soldier, Hoshi, leaving their wives and children to become locked in fierce battle on the infamous Kokoda Track. The story depicts the tension between the soldiers’ sense of duty, their feelings of alienation from the violence of war and their longing to be home with their families. After inflicting massive injuries on each other, Jack and Hoshi find themselves dying together on the same stretch of muddy track. Without a common language, they communicate by sharing photographs of their loved ones. Later, soldiers searching for the dead and wounded find the photographs of Hoshi’s Japanese family and Jack’s Australian family stuck together in the mud, and the soldiers were unable to separate the photographs.

The animated movie 9-11/9-11 (Chin, 2008) linking the 1973 bombing of the Presidential Palace in Chile to the terrorist attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York begins with the parallel early morning waking on that day of US special agent Mike Smith in Santiago in 1973 and the young Chilean man, Salvador, 28 years later in New York. Salvador had previously left an unhappy situation with his mother in Santiago and was now living with Julia, Mike Smith’s daughter, whom he met as a co-worker in a restaurant at the World Trade Center. In 2001, Mike Smith works as a crop duster pilot instructor, living with his wife but estranged from his daughter. The story tracks his recollection of meeting Pinochet and training the Chilean pilot Jorge Montes who carried out the La Moneda bombing. Salvador and Julia learn that Julia is pregnant and she takes an extra shift on 11 September 2001 at the restaurant. The movie then depicts the attacks on the twin towers and the Chilean Presidential Palace as parallel events. Mike Smith and Salvador both see the twin towers attack on television. Julia is killed in the attack. Mike Smith’s wife turns to drinking and Mike Smith, grief stricken, disillusioned and desperately depressed, commits suicide. Salvador, engulfed in overwhelming anger, goes to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), ready to do anything … and is welcomed by the CIA agent, Jorge Montes.

A Systemic Functional Semiotic Approach to Appraisal in Language and Images

While there are many approaches to understanding how images communicate meaning, SFL (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004; Martin, 1992) has influenced social semiotic accounts of images (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006[2001]) that have been prominently taken up by literacy education researchers and teachers (Callow, 1999; De Silva Joyce and Gaudin, 2007; Lemke, 2002; Lewis, 2001; Macken-Horarik, 2004; O’Halloran, 2004; Painter et al., 2013; Royce, 2002; Shirato and Yell, 1996; Unsworth, 2001, 2006; Unsworth et al., 2005). Recent SFL accounts of appraisal in English deal with the linguistic communication of affect; judgements of an individual’s capacities; judgements about an individual’s behaviour in terms of veracity and propriety; and evaluations about artefacts in terms of their compositional qualities, social or cultural significance and impact (Martin and White, 2005). This work has influenced emerging studies of appraisal resources in images (Economou, 2009). The focus here is the communication of judgement of propriety, that is, the extent to which behavior is depicted as good, moral, ethical, fair, sensitive, respectful, charitable and so on. Martin and White (2005) proposed that, as well as using language to explicitly inscribe attitude, a number of strategies are also available for invoking attitude, and these constitute a cline from inscription to affordance ‘according to the degree of freedom allowed readers in aligning with the values naturalized in the text’ (p. 67). According to Martin (2008: 124), images cannot inscribe judgement of propriety, and while recent work has described invoked evaluation in images (Economou, 2009), this article proposes a revision and further explication of strategies for inscribing and invoking judgement of propriety in images. Firstly, the Martin and White (2005) strategies for inscription and invocation of evaluation in language will be briefly outlined. Then their application to images dealing with judgement of propriety will be re-examined to introduce a proposed alternative account.

Linguistic Inscription and Invocation of Judgement of Propriety

To illustrate linguistic strategies for inscribing and invoking attitude, Martin and White (2005: 67) use examples from a speech by former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, characterizing the treatment of indigenous culture by invading Europeans (Keating, 1992). Martin and White (2005) describe the strategies for communicating attitude in language as being broadly to inscribe the attitude explicitly in language choices or to invoke attitude, with a number of more delicate options within the invoke strategy as indicated in Figure 1.

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Figure 1.

Strategies for inscribing and invoking attitude (Martin and White, 2005: 67).

