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The potential isomorphic relation of cinema to hypertext has been argued in considerable detail elsewhere (Miles, 1999, Mancini, 2000). This relation is founded on a simple equivlance of nodes to shots, and links to edits. Most simply, the minimal cinematic unit is already a complex linguistic statement, even where it might only consist of a close-up, and the combination of the units into larger units is what constitutes 'articulation' and meaning production within each medium.
In this earlier work I relied very strongly on Volume One of Gilles Deleuze's cinema philosophy - largely to begin to explore the nature of the 'force' that resides in the link and edit that allows two apparently autonomous fragments to cohere. This essay takes this 'force' as given (though its presence and expression remains untheorised), and does assume that there is a semiotic equivlance between the problems posed by cinematic 'writing' - of joining discrete shots, and hypertext writing - of joining discrete nodes.
Furthermore, just as Kuleshov demonstrated early in the twentieth century, cinema is able to join these discrete fragments and in their combination not only generate new meanings (or interpretations) but also change the meaning of what lies within the shot itself. This cannot be underestimated. On the one hand there is a hermeneutic outcome derived from the juxtaposition of A and B; a rose followed by a close up of two hands clasped suggests 'love', and on the other the content of the shot itself can vary dramatically in its own meaning, while remaining unchanged, by virtue of the juxtapositions it is placed within; the same image of a rose followed by a close up of a burning photograph of a couple can suggest 'loss'.
That this applies to hypertext is, I would hope, clear. Where it departs dramatically from the example of our ordinary conceptions of grammar and language is in the specificity of the units of combination: in a sentence a word gains its reference in its particular use and then in relation to all that it is not. The image of the rose gains its meaning from its very specific referentiality. In other words semiotics demonstrates that the word 'rose' in 'my love is a rose' gains its meaning because it is not 'geranium,' 'pansy,' 'orchid,' or even 'nose'. However, in the cinematic example no such meaning by substitution occurs, it is only, and always, a particular rose with specific qualities.
As a consequence, and as Metz makes abundantly clear, there is no real paradigmatic axis in the cinema, and this is also so in hypertext - when I write hypertext I can link more or less to anywhere and there are no necessary rules of combination that exclude or promote particular destinations. This suggests that it is within the series of combinations formed by links, what Metz in the cinematic case characterises as autonomous syntagmatic units, that hypertext structure resides.
Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
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