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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
1.autonomous.shot

The autonomous shot is a single shot that constitutes, by itself, an autonomous segment. This means that, unlike the other examples, this is not a syntagma since it is not constituted by a series (a series of shots). To be an autonomous shot the single shot needs to represent an episode and the entire shot is the minimal unit for the sequence (ordinarily a sequence is made up of a series of shots).

The autonomous shot does not have to be particularly long, indeed to equate the status or typology with shot length is to misinterpret the role of the syntagmatic unit, but can, in many instances be extremely long. For instance, there are the examples of films that are made up of entire autonomous shots - Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, all of Czech xx ouevre, and Mike Leigh's recent Timecode, for instance.

However, the autonomous shot can also be a short shot, remembering that the definition is determined by its context and content, so that in many instances what is known as an insert can be an autonomous shot. Metz defines four subcategories, the nondiegetic, subjective, displaced diegetic and explanatory inserts, however these distinctions are, generally, difficult to maintain in practice and are probably of more value as categories.

A hypertext example of such work could be the hypertext fiction of Adrienne Eisen where large single narrative units are contained in individual nodes with only three or four links contained at the end of each node. On the other hand this is also an excellent example of the role of the syntagmatic segement in hypertext since this fiction achieves its effect through its cumulative reading.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
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