‘It was our ignorance and prejudice’ is an instance of ‘inscribe’, or communicate explicitly and directly, the judgement of impropriety through using the word ‘prejudice’, and the judgement of lack of capacity by using the word ‘ignorance’. The strategy of ‘provoke’ uses lexical metaphors in similes such as ‘they fenced us in like sheep’ and ‘all we children being herded up, like a mob of cattle’. While this metaphorical language does not make an explicit judgement of impropriety, it ‘does more than evoke a judgement – it provokes one’ (p. 65). Somewhat less directive than provoking is the strategy of flagging, which can involve using non-core vocabulary or intensifying a core lexical item. Martin and White use the example of intensifying the representation of the action ‘break’ by using words like ‘demolish’ or ‘smash’:

… these non-core vocabulary items infused with manner connote attitude rather than denote it; as such they lie somewhere between affording an attitude and provoking it, and so are more sensitive to co-text and reading position for interpretation than lexical metaphor and direct inscriptions. (p. 66)

Finally, the example of ‘we brought the diseases’ indicates that the experiential or substantive meaning itself, without any explicit or implicit inclusion of language that orients the reader to a particular viewpoint, is sufficient to invoke evaluation. Martin and White suggest that in such cases the experiential meaning simply affords the possibility of judgement.

The Communication of Judgement in Images

Strategies for communicating attitude in language are described by Martin and White (2005) as points on a cline, with each option reflecting the degree of freedom allowed to readers in aligning with the attitude naturalized in the text. While inscribed attitude leaves no such freedom, provoked attitude offers some freedom, flagged attitude extends this freedom further and afforded attitude is the most open. This was adopted by Economou (2009) in her study of images in newspapers, with the visual means of ‘provoking’, ‘flagging’ and ‘affording’ paralleling the linguistic means. Thus, Martin and White indicate lexical metaphor provoking evaluation and Economou proposes what she refers to as visual ideational metaphor as a means of visual provoking. Similarly, visual graduation (intensifying by increased quantity or repetition of visual elements) corresponds to linguistic graduation for flagging evaluation, and linguistic and visual realizations of ideational meaning are seen correspondingly, potentially as tokens that can afford evaluation. In terms of inscribing and evoking attitude in images then, Economou (2009) simply adopted the linguistic framework from Martin and White (2005), with the minor change in wording from the use of ‘invoke’ to ‘evoke’.

The investigation of ‘provoke’ in Economou’s data includes discussion of several visual ideational metaphors. One of these shows a former Australian Prime Minister involved in a card game where the playing card design is the nuclear power warning symbol. The photo-image montage also has the head of the former Prime Minister slightly enlarged, emphasizing his characteristic ‘artificial’ smile revealing his large teeth, to portray a somewhat mischievous expression. This visual metaphor of ‘gambling with nuclear energy’ is designed to depict a Prime Minister ‘taking risks’ or ‘playing with danger’ with regard to his government’s nuclear energy policy. Economou regards such visual metaphors as ‘provoking’ negative judgement of propriety. In my view, this kind of metaphor goes further. It is positioned on the cline much closer to inscription, so it is not possible to avoid evaluation in viewing the image. Hence, evaluation is actually entailed in the image and the viewer is being visually ‘directed’ to judge.

The need for this distinction is also made clear by comparison of such visual metaphors with other instances of provoking evaluation provided by Economou. For example, she discussed an image of a heavily bearded man in Middle Eastern headgear speaking into a microphone, making an emphatic gesture with a prosthesis in the form of a metal hook replacing his hand. Economou regarded this as provoking negative attitude among Western viewers where such artificial limbs are rarely seen and are associated with fictional villains of past eras. Now this image may provoke judgement, as Economou suggests, but it does not entail judgement in the same way as the visual metaphor of the former Australian Prime Minister.

