The digital revolution’s development of the hypertext and the post-modern episteme consonant with it, have generated far-reaching changes in the structure of narrative films. Film narrative theorists supporting this revolution envision a future form of hypertext-based film storytelling enabled by the calculative and storage power of computers and by the attending postmodern shifts in perception. They suggest viewing this emerging form as an expansion rather than a break away from the present inherent faculties of film narration (e.g., Brooks, Kinder, Manovich, and Murray).

Others have noticed, however, the dire implications of this episteme and of hypertext based narratives for issues of origin, creativity, coherence, identification, affectivity, and attention. They are concerned with the characterizing postmodern textual depthlessness, loss of affectivity, and disorientation.

In this paper, I would like to focus upon the post-modern and hypertext derived cinematic strategies of de-centering and non-closure through tropes such as split screens and non-cohering narrative threads and that engender viewers’ distraction rather than engagement. It is my contention that the use of such strategies wrongly presumes a subject capable of being attentive while splitting his/her attention. Actually, few, if any, humans are capable of effectively dealing with many of the cognitive tasks demanding split attention, due to the cognitive load that these efforts have on our limited working memory.

The widely accepted cognitive constructivist theory of psychological activity maintains that perceiving and thinking are active, goal oriented processes, and that as film viewers we strive to construct out of the flow of sound and images a cohering, intelligible, causal, and goal-oriented trajectory that starts at some point and reaches somewhere. David Bordwell delineated the strategies and procedures that allow active and aware spectators to reconstruct the film’s narrative in their mind by constantly forwarding perceptual and cognitive hypotheses and trying to fit the film data into them. Film art resides in this construction process. The filmmaker presupposes it and construes within the film surprises, distractions, diversions, and postponements that enhance the process of hypothesis arousal, verification, or refutation. From this derives the film’s appeal to spectators. Film, like other art forms, addresses the cognitive faculties of their spectators and strives to allow them to build a world and a story by realizing these faculties, a process they are hardly aware of, or which is hardly satisfied in real life. Hence, narrative films can deeply engage and sustain the attention of viewers/listeners if they allow them to construct coherent narratives and audiovisual formations out of the flow of shifting sounds and images. Therefore an overall continuous editing style, synchronized or otherwise cohering audiovisual formations, and narrative re-centering and closure, have become tropes of popular mass film artifacts. Following Noel Carroll, it can be said that narrative cinema is popular not because it consists of a set of arbitrary cultural conventions, but rather because it is a cultural invention, easily fitting our cognitive, perceptive, affective, and sensual faculties. It should be noted however, that the evolution of the language of cinema and of television has devised complex narrative structures based upon such principles, which are not confined to the unilinear development identified by many with Hollywood productions. Hence, the reason for narrative cinema’s complex engagement is not due to its simple linearity, but to the fact that simple or complex films rewardingly play with, rather than frustrate, the spectator’s inherent cognitive striving for coherence by offering a constantly re-established, cohering, audiovisual, spatial, temporal, and narrative formation.

Post-modern films predicated on split attention, however, frustrate the spectator’s striving for coherence.

Post-modern film narrative theorists seem to overlook this problem or presume that splitting the viewer’s attention is the characterizing and desired form of perception in our age. Kinder, for example, entertains a confounded belief that the rewarding narrative and audio-visual coherence of the popular cinematic “end product” may not be lost in what she sees as a necessary or desirable decentred, closure-less, process-oriented hypertext film narrative (what she describes as interactive narratives). Her notion is confounded in my view because closure and cohering strategies are the sine qua non component that enables the deep, cognitive, affective, and sensually rewarding engagement of spectators in narrative cinema. Conversely, non-closure and de-centeredness, when being the basic premise of a text as maintained by her and other postmodern textual theorists, frustrate the reader’s striving for coherence and often lead to distraction and loss of interest. In a sense, the whole notion of narration is meaningless if the aspiration for closure is frustrated at the start.10 It is only because texts offer you a notion that they are going somewhere that you are willing to follow.11 Kinder’s comprehension of hypertext based narratives implies this distracting and frustrating result. Thus, at the core of her argument on narrative she claims that “Openness lies at the centre of the narrative illusion.”12 This claim is preceded by her mentioning the notion of “text poaching,” whereby text readers, rather than following a text’s intended meanings, actively appropriate the text for their own interests.13 However, what Kinder overlooks is that the resulting approach to such texts is reduced to gaming rather than elevated to deep, complex engagement. She herself inadvertently exposes the probable results of open interactive-process textual configurations when she writes that hypertext narratives “reveal the arbitrariness of the particular choices made, and the possibility of making other combinations, which would create alternative stories.”14 It is this notion of arbitrariness that engenders the gaming attitude assumed by viewers in face of open-ended hypertext narratives.15

