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cinema and links
one relation
This essay first appeared as "Cinematic paradigms for hypertext." in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13.2 July (1999): 217-226.
However, I do not wish to criticise the colonisation of the cinematic by hypertext, but rather to alter the rules of engagement. Instead of attempting to think what cinema might offer hypertext, which already assumes a particular territorialisation of hypertext in terms of written discourse, I want to propose that hypertext has always been cinematic and that what I'm characterising as the "allure of the cinematic" evident in recent hypertext theory is merely the expression of an immanence that has always been present, though unrecognised. While Michael Joyce once, rather famously, commented that "hypertext is the word's revenge on TV" (Joyce, 1995: 47) I'd like to suggest that hypertext is in fact cinema's revenge on the word, and what I am interested in exploring is the word's remaking of itself in the light of the cinematic. This 'allure of the cinematic' as the expression of an always immanent cinematic force 2 probably takes various forms, however through the comparison of a particular cinematic moment or gesture - the edit - in the light of a particular hypertextual moment or gesture - the link, this force is given, in some manner, corporeal expression.
While there is considerable research in cinema studies regarding editing most of this has been subsumed under general categories of particular styles (Bordwell, 1985, 1997, Chatman, 1990). For instance in 'classical continuity cutting' the function of editing is defined in terms of a concealment of the constructed nature of film and narrative, and to present a seamless fusion of events, character, and movement. Of course there are many other styles of film making, and many other theoretical descriptions of these, but in general most of these descriptions treat editing as an integral process of construction (whether for the film maker, the film, or the reader) and are about the organisation of story, space, and represented event. Even where film theory or practice is explicitly dealing with the edit, for instance Russian montage cinema, one finds that while the emphasis falls on the 'leap' that the edit performs this edit is merely facilitating the expression of a transcendental condition. Interestingly this is probably not the case with Dziga Vertov's work, in particular his theory of the 'interval', and while many commentators have struggled to describe or contextualise Vertov's interval (often through rather forced modernist valorisations, for instance Petric, 1987), Deleuze's description of the interval in terms of a moment of indecision, or of possible decision, in the sensory motor schema of the action image has strong affinities with the hypertext link. (Deleuze, 1986: 39-40).
In a curiously analogous manner links in hypertext, and their theorisation, reveal a similar history. Early hypertext theory, for example Landow's seminal "The Rhetoric of Hypermedia" (Landow, 1994) concentrates on links as devices of connection where the emphasis falls on the intelligibility of the origin and destination of links but not on the links themselves. While being a node 'centric' description its effect is to 'erase' the work of the link, as in classical continuity editing - for Landow, the link is principally a mechanism that facilitates the movement between nodes. Similarly Slatin, in an exemplary early essay, emphasises the role of links as associative pathways. This argument relies upon a naturalising and psychologised zero degree of transparent intentionality where, once again, the link is subject to the content of its origin and destination, now doubled in the relation of link to node and of mind to writer. In more recent Web based hypertext practice much the same process is evident, here not only do links become dumbed down servants of already signposted commands (up, down, left, right, back, next, etc) but there is considerable investment - financial, aesthetic and theoretical - in the redundant nomination of link function through buttons, logos and textual cues, the graphical equivalent of the ubiquitous 'click here'.
What is common to theory's occlusion of the work performed by the edit in cinema, and the link in hypertext, is a two fold dilution of this interval into, on the one hand, merely a technique that facilitates connection, and on the other an active effort to conceal or disavow this connectivity into the material within the node or shot that is being connected. This allows narrative, event, or theme to appear to motivate this connectivity, and so produces classical modes of normative realism. 3 The link or the edit is made subject to the representational content of the work, and while it is unclear whether there may be a 'realist' hypertext style analogous to classical film narrative redundant link legibility and the 'naturalised' graphical link could well be it.
In both domains the invisibility of this interval has produced a privileging of content spaces over their points of connection, but it is the possibility of there being connections that, in a rather banal way, makes each medium possible. In other words if we don't have links we don't have hypertext (certainly of the link node variety 4) and this truism needs to be given due regard, as recent theory increasingly recognises:
To commemorate the third epoch of writing, the hypertext link will be made to carry its own signification, much as narrative has become its own kind of study today. So, in an attempt to add to that scholarly pursuit, I will propose the notion of a paratext, a dimension of signification that begins within text, but might systematically be shown to spawn its own narrative depictions. (Ricardo, 1998: 142).
Nodes without links are books, it is the presence of links that confers hypertextuality upon a discursive object, and while I am not willing to argue that the same can be said for the role of the edit in cinema (after all it is possible to have a cinema that consists of a single shot), the role of the camera in producing an enframed set does suggest strongly that the cinematic shot is formed by a simultaneous separation and insertion into a series of constricting and expanding sets (Deleuze, 1986: 12-28). Similarly in hypertext writing the possibility of the link offers itself as an open set, and while any particular link constrains this set, the link retains an aspect of this open set in its divisibility. This is one of the manners in which I would characterise the experience of hypertext linking, and this suggests that the intelligibility of the link and edit is an indirect problem, that is a cognitive or perceptual question, and it is the possibility of there being the possibility of a link or edit that needs accounting for.
Of course, in some ways, this is a caricature of film and hypertext theory, for there is considerable work that examines links and edits. However, this work can be characterised by its effort to present, or at least discover, a principle of classification that would allow links and edits to be described and catalogued. In cinema studies this work reached its zenith in the high structural work of Christian Metz (1974), and the more recent narratological work of someone like Seymour Chatman (1988, 1990), while in hypertext it is represented by work such as Burbules' "Rhetorics of the Web" (1997), Lanham's (1993) general rhetorical entreaty, and possibly even the research examining annotation practices being conducted by Xerox PARC (for example Marshall, 1998, and Price et al, 1998).
This general project appears to want to be able to produce or define typologies of link types prior to any particular hypertext analysis or readerly navigation, but like its cinematic equivalent its belief in the presence of a definable metastructure or system owes more to the reifications of structuralism (or possibly late modernism) than to the pragmatics of link or edit use. It is clear that links and edits have rhetorical force, they do make connections between parts, they generate, demonstrate, even perform, arguments, and these do involve sets of relations between source, destination, and reading context. However, the point is not that they can be described prior to their appearance, but that they are the product of their conditions in practice, in other words they are what Deleuze and Guattari describe as an assemblage: 'As long as linguistics confines itself to constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or phonological, it ties the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject and accordingly botches the assemblage" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 82). The problem, or question, is not what types of assemblage can be made, but what makes the assemblage possible. This is intended as a nave question.
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