This proposed distinction between ‘provoke’ and ‘entail’ can be readily discerned in literary picture books. Zoo (Browne, 1994) tells the story of a visit to London Zoo by a family of four: two boys of elementary school age, their mother and their loud, overbearing father. The book includes an image of ‘Dad’ from an extreme low angle, close-up frontal view of a very large Dad looking down with annoyance, presumably at one or both of his two sons. The aggressive image of Dad is emphasized by the cloud formation in the sky, which appears to attach clouds in the shape of bull’s horns to the sides of Dad’s head (the image may be viewed in an illustrated reading of Zoo on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7OMD5I-cNU) uploaded by ferniekat on 21 November 2010). I understand that for some Latin American cultures such an image symbolizes cuckoldry rather than aggression. However, the key issue is that the cultural symbolism in this image, seamlessly interpolated into the visual representation of the story, directs the audience to judgement, since here also, evaluation is entailed in the image.

In the picture book Gorilla (Browne, 1983), there are a number of images that do not entail evaluation in this way, but do indeed seem to provoke evaluation. Gorilla is about a young pre-adolescent girl called Hannah, who believes her father never has time for her. Hannah is obsessed with gorillas and, after asking her father for a gorilla for her birthday, is disappointed that her gift is a small, toy gorilla. However, during the night, the toy gorilla turns into a real gorilla that does all the things Hannah wishes her father would do with her such as going to the movies, to the zoo, eating ice-cream, etc. When Hannah and the gorilla are about to leave the house on their excursion, we see an image of her in the hallway with the gorilla dressed in trousers, an overcoat and hat and, opposite him, on the coat rack are hanging the very similar set of her father’s clothes. The arrangement of the image provokes an evaluation based on the contrastive comparison of the gorilla and her father who is a somewhat disembodied being in Hannah’s view of their life together (The relevant image can be viewed in an illustrated video reading of the book on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgaCzuFtKoI uploaded by L0renc on 20 March 2011).

This re-examination of the Economou (2009) data and limited excursion into picture books distinguishes between images that provoke and images that entail evaluation. The images that entail judgement are visual metaphors in that a participant or object is depicted, on some point of comparison, as being identified with an otherwise unrelated participant or object. The former Australian Prime Minister is construed as a gambler with nuclear energy and the father in Zoo is construed as having bovine horns. In these images, the bringing together of the incongruous elements forces the viewer to construe the visual metaphor. The inclusion of the culturally widely understood symbols (nuclear symbol, playing cards symbolizing chance, and horns symbolizing bovine aggressiveness/cuckoldry) makes it impossible to avoid the evaluation normally conveyed by such symbols, and hence judgement is entailed in these images. On the other hand, the image of Hannah and the gorilla is not a visual metaphor. It does not involve the identification of two elements on some point of comparison that would otherwise not be related. The contrastive visual comparison does seem to reflect Hannah’s judgement of her father never having time to be with her so the comparison or parallelism in the image can be said to provoke judgement.

Exploring a Cline of Invoked Judgement in Persuasive Picture Books

In cartoons of social and political commentary, the use of caricature, visual metaphor and symbolism are clearly designed to communicate evaluation. In many instances, the dimensions of caricature and the nature of visual metaphor and symbolism may be historically and culturally quite specific, especially due to the contemporary and localized targeting of evaluation in many such cartoons. Whether such images can inscribe or in fact just strongly entail evaluation remains problematic, but it seems likely that in most cases they do more than provoke. The wide range of depiction styles in picture books (and animated movies) means that it is possible for caricature, visual metaphor and symbolism to be incorporated into the visual communication of the narrative without violating the representation of the story world. Hence it seems possible that there would be a fairly extensively graduated cline from inscription to affordance in the communication of evaluation in images in such narratives. This section explores the possibilities of this cline in two picture books of quite different visual depiction style.

In Raymond Briggs’s (1984) The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman, his re-contextualization of the historical recount of the Falklands war as a ‘bedtime’ story, progresses through three phases (Martin, 2006). In the first phase the illustrations are caricatures of Galtieri and Thatcher with their ships and soldiers as toy ships and toy soldiers. Both Galtieri and Thatcher are enormous, relative to the size of their ships. They are drawn mainly in grey-scale but with multiple coloured splashes of symbolic attributes. In the case of Galtieri these are weapons and markers of rank such as gold braid and comical militaristic accessories such as golden coloured spurs. Thatcher appears as a dominatrix, dressed only in stockings and high heels, and with iron breasts that open to pour out gold to finance her war, and on another occasion are twin cannons firing at the enemy (the images can be seen in an illustrated reading of the story on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rq2tkepYHM, uploaded by SkidRowRadio on 30 January 2011). The images of this first phase clearly entail evaluation. The outlandish and exaggerated size and characteristics of the characters indicates an obvious direction by the artist to evaluate them as preposterously self-important and irresponsibly dangerous.

