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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
Metz.e

Kuleshov's experiments . . . were considered for many years the "scientific" basis for the supremacy of montage. No one, however, has paid sufficient attention to the fact that, in the midst of the age of "montage or bust," there existed another interpretation of those famous experiments. . . . It was contained in Béla Baláz's book Der Geist des Films (1930). With a kind of shrewdness peculiar to him, the Hungarian theoretician remarked that, if montage was indeed sovereign, it was so by necessity, for, when two images were juxtaposed purely by chance, the viewer would discover a "connection." That, and nothing else, is what Kuleshov's experiments demonstrated. . . . Jean Mitry elaborates in much greater detail an interpretation of the "Kuleshov effect" . . . He concludes that the famous experiments in no way authorize the theory of "montage or bust" (according to which the diegesis is marginal to the development of montage effects, which tend to produce an abstract logic, or piece of eloquence, independent of the film itself). They simply demonstrate the existence of a "logic of implication," thanks to which the image becomes language, and which is inseperable from the film's narrativity. (Metz, pp. 46-7.)

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