The narrative limitations of pure pictures stems from their inability to make propositions. As Sol Worth has argued, visual media lack the code, the grammar, and the syntactic rules necessary to articulate specific meanings (Ryan 10) There are certain types of statements that seem totally beyond their reach (Ryan 10) Being limited to the visible, they are unable to express abstract ideas, such as causality (Ryan 11) Reading images is a matter of training just like in the case of studying a foreign language, the grammar and syntax of images has to be learned and practiced in order to decode their meaning If we define narrative in cognitive terms, it is not a linguistic object but a mental image While it may be true that only language can express the causal relations that hold a narrative together, this does not mean that a text needs to represent these relations explicitly to be interpreted as a narrative What matters [] is the spectators ability to infer from the text The human mind seeks patterns such as cause and effect The patterns we uncover are, to a certain extent, culturally conditioned From his experiments, Bartlett concluded that people tend to rationalize material that they are remembering. In other words, they try to make it easier to understand the material, and modify it into something they feel more comfortable with. (Foster 17) The scene in which Brabantio accuses Othello of bewitching his daughter establishes the storyworld Existents Setting Social rules and values Events Mental Events The Principle of Minimal Departure When a text mentions an object that exists in reality, all the real-world properties of this object can be imported into the storyworld unless explicitly contradicted by the text (Ryan 35) In the case of an adaption, the source material can become an object within the storyworld of the adaptation e.g. in Harlem Duet the 1928 incarnation of Othello quotes several lines of Shakespeare O is not just an adaptation of Shakespeare It engages not just the text of Othello but also the aura of significance surrounding the original text the storyworld is extended such that it includes the source material as well The movie begins and ends with Ave Maria from Verdis Otello The story is framed by Hugo (Iago) (he narrates both the first and the final scene) Iago is given a clear motivation The audience empathizes with him All my life I always wanted to fly. I always wanted to live like a hawk. I know you're not supposed to be jealous of anything, but... to take flight, to soar above everything and everyone, now that's living (first lines) All my life I always wanted to fly. I always wanted to live like a hawk. I know you're not supposed to be jealous of anything, but... to take flight, to soar above everything and everyone, now that's living. But a hawk is no good around normal birds. It can't fit in. Even though all the other birds probably wanna be hawks; they hate him for what they can't be. Proud. Powerful. Determined. Dark. Odin is a hawk. He soars above us. He can fly. One of these days, everyone's gonna pay attention to me. Because I'm gonna fly too (last lines) Odin (Othello) is by no means innocent he has violent tendencies, he is aggressive and impulsive Racial issues are almost never addressed explicitly, however, it is always present implicitly The story is set in the South Othello is African-American (and he is the only African-American in the movie) Arguably an effect of the MD principleMy life is over, that's it. But while all ya'll are out here livin' yours, sitting around talking about the nigger who lost it back in high school, you make sure you tell them the truth. You tell them I loved that girl! I did! But I got played![Points to Hugo]He twisted my head up. He fucked it up. I ain't no different than none of ya'll. My mom ain't no crack head. I wasn't no gang banger. It wasn't some hood rat drug dealer that tripped me up. It was this white, prep school motherfucker standing right there! You tell them where I'm from... didn't make me do this.[Shoots himself in the chest, collapses] When O demands that Hugo tell him why he deceived him I did what I did, and that's all you need to know. From here on out I say nothing O reframes Shakespeares Othello into a contemporary story of betrayal and intrigue Though the movie maintains a certain kind of dialogue with the original text, the relation between these two texts is not the issue at hand The movie attempts to reframe the contemporary issue of race and racism from a broader cultural and historical perspective The most significant borrowing from the Shakesperean text is the cultural significance attached to it, rather than the plot itself