In the second phase, the images become grey-scale etchings representing the various forms of death of the soldiers (‘Some men were shot. Some men were drowned. Some men were burned alive. Some men were blown to bits’). These illustrations depict indistinct images, recognizable as men, but with no detail of their appearance or surroundings. The images may afford evaluation but they are so indistinct that it is actually the one line of text on each facing page in combination with the images that affords evaluation. The next image is a double page spread with the text below it extending across the two pages:

Some men were only half blown to bits and came home with parts of their bodies missing.

The image shows a large but indiscernible number of men maimed in various ways, which we can see, but there is still very little visual attribution of their individual appearances. What seems significant is the large number of men, all with some manifestation of the diverse forms of maiming. It is this graduated up-scaling of the maiming, as evidence of suffering, and the gaze of the men towards the viewer that seems to invoke judgement of the impropriety of whoever was responsible for this. This then does seem to correspond to the Martin and White notion of ‘flagged’ invoking of attitude realized by graduation in language. This interpretation is supported by the final image in this phase of the story, showing a very large but indiscernible number of white crosses marking the graves of soldiers.

The third phase of Briggs’s story deals with the aftermath of the war in the UK. In this phase, the interaction of image and language in flagging evaluation is shown in the double page spread image of a container being loaded onto a truck above the main text, also spread over the double page:

Later on, a boat came back to the Old Iron Woman’s kingdom with a big iron box full of dead bodies.

There is nothing in the image itself that would afford evaluation but, in conjunction with the language, the image provides an additional intermodal graduation that flags judgement of impropriety again of whoever was responsible for that many bodies returning home and in such an unceremonious manner. The next two images also seem to flag evaluation. The first is an image of a medal on the left hand page with the rest of both pages completely blank apart from the main text:

Then the old iron woman gave all her soldiers a special medal.

The absence of any visual context, especially the absence of any human, seems to flag evaluation here. The negativity of the evaluation depends significantly on the language on the previous page referring to the large number of bodies and showing the container in which they were brought home. The subsequent image shows a view of the victory parade in which all we can see is the hundreds of flags and the bayonets fixed to the tips of the rifles. This complex form of visual graduation also seems to flag evaluation. On the final page, we see a rear view of the family of one of the soldiers at his grave. In this picture book, then, the images entail, provoke, flag and afford judgement and, in some cases, the manner in which judgement is invoked is achieved through the sequencing or combination of images, integration of discordant depiction styles and the coupling of graduation across the images and the accompanying text.

From Martin’s (2008) analysis of the intermodal construction of the theme of reconciliation in Photographs in the Mud (Wolfer and Harrison-Lever, 2005), the contribution of the images of photographs of family members, which are embedded in the main images of the Australian and Japanese soldiers who fought in the jungles of New Guinea, will be re-examined and extended here. In the early part of the book, these images of photographs appear to be quite normal elements of the experiential content of the main images in which they are embedded. This is very obviously the case when Jack’s wife is depicted looking at a small photograph, which we cannot see, and the embedded photograph of Jack that is hanging on the wall of the baby’s room could easily be interpreted as an enlarged version of the photograph his wife is holding. The photograph of Hoshi embedded in the main image of his wife and daughter is not so naturalistically placed but is clearly a display version of the smaller photograph Hoshi’s wife is looking at. In a number of other cases, the embedded photographs are quite plausibly linked to the experiential content of the images of the soldiers in New Guinea. In some cases, the accompanying narration makes this quite explicit. For example, ‘As Hoshi prepared for yet another battle, he thought of his daughter.’ The embedding of these images evokes affect and may afford judgement of negative propriety directed to whoever is responsible for bringing these men from loving gentle family situations into the violence and suffering of war.

