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If we are to move from integration to innovation, from hypertext as print's auxiliary to hypertext as an independent cultural agency, our conceptions need a further evolution. We need to consider situations in which the intersection of hypertext and linear media produces not harmony but dissonance - not a constructive but a deconstructive hypertext. (Moulthrop, 1991.)
The strictly linguistic laws cease when nothing is any longer obligatory, when ordering becomes "free." But that is the point where film begins; it is immediately and automatically situated on the plane of rhetorics and poetics. (Metz, p. 81.)
Any brief examination of recent writing on hypertext, including papers delivered at recent major conferences where hypertext is represented, reveals what appears to be a steadily increasing interest in the relation of cinema to hypertext.
This interest, characteristically, appears to concentrate on what cinema may teach us about nodal relations and link typologies where the example afforded by the cinema is rifled in an effort to seek classificatory rules, exemplars, and a rhetoric for hypertextual sequencing. Here cinema is examined in terms of how film has established, defined, and considered the relations between its parts (shots, sequences, episodes) and how these relations facilitate meaning, sense, and comprehension.
This essay aims to examine the work of cinema semiotician Christian Metz, who developed a syntagmatic schema of the varieties of cinematic sequence, and to describe the extent to which these offer a methodology to reconsider our notions of link rhetoric and link typology. This essay argues that much of the appropriation of cinema within hypertext is founded on a common misconception of there being an a priori formal cinematic grammar. Cinema relies upon the contextual and pragmatic basis of connection for the production of meaning, and has clear applicability to a posteriori attempts to determine rhetorical structure in hypertext. The assumption of an isomorphic relation between hypertext and cinema is fundamental to this thesis.
This work includes video examples (utilising QuickTime) to illustrate key concepts, and is written as an academic hypertext. In deference to JoDI's principals of usability a thematic map is provided.
Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information