Essential McLuhan 128 een 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 at 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 emphatically 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 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 two men to an African audience and one had finished his business and he went off the edge of the screen, the audience wanted to know what had happened to him; they didn’t accept that this was just the end of him and that he was of no more interest in the story. They wanted to know what happened to this fellow, and we had to write stories that way, putting in a lot of material that wasn’t to us necessary. We had to follow him along