Martin (2008) points out that we never make eye contact with Jack or Hoshi or their comrades but, in several images depicting the soldiers in the jungle, the family members in the images of the embedded photographs do make direct eye contact with the viewer so that a form of pseudo-interpersonal engagement occurs between the viewer and the family members establishing empathy with them. Martin also notes that this is particularly moving when these embedded ‘photographs’ engage with the viewer at the same time as the main image depicts brothers, fathers and sons slaughtering each other in battle. But the important distinction to be made is that in these images (there are two of them) there is not the same obvious link to the experiential content of the battle in the main image as was the case with the other images. The greater experiential disjunction between the embedded and main images shifts the role of the embedded images and renders the composite images of battle as having more of a symbolic quality, directly addressing the thematic interpretation of the narrative and, in Martin’s (2008) terms, providing ‘an important imagic re-contextualization of what “fighting for their families” in fact means and how their families might feel about it’ (p. 124). I believe that the composite of the embedded and main images in these two battle scenes directs the viewer to evaluation and provokes rather than affords judgement. But the various ways in which all of the embedded images related plausibly to the main images in terms of the depiction of the events means that the more symbolic nature and greater orientation to thematic evaluation in the battle images does not violate the storying.

From the data examination to this point it appears important to distinguish between images that direct the viewer to evaluate and those that invite the viewer to evaluate. Among images that direct, the nature of the judgement may be integrated into the form of the image as is the case with the symbolic nature of the visual metaphors we have considered from the nuclear power card playing former Prime Minister to the bullying father in the picture book Zoo (Browne 1994), to the caricatures of Galtieri and Thatcher as tin/iron non-human leaders sending many flesh and blood men to their deaths. Such images seem to entail judgement in that it is not possible to avoid this in viewing them. Other images direct evaluation but less overtly, so that images like the parallel depictions of the gorilla and the father’s clothes in the picture book, Gorilla (Browne, 1983) and some of the embedded images in Photographs in the Mud (Wolfer and Harrison-Lever, 2005) provoke judgement. It appears that visual graduation, as observed in images of the maimed soldiers and the numerous crosses in the graveyard in The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (Briggs, 1984), invite evaluation through flagging of judgement, and that the experiential content alone in other images affords judgement. An examination of the 9-11/9-11 (Chin, 2008) animated movie supports this cline of invocation of judgement in images, showing how symbolic morphs as transitions between scenes also entail judgement of propriety and do not disrupt the visual narrative representation of events.

The 9/11-9/11 Movie: Symbolic Images, Transitional Morphs and Evaluative Stance

Perhaps the most powerful persuasive image is that of the simultaneous impact of the aircraft hitting the World Trade Center tower in New York and the missile penetrating the Presidential Palace in Chile (Figure 2). This split-screen effect produces a composite symbolic image. The events occurred 28 years apart, but here are represented as simultaneous, entailing the judgement of negative propriety, in that the missile attack on the Palace is visually equated with the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. I think this image is designed to convey the judgement of social sanction in relation to both attacks, so evaluation is built in, or entailed in the image.

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Figure 2.

Symbolic image: equating events 28 years apart. Image from the film 9-11/9-11. © 2009 Mel Chin. Reproduced with permission.

A very large proportion of the transitions from one scene to another involve the morphing of some object from the first scene into an object in the subsequent scene. In some cases these morphs seem to be cohesive rather than evaluative, setting up parallels between events in different locations in time and space. In these morphs, the object from the first scene does not change into something completely different in the second scene. For example, the keys jingled by Mike’s wife when they are leaving the church resemble the keys jingled by Salavador’s mother to amuse him as an infant nearly 28 years earlier; and Mike’s coffee cup into which his wife is pouring his coffee becomes the coffee cup into which Julia is pouring a customer’s coffee in the World Trade Center in the subsequent scene.

In another group of morphs, neither the initial object nor the morphed object seem to identify a clear target for evaluation. It may be that these morphs presage future events. For example, early in the movie the propeller of the crop-dusting aircraft morphs into the cross on the church where Mike Smith is waiting for his wife. Perhaps this presages the role of aircraft in bringing death in this story. Later in the movie, Julia’s eyes turn into the headlights of a car which nearly hits her and Salvador crossing a road. Perhaps this can be seen as intimating Julia’s fate. But it may also be that these morphs are simply providing an aesthetically appropriate textual transition from one scene to another.

