Thinking involves images, words, or numbers. Words can be heard, unheard, or vaguely heard, in a language one knows, one knows somewhat, or not at all. Images can be static, moving, or suggestive of movement; at a realistic or an artificial rate; backward or forward; in some range of colors or tonalities; large or small; flat or three-dimensional; virtual or material. Numbers we shall largely relinquish to the realm of mathematicians and musicians, remembering all the while that, not for nothing, Goethe called architecturefrozen music, that since Leonardo—and especially since Whistler—painters have appealed to music as an analogous art, and furthermore, that in these digital times some images are essentially numeric. Cinema involves all three: images, words, and music, or put more abstractly, issues of visibility, audibility, and—pervasively—of rhythm. T.S. Eliot praised Chaplin for exactly that: ‘The egregious merit of Chaplin is that he has escaped in his own way from the realism of the cinema and invented a rhythm’.

To be alive is to process such semantic entities. To be making them also for posterity is the business of authors, artists, and composers, including those of the theater, opera, and ballet. Words and images have competed for priority across the length and breadth of Western art.