Table Of ContentHyper-Narrative
Interactive Cinema
Consciousness
18
Liter& ture
the Arts
General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers,
William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis,
Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow
Hyper-Narrative
Interactive Cinema
Problems and Solutions
NItzaN BeN SHaul
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Cover Design:
Aart Jan Bergshoeff
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-2461-8
ISSN: 1573-2193
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008
Printed in the Netherlands
Table of Contents
Introduction 7
Chapter 1: Hyper-Narratives 15
1.1 What is a Film Narrative? 15
1.2 Postmodern Narrative Film Theory 18
1.3 Postmodern Hyper-Narrative Theory 23
1.4 Cognitive Constructivist Hyper-Narrative Theory 30
1.4.1 Hyper-narrative Option restriction 30
1.4.2 Strategies for Devising Coherence
between Narrative Threads 31
1.4.3 Strategies for Devising Dramatic
Succession and Closure in Hyper-narratives 33
Chapter 2: Interaction 39
2.1 The Interactor as Film Protagonist Fallacy 39
2.2 From Film Viewer to Hyper-Narrative Film
Interactor 43
2.3 From Computer Game Player to Hyper-Narrative
Film Interactor 45
2.4 A Cognitive-Constructivist Model for
Hyper-narrative Interaction 51
2.4.1 Dramatic Succession 51
2.4.2 Narrative Thread Restriction 52
2.4.3 Strategies for Devising Coherence
between Narrative Threads 53
2.4.4 Strategies for Devising Dramatic Succession
and Closure in Interactive Hyper-narratives 55
Chapter 3: Audiovisuality & Interfacing 59
3.1 Immersion Hyper-Narrative Film theories 60
3.2 The Immersion Fallacy in 3-D Movies 66
3.3 Hyper-reality, Morphing, Digital Replication and
Split Screens 70
3.4 Engaging Interfaces 75
Conclusion: Engaging Hyper-narrative Interactive Cinema 83
Bibliography 87
Index of Names and Titles 91
Index of Topics 94
Introduction
The digital imaging revolution is generating far-reaching changes
in the structure of narrative audiovisual texts as we know them today
in film and television. Theoretical writings have offered a variety of
hypotheses concerning the intersections of this revolution with larger
cultural shifts (e.g., post-modernism) and their implications for issues
of origin, creativity, coherence, identification, affectivity and attention.
The general direction in these writings concerns notions of narrative
segmentation, depthlessness, lesser affectivity, disorientation, split
identity, cyborgization1 and simulacrization.2
At the intersection of technology and creation there is intense
experimentation with, and research of the digital revolution’s emergent
new media. There have been tremendous advancements in indexing
software such as Vsoft, Media Base, MATE, Oracle, Synopsus, etc.
A leading creative/technological research direction encapsulating the
thrust and promise of these new media deals with what can be termed
hyper-narrative interactive cinema. By this term I am referring to a
variety of hypotheses and actual works whose common denominator
is their focus upon a computer-mediated interaction between users or
‘interactors’ and moving audio-visual texts that strives, through the
use cinematic strategies, to offer the interactor an option to change
at predetermined points the course of action by shifting to other
predetermined options. The Oz project at Carnegie Melon University3
tried to dwell upon cinematic narrative strategies to construct a
synthetic environment populated by autonomous animated ‘emotional
agents’ that react in a ‘believable’ way to users’ actions. This trajectory
has been followed by works such as Façade,4 a synthetic interactive
environment consisting of a single drama where the player interacts
with a computer generated couple, and by The Virtual Storyteller
The preparation of this book for publication was aided by NDS and the Netvision
Institute for Internet Studies (NIIS)
8 Introduction
research group at Twente University, Holland.5 The Hyperplex model
suggested at MIT Media Laboratory6 strived to create a dynamic large
screened presentation of simultaneous films so as to allow the user to
shift among them. The Media Lab at MIT also developed automated
storytelling systems and methods for analyzing moving images based
on indexed media bases.7 Experimental interactive films such as Bob
Gale’s Mr. Payback: an Interactive Movie (1995) offered parallel
narrative trajectories allowing viewers to shift among up to sixteen
narrative developments. The concept of hypertext, which allows links
at different points to a variety of intertextual relations8 is employed for