What is clear is that a very significant number of transitions involve morphs that are symbolic and do entail judgement of propriety. Three examples will be briefly discussed and a number of others noted. Early in the movie, when Mike Smith arrives in Santiago in 1973, someone hands him an election poster, which reads ‘ VOTA. MANTÉN A CHILE EN DEMONCRACIA’. Mike folds this, and the folded paper then morphs into his secret orders from the US, as shown in Figure 3.

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Figure 3.

Morphing from election pamphlet to secret orders. Images from the film 9-11/9-11. © 2009 Mel Chin. Reproduced with permission.

The folding of the election pamphlet effectively erases from view the maintaining of democracy in Chile and replaces it with the instrumental role of the US in the destruction of the Allende government. I believe evaluation of negative Judgement:Propriety with respect to the US government support for the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government is actually built into this image sequence and thus the image sequence entails evaluation. Later in the movie when Salvador is begging on the streets in the US, an African-American youth who gives him helpful advice, upon departing, flips a coin into Salvador’s begging cup. The symbolic morph from the American coin into the insignia on the dictator’s uniform heralds the meeting between Mike Smith and Pinochet. The voiceover from Mike Smith (‘Got new orders from home. Time to meet Pinochet’) affords negative Judgement:Propriety. The visual morphing of American money into the insignia as a symbol of Pinochet’s power entails negative Judgement:Propriety. This symbolic representation of the channelling of US funds adds another dimension to the impropriety of meeting with Pinochet and foreshadows the support sought by Pinochet and provided by the US.

The final morphing image occurs in the transition from Mike Smith’s suicide to Salvador’s appearance at the offices of the CIA. We first see Mike Smith’s arm and hand on the floor with his pistol on the floor beside his hand and a large flow of blood in a distinctive shape on the carpet. It is the combined shape of Mike’s hand, pistol and pool of blood that morphs into the exact shape of the shadow of Salvador opening the door to the CIA office, volunteering to do anything to overcome those responsible for the September 11 attack in the US (Figure 4). I believe this image entails an evaluation of negative Judgement:Propriety in relation to ruthless violent conflict that results in loss of humanity and self-destruction.

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Figure 4.

Morphing from Mike Smith’s suicide to Salvador’s appearance at the CIA. Images from the film 9-11/9-11. © 2009 Mel Chin. Reproduced with permission.

There are several other such symbolic morphs that entail judgement of propriety, for example, the close-up image of the handshake between the military and the civilian political leaders that morphs into the joint in the steel pipeline leading to the industrial complex, symbolizing the partnership between the force of the military and the wealth of the business and conservative political community in maintaining the Pinochet dictatorship.

Somewhat different from these symbolic morphs that entail judgement is the morphing of the head of Jorge Montes into that of a wolf (Figure 5). This occurs in the transition from Jorge indicating his pleasure at the power and access to any woman he desires, which he has achieved by becoming a member of Pinochet’s secret police, to Mike Smith’s watching a television documentary about wolves on the day of September 11, 2001. The morphing of the image of the face of Jorge Montes to that of a wolf’s face certainly communicates negative Judgement:Propriety in relation to the predatory animal-like pursuit of political and social dominance, which Jorge now embodies. But the question is whether this morphing actually inscribes judgement. Is the symbolism of the wolf as a feared predator sufficient evidence that the representation of Jorge’s head turning into that of a wolf is inscribing judgement? If this proposal were to be pursued, further examples would be needed to confirm it; however, what does seem very clear is that this morph at least exceptionally strongly entails negative Judgement:Propriety.

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Figure 5.

Morphing of Jorge Montes. Images from the film 9-11/9-11. © 2009 Mel Chin. Reproduced with permission.

There is at least one example where judgement is absent from the visual morph itself, but in synchrony with the dialogue the morph does provoke judgement. This occurs early in the movie in the room with Julia and Salvador when Julia is about to depart for work in New York on 11 September 2001. Her face appears in profile as she says, ‘I’ll be fine’. Immediately thereafter her face morphs to the face of Mike, as shown in Figure 6, who says by phone in Chile, back on the same day in 1973, ‘You’ll be fine … Do the job.’

