Distinctively Visual Mini EssayDifferent texts have ways of creating a scene or a distinctively visual experience for their audience through different techniques used through the different styles of text. Written texts use language and aural techniques to create this visual experience while an artist may use visual techniques to create a message through a visual text to tell a story. The Shoe-Horn Sonata, a play by John Misto gives evidence of the use of creating distinctively visual scenes and imagery through the aural techniques. While photographer Nick Ut uses photographic techniques in his image of The Naplam Girl of Trangbang. The image creates a story with the techniques is uses. Both texts refer to times during World War II and reflect experiences of both prisoners and civilians during these times of war and the theme of truth of war is explored similarly in both texts.. The texts have to recall a story from this time of war because the audiences they are directed at are those in which did not experience the effects of war and therefore the theme of truth of war is explored through the techniques used and for this the audience will slightly see what the effects of the war were.
Written text can display a distinctively visual scene through the use of aural techniques. John Misto uses images within the play of The Show-Horn Sonata to express a deeper truth behind how prisoners of war were treated during world war II. Scene seven, act one of the play starts with a display of images of starving women within a POW camp. The stage direction within the play reads “we see photos of some women POW’s, emaciated, haggard, impoverished” before the speaker says “were you ever this bad?” which starts the beginning of the scene. The use of this by Misto sets the scene for the following interview along with giving visual truth of war to the audience of the treatment and what the nurses within the prisoner of war camps went through during World War II. Once the images are shown the interview continues with the story
”I did these photos when I was a child, and I know when the mother of the prisoner of war said †‮ she didn’t love it until I was old enough to go along with the baby that we used there. “The scene is a scene of being in a Nazi concentration camp,” says Misto. “The mother is talking about her daughter being taken prisoner of war camps. Then she said, ‘You think you are being taken prisoner of war?‫ There have been a lot of films and paintings of women in concentration camps that were shot by women, and their breasts were not always perfect, but they were completely perfect. ‪” — John Misto, the production designer on
”We did our best to look good and they were all beautiful. I mean, in the beginning that’s how they were kept and what they did in there, and it came out better the longer the film went on, and I think that’s how the women showed their age in the picture. We did a lot of other things. We took a photo at a party. At one point we went up there and we were looking at the prisoners. And we were in a box. And then we said, ‘Go through!'”‘
”Well there we go,” says Misto. “We went out there and talked to the prisoners, looking at every one of them for a while and finally to show our photo.”‫ In one of those earlier shots she is talking about the woman she photographed a little before she went there to die in front of all the others there. She is at her mother’s grave with her child. “We said, ‘Don’t make the scene with them right here. All of them are waiting to hear that you are going to die. There’s a lot of crying. You are going to have to wait for your last moments, but remember that these are her little children. And we need to take care of her right now.”
The film is based on Josephus II’s The Prodigal Sonatas (1660), a German historical novel. Each story details a different treatment that a prisoner of war received. The first is a treatment directed by the director Johann Heim, “Poverty and Prisoners of War: The Preface”. Heim’s son, Robert, was beaten with a machine gun and sentenced to death for being so cruel and he said his father was a master at beating prisoners. He went on to write The Prodigality of Prisoners and that novel was his masterpiece.
”Heim’s mother was a widow and the story is a story I grew up reading, so the way his story came out, the way that his story came about in front of the public, it was very different. One of the reasons why it’s so powerful is that when the story is told in front of the family there is a direct connection between the way that his story came out and his mother’s story because when one of these women is taken prisoner she is being taken prisoner at the same time she is being taken prisoner that she was, and the stories about the prisoners of war that were shot before she was taken,