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Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
traditional.cinema

Many attempts to utilise or consider the example of cinema in hypertext have relied upon what is a hegemonic conception of film narrative. This conception is derived from the Hollywood studio cinema of the late 1930s to the end of the 1950s, and is a result of the emphasis that such content has received in academic cinema studies.

It is a considerable error to assume however, on the basis of this particular cinematic history, that what is defined is either descriptive of all cinematic narrative practice, or indeed of fiction and nonfiction film. In what is an admittedly dangerous generalisation, this theoretical history has emphasised the ways in which what is now known as 'classical cinema' expressed, maintained, or reflected various ideological positions, and it is to this extent that the formal narrative model expressed in this cinema emphasised a particular form of narrative realism (Bordwell, 1985, Nichols, 1976.).

As Bordwell, among others, has demonstrated, this cinema has a series of quite specific rules about sequence composition that has, through critical reflection and reification, developed the status of a quasi film grammar. That the cinema does not have a grammar, in the ordinarily conceived sense of the term, is today reasonably well established (as indeed Bordwell (1995) makes clear in his analysis of different narrative styles, see also Nichols, 1991), and the implications of this are yet to be fully developed.

These rules of composition and sequence are largely 'motivated' by character psychology - character x looks towards a sound, we see the origin of the sound, as well as character action - character y gets up and leaves frame, we cut to another location. As Bordwell elaborately demonstrates, the explication of this in terms of character actions is largely a method to 'explain' the system through the construction of realist assumptions of character motivation, but narratologically there is no particular reason to think that a character shoots another character because she's angry (or scared), than that it's a horror film and a monster must be met.

This normative cinematic realism (a realism that ought not to be confused with the veridical status of the photographic image) is a style, historically contingent, and is not a fundamental or necessary grammar to cinematic narration. This is instructive as the assumptions that this realism express are shared in much of the hypertext research, and to the extent that classical narrative cinema only represents a style - rather than an essential and necessary practice - these assumptions in hypertext are problematised.

The formal rules that mark classical narrative film largely refer to what is required within (or without) the frame to allow the shot to be edited to other shots to form a sequence. In other words, the classical narrative film concentrates more on editing and montage than on a series of rules for what ought to be in the camera frame (that is, on the production of unified syntagmatic series). That this is similar to hypertext ought to be reasonably apparent - witness for example Landow's (1994) early but important essay on the rhetoric of link types where the emphasis falls on rules of connection rather than rules of content.

Furthermore, to the extent that there is a standardised form of cinema narration - 'classical' Hollywood style - it is generally accepted today that this development was a requirement of a studio (and so Taylorised and industrial) mode of production. In other words, because creative roles were performed almost independently of each other there needed to be clear procedures of construction. This would allow, for instance, a team of editors to be able to cut a film independently of the director since they would know what footage would be provided and available.

These rules generally involve and require the use of an establishing shot, point of view shots, and the maintenance of what is known as the 180 degree rule, but they also included rules about screen movement, cutting on action, and the movement of bodies across screen borders. What is evident in each of these rules is that their role is much less to facilitate narrative than to conceal articulation, that they are in effect simply a mode of narrative realism rather than a grammar per se. Much writing on hypertext links is similarly constrained by an uncritical realist assumption, and confuses this with reading and writing context.

The examples provided here are illustrative, and are intended to demonstrate that it is the larger context of the narrative that helps determine what a particular connection might mean. These contexts do operate teleologically - not in the sense of a closed or finite interpetation or set of meanings, but in terms of providing a grounding for interpreting the local. The intercutting in the rescue in Keaton's Our Hospitality, for instance, is a rescue and not an escape.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
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