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Figure 6.

Morphing Julia to Mike. Images from the film 9-11/9-11. © 2009 Mel Chin. Reproduced with permission.

This visual overlay brings into sharp relief our knowledge that Julia will not be fine in New York on that day, but also that, while the agent Mike Smith is talking to will be fine on that day in 1973, the Chilean victims, like Julia, will certainly not be fine. It seems to me that this image sequence in combination with the language provokes an evaluation of negative Judgement:Propriety for the callous disregard of individual human life in orchestrating the La Moneda bombing.

Some of the transitional morphs in the 9/11-9/11 movie do not seem to involve evaluation. These have been referred to as cohesive morphs and presaging morphs. It has been argued that a significant number of morphs clearly entail judgement, at least one may well inscribe judgement, while another in conjunction with the synchronous soundtrack provokes judgement.

Towards a Description of Inscribing and Invoking Judgement in Images

In considering a modified extrapolation from the description of strategies for inscribing and invoking attitude in language (Martin and White, 2005) to a description of strategies for communicating judgement in images, it would appear that to invite such evaluation in images can involve similar strategies to the options for language of flag and afford. The concept of verbal graduation or intensifying evaluation through quantification (Martin and White, 2005), as, for example, in ‘tens of thousands of refugees died’, was shown to be comparable to visual quantification in the images from The Tin-Pot Foreign General … (Briggs, 1984) where the indefinitely large number of maimed returned soldiers and the similarly highly graduated image of multiple graves of soldiers, were seen to flag negative Judgement:Propriety.

What is clear from the several data sources examined is that the alternative invoking strategy to invite, which Martin and White designated as provoke, requires a more differentiated account in relation to images. The broader alternative to invite proposed here is direct, as indicated in Figure 7. There are two more delicate options within direct, which are differentiated according their relative constraint on freedom of interpretation by the viewer. The greatest constraint, or closest to the inscribe strategy, is the entail strategy. This is where a symbolic attribute (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006[2001]) within the image is culturally understood to explicitly cue the particular judgement to be made, so that with such images it would hardly be credible that they could be read without interpreting the judgement constructed within the design of the image. This is the case with visual metaphors as exemplified in the image of former Australian Prime Minister playing a game of cards with the nuclear warning symbol as the cards’ design. It is also the case with the image of Dad in the picture book Zoo (Browne, 1994) where the cloud shapes have the effect of forming a set of horns on the sides of his head. In moving images, the symbolic attribute can be dynamic as in the morphing of the insignia on the US coin into the insignia on the badge on Pinochet’s cap in the 9/11-9/11movie (Chin, 2008).

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Figure 7.

Inscribing and evoking judgement of propriety in images.

The provoke option is considered to be somewhat less restrictive of viewer freedom in interpretation than the entail option although still directive. One means of visually provoking judgement is where there are within the image or image sequence ideational meanings that are incongruous. In Photographs in the Mud (Wolfer and Harrison-Lever, 2005), the embedded images of the soldiers’ family members within the main battle images exemplify the provocation of judgement arising from such incongruity, and perhaps also from a certain cultural perspective, the ‘hook’ prosthesis in the image of the Middle Eastern man in the Economou (2009) data. Another realization of the provoke strategy is visual parallelism within or across images as discussed in the early part of the article in the images from the picture book Gorilla (Browne, 1983). There are similar parallelisms provoking evaluation in the 9/11-9/11 movie (Chin, 2008). In the early part of the movie, for example, we see Mike Smith’s bedside table with his pistol prominent and the card indicating welcome to Santiago in Chile. Soon after, we see the bedside table for Salvador and Julia with the painting brushes and cigarettes (Figure 8).

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Figure 8.

Example of parallelism in the 9-11/9-11 movie. Images from the film 9-11/9-11. © 2009 Mel Chin. Reproduced with permission.

