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The difficulty of modifying images once they were recorded was exactly what gave cinema its value as a document, assuring its authenticity. The rigidity of the film image has defined the limits of cinema as I defined it earlier - that is to say, the super-genre of live-action narrative. Although it includes within itself a variety of styles - the result of the efforts of many directors, designers, and cinematographers - these styles share a strong family resemblance. They are all children of the recording process that uses lenses, regular sampling of time, and photographic media. They are all children of a machine vision.
The mutability of digital data impairs the value of cinema recordings as documents of reality. In retrospect, we can see that twentieth-century cinema's regime of visual realism, the result of automatically recording visual reality, was only an exception, an isolated accident in the history of visual representation, which has always involved, and now again involves, the manual construction of images. Cinema becomes a particular branch of painting - painting in time. No longer a kino-eye, but a kino-brush. (Manovich 1999, p. 192.)
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Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information