Movement across frames

Where there is no character or object movement across frames, but a shot sequence is produced by editing, then it is extremely common to conceal an edit in classical cinema by cutting on action. This is where the editor, for instance, will cut on a character's movement (such as lifting a cup) and the common movement of the character in each shot is used to help conceal, and smooth, the edit.

In The Searchers the movement of Aaron to open the homestead door for the "reverend" is used to motivate the change in point of view.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links

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Screen movement

In an effort to maintain constancy of movement and screen direction various rules were articulated for narrative cinema.

These are preserved today in most sporting telecasts, and are a common feature in all film making. Very schematically, if a character (or car or other moving object) leaves screen left, then it must enter in the next shot from the right hand side of the frame but continue moving screen left. The reverse is also true.

Additionally, if there is movement towards and past the camera, say to the right (so since they have moved towards and past the camera the moving object would exit in the lower right of frame), then the next shot requires that the figure enters from the lower left of the frame - in effect the camera crosses the axis of direction. These concerns about screen direction are used in combination with those that apply to movement across shots.

In these examples constancy of direction is directed towards readerly intelligibility - an assumption being that this consistency will aid the viewer. However it is widely accepted theoretically that the major import of such a practice is as much to conceal the presence of the edit as it is to enhance readerly comprehension.
This constancy is evident in the rescue sequence in Keaton's Our Hospitality, though is broken where the boat plummets over the waterfall.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links

A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

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Hypertextual minimal unit

This is not particularly suprising as it is apparent that hypertextual fragments (nodes) can, like cinematic shots, be arranged in numerous sequences and that there is no intrinsic and necessary grammar to this (Miles, 1999).
An earlier emphasis on the cinematic nature of the connection between hypertext nodes (Miles, 1999), while important, does not provide an adequate account of the production of narrative (fiction or nonfiction) sequences in hypertext. Like the cinema, it is apparent that hypertext requires a minimal unit constituted by the set of nodes conjoined. That this has been the case in much extant hypertext fiction is clear. Such a process has been much less common in what has been routinely described as hypertext nonfiction.

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assertive image

Image is almost always assertive - and assertion is one of the great "modalities" of actualization, of the semic act.

It appears therefore that the paradigmatic category in film is condemned to remain partial and fragmentary, at least as long as one tries to isolate it on the level of the image. This is naturally derived from the fact that creation plays a larger role in cinematographic language that it does in the handling of idioms: To "speak" a language is to use it, but to "speak" cinematographic language is to a certain extent to invent it.


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Autonomous segments

Hypertext, unlike traditional cinema, provides for nodes that can be reused, or reappear, in any particular pattern, and this practice of reuse or repetition is one of the principal methodologies employed in hypertext writing (and reading). This means, obviously, that the autonomous segments that can be formed in hypertext, while falling into many different types, also have the feature of a particular node or even minor series forming a significant part of a completely different autonomous segment.

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Context and connections

An important implication, as Metz notes, is that if it is the development or articulation of autonomous segments that are fundamental to narration in cinema, then the meaning that accrues to these segments is highly contextual and not inherent within the connections themselves.

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Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

Choice of words

Any element of a film is already linguistically meaningful.

They are more like statements (the cliche that "a picture is worth a thousand words" comes to mind), and the paradigmatic process - choosing which from the paradigmatic series to place in the syntagmatic chain - is considerably diluted in film as the paradigmatic field is made virtually trivial, and the syntagmatic ordering is similarly weakened. In other words, in a sentence the choice of words is constrained to some extent by what choices are available within a vocabulary, and then by the grammar which constrains what can appear where.
When composing a film image there is no substantive paradigmatic series that the sequence most be chosen from within, and then once a shot is composed, its location within a syntagmatic series (a sequence) is similarly much more open than that offered by a linguistic grammar.

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Rules of combination

As Metz makes abundantly clear, there is no real paradigmatic axis in the cinema, and this is also so in hypertext - when I write hypertext I can link more or less to anywhere and there are no necessary rules of combination that exclude or promote particular destinations. This suggests that it is within the series of combinations formed by links, what Metz in the cinematic case characterises as autonomous syntagmatic units, that hypertext structure resides.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

Collection of shots

Metz makes a strong argument for recognising that the major narrative units in cinema are not shots and their immediate relations (edits) but the series that are formed through collections of shots. These series, Metz's autonomous segments, form the major narrating blocks within cinema. This would indicate that it is not the content of an individual shot, nor the relation established between two fragments, that provides what might be characterised as minimal narrative units. Hence, if there is no intrinsic order required between parts then any principle of organisation or coherence will apply at a higher level.

