Untitled - witz cultural

255RECONFIGURINGNARRATIVEvenience, and relative ease of manipulation often lead to employing computeranimation for elaborate special effects, including flying over or zooming intocityscapes. These two contributions of computing to cinema have already hadmajor economic effects on both Hollywood and independent filmmaking.The two other ways computers have affected filmmaking bear more directly on its relation to digital and hypertext narrative, since they include twoessentially new forms of digital cinema. The first, hypertext cinema-cinemaclosely analogous to hypertext narrative-theoretically permits the audienceto choose narrative direction at key points in the story. Both the uauma surgerysimulation and fanet Murray's MIT French language-teaching project,which exemplify this particular mode of virtual cinema, exemplify educationalhypermedia that closely resembles computer-based adventure games.In Kristoffer Gansing's study of what he calls "the 'imaginary' genre of interactivefilm" (51), he claims that adventure games hold "a position as Ihe mainstreamof inleractive cinema" (54), though he is more interested in the possibilitiesrevealed by various forms of CD-ROM art films and net-based cinema'Gansing describes the "minigenre. . . already made up of 'database narratives'which utilizes associative interaction with audio and video sequences-oftencollected from linear films. The user deconstructs and constructs his/her ownversion from a given set of materials that is called upon through experimentalinterfaces sometimes combined with elements of randomization" (55).Like hypertext cinema, the second branch of digital filmmaking, which Ilerm randomized or multiple cinema, also conceives of the film as essentiallydivided into a significant number of discrete sections. Unlike the hypermediaform, however, either the filmmaker or a computer program decides theorder in which the audience views the segments. Since I have not seen Gansingkexamples, I'11 discuss instead Ian Flitman's Hackney Girl (20031and thatpart of Diego Bonilla's A Space of Time that he calls Streom of Consciousness(2004). Hackney Girl (Figure 29), an example of net cinema, presents a varyingnumber of randomized sections of film, presenting them in a differentsequence each time viewed; I encountered between 139 and 143 sections, andthe full viewing time also varied but remained somewhere around fifteenminutes. The viewer first encounters a large black screen on which appears acollage of as many as seven small windows, only one ofwhich contains video.Some of these windows are monochrome, others color. Every version I sawfairly quickly made clear that London, departing airplanes, ayoung Englishman,his Turkish wife or girlfriend, and her cat would be the main subjects.The first version I encountered told a tale of the young woman's aftange'ments to leave London for Istanbul. Another began with scenes of London