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Abstract:
Cinema is taking on the characteristics of new media, existing in a networked, intertextual space, which enables new developments in narrative that are increasingly interactive. Using examples from a variety of different genres, this essay analyzes how narrative might mimic the work, play, and networks of the contemporary digital society.
PR(A) = (l-d) + d(PRTl)/C[T1) + . . . + PR[Tn)ZC[Tn))
- Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin1
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze defined a break coinciding with World War II, describing an emergent way of making sense of die world that was represented in postwar cinema.2 Instead of actions leading to reactions as in die classical movement-image's rational and stable representations of Cinema 1, the postwar time-image presented seemingly irrationally linked images.3 1 would like to explore the idea that a new way of making sense of the world is being represented in our contemporary cinema - a new form, which better represents the new economies and systems of work, play, and violence of the digital networked society
Cinema 2 for Deleuze was a "cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent" as the movement-image gave way to the time-image.4 As D. N. Rodowick describes Cinema 2, "Acts of seeing and hearing replace the linking of images through motor actions: pure description replaces referential anchoring."5 1 propose diat Cinema 3.0 might be a cinema of the user, as the time-image gives way to die interactive-image. Rodowick describes how with the digital electronic image "the spectator is no longer a passive viewer yielding to the ineluctable now of time, but radier alternates between looking and reading as well as immersive viewing and active controlling."6 As he explains, these are "overlapping states." Interaction becomes a natural consequence of digital media. Computer and digital users have been trained by dieir immersion in digital culture to participate in/with what they consume. With die disappearance of the spectator, what becomes of the spectacle? Instead of world as picture we have world as game.7
A number of theorists have written recently on aspects of complex narrative in films. Jan Simons provides a wonderful review of the différent recent approaches in his article "Complex Narratives." citing recent work by David Bordwell, Edward Branigan, Allan Cameron, Thomas...