Rhetorics of links

The rhetoric of links is a reasonably common theme in the humanities hypertext literature (Burbules (1997), Ingraham (2000), Kolb (1996, 1997), Liestøl (1994), Moulthrop (1991, 1992), Landow (1994), Morgan (1999), Trigg (1983)). It is apparent, however, that much of this criticism inevitably retains a strongly literary intent - rhetoric is after all a linguistic category, and less surprisingly most who have written what the humanities would recognise as criticism come largely from the literary community.

It is reasonably easy to demonstrate very strong affinities between link node hypertext and cinema. This suggests that while a traditional rhetorical approach may be useful, it is far from adequate to account for the varieties of hypertext sequence, and indeed the model of the cinema may provide more fertile theoretical grounds for articulating link typologies.
Metz, in his semiotic analysis of the cinema, has demonstrated the authority of the syntagmatic in relation to the paradigmatic, and Bernstein's work in hypertext can be appropriated in terms of its relevance to syntagmatic series.

Such an understanding suggests that the role of rhetoric in relation to link typologies is not grounded in the individual relations established between a single link (or even a multiheaded link) between two nodes, but is in fact determined much more substantially by the context provided by an autonomous segment developed across several nodes, and more specfically several links. (A distinction needs to be recognised between the quantity of nodes versus the quantity of links simply because a small number of nodes can produce a significant number of autonomous segments by virtue of a high incidence of linking.)

This is also supported by the example of cinema, where it is clear that there is no significant meaning that adheres to the formal nature of a connection between two shots. Most of the meaning of the connection, of the edit in itself, is determined by the larger contexts provided by the content of the shots, and the narrative itself. In other words, there is no intrinsic 'meaning' to a dissolve, its particular meaning is always determined by the contexts of its particular instantiation (and these contexts are internal - provided by a set of diegetic markers, and external - what is ordinarily the stuff of fields like reader response theory, or even hermeneutics).

In addition, once the role of the syntagmatic series is recognised as a potentially richer notion of minimal narrative unit in hypertext, it becomes clear that the paradigmatic aspect of hypertext, at least in terms of linking practice, allows us to recast how we consider link rhetoric and grammar.

What is extremely important in this claim, however, is not only the relevance of cinema to hypertext as a narrative system, but equally the erosion of an artificial division between genres of discourse that strives to emphasis the distance between the literary and the technical. Ironically, though formal semiotics has been instrumental in identifying qualities that inherently distinguish the literary from the non-literary, this distinction is today largely ignored as the importance of context and the reader is acknowledged.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links

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Linking categories

Christian Metz argued that the major mode of analysis for cinema (and by implication, hypertext) was based on syntagmatic relations, that is, meaning is principally developed and articulated through the expression of a partially autonomous temporal chain.

This is quite different to the model of natural languages, and extremely different to how we might understand poetry and other creative utterances. Based on this, Metz developed a bifurcating series of possible syntagmatic relations which can be considered to be the major combinations possible.

Metz's schema is derived from a series of simple oppositions, where each distinction revolves around what can be characterised as plot order (continuous or discontinous) and story time (continuous or discontinous). This generates a series of paired syntagmatic groups where each division is able to be further subdivided on the basis of these simple divisions.

The value of this schema for hypertext is significant. First, it offers a novel approach to considering link relations that may (or may not) prove fruitful in considering and developing a critical and creative awareness of hypertextual patterns. This clearly intersects with Bernstein's significant work on hypertext patterns, and this essay's contribution may be useful to the extent that it encourages writers and readers to rethink our assumptions about sequence.

Second, there are substantial theoretical implications embedded within Metz's approach, for the significant narrative unit identified by Metz is not the shot (the hypertext node), or the relation of one shot to another (the edit), but is in fact the larger sequential units produced by the combinations of shots.

Finally, Metz's work demonstrates the strongly contextual nature of these syntagmatic series, a context that traditional cinema narration attempts to saturate, and a context which is increasingly recognised as relevant to hypertext design.

The success of Metz's categories for hypertext lie not so much in their direct applicability but in allowing us to cast light on the role of syntagmatic segments in the production of meaning in hypertext. Metz recognises, as a result of his hierarchy, that such semantic or syntactic trees are unable to account for the varieties of possibility afforded, nor for how they are actually used by individual films, or readers.

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Hypertext and cinema

Semiotician Christian Metz developed a syntagmatic schema of the varieties of cinematic sequence.

He described the extent to which these offer a methodology to reconsider our notions of link rhetoric and link typology. With Metz' description, we can see that much of the appropriation of cinema within hypertext is founded on a common misconception of there being an a priori formal cinematic grammar. Cinema relies upon the contextual and pragmatic basis of connection for the production of meaning, and has clear applicability to a posteriori attempts to determine rhetorical structure in hypertext.

The assumption of an isomorphic relation between hypertext and cinema is fundamental to this thesis.

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