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HyperText project
Solstrand seminar: something borrowed, something . . .
Singin' in the Rain is a hypermedia essay written in 1996 that is a traditional close reading of the "You Were Meant for Me" sequence from the film. It includes the extract within the space of the writing, generally as sections included in the analysis of the parts of the sequence.
This is preliminary work in many ways, but is actively about the role of digitised video in academic cinema studies. In this example it is largely a test of its viability, but it largely works as illustration. What was of interest in writing the essay was that including the sequence meant that my writing no longer needed to describe, but to interrogate. A more interesting outcome, and one that only presented itself towards the end of the essay, is the page where I compare the opening and closing of the film via a series of contrasted stills. I regard this as more significant than the video per se as this is beginning to develop a critical visual rhetoric applicable to film theory in hypermedia.
This is work that I am continuing in various contexts, and generally revolves around the idea that including the moving image into the 'field' of academic discourse potentially disrupts how that discourse can be, or ought to be, performed. This has implications for teaching, and writing. At its simplest this disruption is that students (and academics) no longer need to translate the film sequence or image into text. A hermeneutic effect of this is that by including the sequence within the space of writing, while writing, seems to encourage the writing to respond to the image in ways that are quite powerful. I tend to describe this (in a rather untheorised manner) as the image bearing witness to the writing - that the presence of the sequence tends to envelope what you write and requires attention. Finally, it is a common assumption that including the video sequence within the field of writing somehow erases or lessens the distance between writing as a critical practice and the film. This is never the case. The presence of the sequence within the field of writing in fact emphasises the distance between the cinematic sequence and the writing. This is, as far as pedagogy is concerned, a major learning outcome.
I am continuing this sort of work with a project where I will perform an 'analysis' of John Ford's The Searchers, concentrating on the role of the door as liminal threshold. However, I'm trying to 'write' the essay by only using images from the film that are presented as icons with 'contextualising' video available. The video and images for this project are still being collected, but the major task in such work is to see if it is in fact possible to develop a critical visual vocabulary in relation to a film. I expect the completed work will be much like a graphical novel, though in this case it would be a graphical film studies essay.
This will lead to a second essay that will be an annotated reading of the opening sequence of The Searchers where the moving image will be the 'table of contents' for the writing and reading of the analysis. I imagine that as the film plays icons will appear which can be clicked on to take the reader to either textual, image, film, or audio information. If this 'works' then this will form the basis for a developmental project where we build a tool that will let students write similar annotated work on any nominated film sequence.
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