I suggest that the design of these parallel images goes beyond the notion of ideational tokens affording evaluation. They are designed to provoke evaluation, but cannot be said to entail evaluation in the same manner as the symbolic morphs. Intermodal realization of provoke occurred in the Briggs story with the language indicating that the large container on the dock contained the bodies of soldiers and also in the 9/11-9/11 morph of Julia and Mike Smith. In this case there seemed to be nothing in the image morph per se that would invoke judgement and, although it would be difficult to see invoked judgement in Julia’s words, the sequence of uttterances by Julia and Mike Smith in combination with the morphed overlay of their faces does seem to more strongly provoke negative Judgement:Propriety of Mike Smith, since, while at this stage we do not know that Julia will die, we do know that New York is not going to be safe as she thought and this emphasizes the terror resulting from Mike Smith’s utterance ‘do the job.’

While this has been a somewhat limited exploration of a cline of invocation of judgement of propriety in images, the strategies that have been identified seem to be plausibly differentiated. A number of different realizations for various strategies have been identified which, to some extent, seem to be related to the depiction style and communication media, such as the use of embedded sepia simulated photographs functioning in some visual contexts in Photographs in the Mud (Wolfer and Harrison-Lever, 2005) as provoke images. However, it is also the case that some realizations were common across different media such as the parallelisms in picture books like Gorilla (Browne, 1983) and in the 9/11-9/11 (Chin, 2008) movie, and the commonality of the symbolic attribute in images which entail judgement, albeit that in the movie the symbolism was achieved dynamically. These initial findings suggest a potentially robust approach, which, with further exploration of a broader range of data may well extend and refine the tentative description outlined here.

Conclusions and Implications for Further Analysis of Multimodal Persuasive Narratives

A number of studies in the tradition of SFL have addressed the multimodal semiotics of persuasive narratives – predominantly in media texts and texts of popular culture (Caple, 2008, 2010; Macken-Horarik, 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Martin, 2002, 2006, 2008; Martin and Rose, 2008). There is a need to extend this work in relation to multimodal literary narratives (Martin, 2006, 2008; Painter et al., 2013), particularly to inform emerging multimodal literacy and literary pedagogies responding to the multimodal re-conceptualization of English curricula in schools.

In this article, the selection of narratives challenging discourses that naturalize war and armed struggle as approaches to resolving conflict has given immediate emphasis to literary narratives as persuasive texts and has facilitated a focus on images and image–language relations that construct judgements of propriety. What has not been discussed are other visual narrative techniques that are crucial in constructing evaluative stance and aligning the viewer with the ideological view(s) privileged in the texts. In the case of the 9/11-9/11 movie (Chin, 2008), for example, a key concern is that terrorist atrocities, including the US-supported bombing of La Moneda in Chile in 1973, are perpetuated by people who have become completely bereft of empathy and individual human caring, to the extent that they are prepared to ‘do anything’ to achieve political goals. The characterization of the US agent, Mike Smith, is central to the development of this theme. Not only is there no mention of the human trauma caused by his mission in Chile, but also we see him alienated from his daughter and detached from his wife and particularly from her suffering following the death of their daughter. He is also interpersonally detached from us as viewers in that the only time we make eye contact with Mike Smith, and the only time his face expresses affect, is when he sees on television the attack on the twin towers in New York in 2001. Visual focalization is also used to support this interpretation. We are only ever very briefly positioned to have a point of view along with, or as if we were the character of Mike, when he receives his orders and in his interview with Pinochet. We are never so positioned in contexts where he is interacting with his family. Of course, there are additional ways in which visual interactive meanings constructing pseudo-interpersonal relations between viewers and represented characters and visual focalization position viewers in relation to the point of view of characters, and such visual narrative persuasive techniques need to be considered in combination with the nature of evaluative images as discussed herein.

What has been demonstrated in this article, especially in relation to the evaluative nature of the symbolic transitional morphs in 9-11/9-11, is that the affordances of the media and the depiction style can create distinctive forms of images and image–language interaction that, in turn, offer new approaches to constructing evaluative stance. Clearly much remains to be done in explicating the nature and role of evaluative images in literary narratives as books and animated movies, the interaction of such images with language, and the distinctiveness, as well as the intertextuality, of multimodal persuasive techniques in narratives.