Understanding Reframing with Physics and The Titanic (The Movie)

While the second example is a bit dated (Titanic is over approaching its third decade in circulation!) the logic holds and can be applied to a variety of films set in a historical context:

I think of these perspectives as frames of reference. Within the field of physics, for example, a frame of reference is a framework that is used to observe and describe a physical phenomenon. It is a structure of views or values used to understand and evaluate data. (For example, imagine two people standing, facing each other on either side of a sidewalk.

If a skateboarder rides down the sidewalk between them, for the person on one side of the sidewalk, the skateboarder is moving to the right; for the person on the other side, the skateboarder is moving to the left. The two people constitute two different frames of reference from which to describe the skateboarder’s movement.) By placing data into a certain frame of reference, interpreters are able to describe it in a particular way. In fact, reframing a collection of data into different frames of reference yields new meanings that aren’t necessarily visible from other frameworks. And if we place the same set of data into different frames of reference, we are often able to understand and describe it in more than one way.

For a nonscientific example, think about the ways that contemporary movies often take known facts about a historical person or event and reframe them within a storyline that gives them new dimensions of meaning. We might think here of the many movies made about the sinking of the Titanic cruise liner in 1912. One of the most recent of these movies, for instance, incorporated the names of historical persons involved in the events into a fictional, tragic love story of a romance forbidden by the social and economic class divisions of the time.

This film creatively used various facts to tell a different story, and in the process left its viewers with new ways of imagining the personalities and actions of some of the real-life persons who experienced the actual event.

The point is that frames of reference are ways of gathering and viewing certain materials that bring out new dimensions of meaning. Whether physicists, moviegoers, or readers of scripture, observers can switch frames of reference and see different emphases and insights.