Let's see how this reflects on my practice within film studies/film criticism and your reception of it. Suppose I am writing a paper on subliminal signals in contemporary cinematography and chose Fight Club as my case study. Few minutes ago I watched an excerpt from the film and will present you with this short analysis/description jotted down on the spot:

The scene begins with Ed Norton's narrator introducing Tyler Durden. As he speaks his first lines revealing Durden to be a night owl, we stare at a magnifying glass that slowly focuses on pictures lying beneath it. Gradually, as we get more information, what appears to be buttocks morphs into a torso and finally - a rather bulky penis. This sexual hint is reinforced in the very next shot by an image of Tyler cutting a film stock as if circumcising it. Durden's one day shadow and black rings around his eyes prove narrator's statement about his sleeping habits to be correct. America's dearest - Brad Pitt plays this film's enfant terrible against his image - together with his navy blue starry T-shirt and red trousers, it might be read as a statement about decline of American values. As characters engage in their first interaction in that scene, they visibly break the fourth wall. While Durden explains how he's pasting frames from porn films into cartoons, a so called "cigarette burn" indicating a necessity of a reel change appears on our screens. Subsequently, we move to characters' point-of-view shot of a cinema audience exposed to the subliminal tinkering of Tyler. As we move along the concentrated faces, suddenly something flashes in front of our eyes, as if one or two frames were missing. Same as with cigarette burn, also this time the diegesis of the film is being broken and Tyler's extra frame appears on our screens as well. We might conclude with narrator's own words: "I don't know if a hummingbird would catch that, but it worked".

The funny thing with the text is that regardless of what you know or don't know about this film, regardless of what is true to the image or not, this description makes sense in its own right. Even if you've never seen Fight Club and don't know who Brad Pitt is, you already have an internally coherent notion of that scene. Words usually don't need images to become meaningful, since they hinge on ideas (which in turn might be composed of multiple images as well). If all the copies of David Fincher's film spontaneously combusted during the night - this text would stay meaningful.

Saying this, I don't even remotely suggest that the text above is a valuable piece of critical analysis or that it might be superior to the film itself. On the contrary, even if it was a brilliant piece of prose and not a rushed attempt of producing valid example, it is far from being faithful to the original. Some things I didn't remember well, some things just came together for the sake of the argument, although the evidence was disputable, others are simply products of vocabulary, grammar, style and composition. Moreover, the amount of details I forgot to metion is always going to be greater than the small group of those which I described (since images are infinite within their frames). These are the problems on my part, but what about the reader? What did you see under those few chosen terms?