educational purposes9 but also in multimedia works such as the CD-
ROMs developed at the USC “Labyrinth” project or in Chris Marker’s
Immemory (1999). Salient are multi-narrative cinematic constructs
projected to audiences such as Bob Bejan’s film I'm your Man (1998),
in which the audience chooses by a majority ‘vote’ (through pressing
a button), which course of action the film will take; Guy Vardi’s Point
of View: An Experiment in Linear Hypervideo (2000), which offers an
interactive perspective-shifting experience where the user chooses from
which character’s perspective he views the ongoing action; Glorianna
Davenport’s documentary data-based Interactive Cinema;10 Kevin
Brooks’ multi-narrative film script authoring tool Metalinear Cinematic
Narrative;11 Ruth Aylett’s experiments with emergent narratives;12 and
the European consortium Inscape Storytelling, an unfocused ambitious
project aimed at “developing a software suite for authoring, publishing
and experiencing interactive, multimedia stories and contents”.13
While the aims of these works differ, most of them try to apply
cinematic strategies and aesthetics to the creation of such interactive
environments.14 This has been intended not only to evoke but also to
enhance the cognitive, affective and sensual engagement offered by
the cinema. Such enhancement is perceived as promising given the
apparent higher potential in interactivity to engage the user’s attention
towards the work.
However, this intense research and tool development has resulted
in little output and meager success insofar as deep, attentive, sustained
interaction is concerned. The promise of such developments to exchange
or surpass the present mass popular cultural media works of film and
television has failed to materialize.
In recent years we witness a growing body of research aimed
at debating the reasons for the present situation, offering possible
Introduction 9
solutions. Manovich for example, claims that digital works’ relation
to film is not one of constructing cinematic interactive narratives at
all, but rather in these works’ ‘return’ to the early cinematic paradigm
of discontinuous ‘proto-cinematic practices’.15 Lunenfeld on his part
suggests that the notion of cinematic interactivity as a text inherently
designed to be interactive is ill defined. Films are ‘interactively’ neutral
since interactivity is something users perform upon a given film and
any film can be altered by fans who ‘poach’ already produced films and
create and circulate their altered versions.16
These solutions actually imply an irretrievable loss of narrative
cinema’s ability to engage and sustain its viewers’ attention with no
comparable alternative. In fact, what Manovich offers is the narrow-
ranged and short-term engagement typical of attraction. Lunenfeld’s
suggestion also implies an irretrievable loss of narrative cinema’s
ability for deep engagement since his contention that interaction
consists of lay people arranging something different out of a previous
artistically preconceived work entails the narrow-ranging engagement
characterizing social games and enhances the incoherence, non-closure
and decentring characterizing postmodern conceptions.
Whereas these solutions offer alternative paradigms to narrative
cinema, others try to expand its potential towards interactive, computer-
based films by trying to overcome the problems entailed in adding
interaction to narrative cinema. The Oz Project mentioned above, tried
to apply Aristotelian narrative structures, devise interactive believable
fictional characters, and apply to interactive texts traditional cinematic
audio-visual continuity editing strategies so as to evoke an interactor’s
‘suspension of disbelief’ and consequent ‘immersion’. Likewise, Murray,
Brooks and Kinder,17 mentioning the hypertext medium’s infancy,
claimed that interactive, engaging hyper-narratives are the future form
of storytelling, feasible because of the calculative and storage power of
computers and postmodern shifts in perception that expand rather than
break away from the inherent faculties of narrative.
Kinder, for example, believes that the shift in passing from physical
passive reception of narrative films to behavioural active interaction
with them can generate deep engagement given the possibility for
a successful combination of engagement strategies employed by
interactive computer games with certain cinematic narratives.
While these approaches to interactive hyper-narratives offer viable
models consonant with computer materiality and the human craving for