The films Timecode (Mike Figgis, 2000) and Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) stand out as emblematic of formal and narrative hypertext oriented post-modern textual strategies. They offer non-cohering, de-centered audio-visual formations and narratives that distract or frustrate the viewers. In Timecode four simultaneously evolving occurrences are presented on a screen split into four. Whether the spectators see the same occurrence shot from different positions or different occurrences, it is impossible for them to follow what’s going on because their attention is split between the different screens. The only reason viewers can somehow follow Figgis’ film is because he manages to draw attention away from the disturbing parallel occurrences through different strategies that accentuate one frame over the others such as his use of voice enhancement coming from one of the screens, or the reduction to minimal, recurring, and non-interesting movement and action in the non-emphasized screens; by using a sporadically appearing earthquake that affects all the happenings in the four screens; or, towards the end, the use of a melodramatic shootout of a betrayed lover that correlates and clarifies in a simple manner the interrelation between the four screens. There is, however, one interesting use of the split screen, in which we see on one screen the betrayed lover, who has planted a microphone in her lover’s bag, listening to her lover in another screen as she makes love to a man the betrayed lover does not know. Then, within her screen we see her get out of the car she’s in while the man with whom her lover was making love is seen in the other screen leaving the building he was at, and they bump into each other in their respective screens without knowing each other (this is the man she eventually shoots by the end of the film), so that we see simultaneously the same occurrence from different angles. This scene is interesting because it makes cohering rather than distracting use of the split screen, in that it literalizes through the formal means the implications of betrayal.16 Excluding this cohering use of the split screen (which still materializes only two of the four screens), the question arises as to what is the added value of this film being split-into- four screens? It only actually manages to somehow and poorly engage our attention because it in fact contradicts its formation. In any case, the only available response for viewers in this film is distraction coupled with shallow engagement, which approximates a gaming attitude towards the film rather than deep engagement. Whereas Time Code instantiates the split attention generated by the post-modern use of multi-screens, Adaptation exemplifies the post-modern split narrative. The film starts as a deeply engaging and complex work. It tells the story of Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), a screenwriter who is repelled by the way he looks and is extremely unsure of himself both in respect of his writing and of women. He has a twin brother, Donald, who is in many ways his opposite. Donald, as presented from his brother’s point of view, is ridiculously self assured but to his brother’s surprise, has success with women and when he decides to also become a screen writer like his brother, he comes out with a script loved by Charlie’s film agent. Whereas insecure, repelling Charlie is interested in a non-eventful film, Donald, ridiculed by his brother, is interested in the generic, causal, conventional development of a story with protagonists who evolve and change throughout the film following their overcoming a difficult task involving action, drama, and tension. As the film develops Charlie is contracted to adapt into film a book on orchids written by a magazine journalist (Merrill Streep) from New York who lives with a boring husband and longs to be in a state of fascination with something (be it a flower or a man). She henceforth inquires into the mentality of orchid flower collectors and starts following a mysterious orchid hunter and collector searching for the rare “ghost orchid.” Charlie decides to adapt the book into film so that it maintains the book’s unique, non-eventful, “life-like” and original stream of conscience style. At one point however, Charlie gets lost in the labyrinth demanded by his type of film and asks Donald to rescue his script. What the film cleverly causes the spectator to be aware of is that the script being written within the film by Charlie is also the actual film the spectators are watching (a film about a scriptwriter trying to write the film the spectators are watching). True to form, once Charlie asks his brother to help him with the script he is writing (a script that the spectators are watching) and Donald starts taking things into his perspective, the film watched suddenly turns into a Donald action film, filled with drugs, chases, and murders. Hence, once the film shifts to Donald’s perspective we become aware that the orchid hunter has an affair with the reporter and that he is actually a drug dealer extracting drugs from the orchids he collects. We then see Donald and Charlie follow the reporter to the orchid hunter’s house, where Charlie, peeping through their window finds out about their drug dealings. He is spotted by the couple, caught by them, and once they realize he knows about their drug dealings and love affair they decide to kill him. Eventually they chase both brothers and end up killing Donald while Charlie manages to escape, finishes his script and even finds love. As can be noticed, Adaptation is split into not only twin protagonists, but also two respective thematic and stylistic developments. However, when this clever film shifts from Charlie’s stream of consciousness film to his brother’s action film, the result is frustrating because its spectators are pulled out from the depth and involvement they were in when following the stream of consciousness film, and pushed towards an action film that starts suddenly without serious earlier development and out of materials that have been differently contextualized and are alien to the action film (e.g., the hunter’s search for the unique, rarely found fascinating orchid suddenly turns into a factory for drugs filled with such orchids). This perspective shift, which if coherently construed could have deeply involved the audience in the textual or life and death implications that are at stake in the film’s relative perspectives (as Kurosawa did with the notion of truth-searching in Rashumon or Coppola with the consequences of wrongly held presumptions in The Conversation), ends up neutralizing the impact of both views due to its split narrative construction, engendering a gaming distraction and frustration rather than deep emotional-cognitive engagement.

In a way these post-modern films seem to reference the modernist avant-garde films of the sixties as their precursors. However, whereas some of those films were predicated on de-centering and non-closure (e.g., Godard, Antonioni), they were in their time aesthetic and ideological (often obscure) searches for truth through challenges to established perceptions, challenges to which committed viewers were expected to respond by reflection upon their lives or by attempts at re-assessment and re-construction.

Hence, Antonioni in The Red Desert used alienating strategies such as long, inconsequential shots and de-centering of protagonists, to deflate and deconstruct dramatic meaningful moments such as the love for a child or extramarital affairs. Through these strategies, he projected his explicit existentialist alienated vision of the world,17 lamented alienation, and strived for truth. Antonioni’s Red Dessert insinuated that while alienation may be a natural condition of the human being it is also the result of the capitalist mode of production that generated the alienated mentality of the North Italian bourgeoisie he depicted in the film.

Post-modernists, however, seem to presume that split attentiveness is the favored culturally determined state of cognition and reception of their viewers. The resulting subjectification of truth and its relativity are considered non-problematic and even blissful. In other words, avant-garde modernists presumed a centered self whose confidence they wished to reassess through alienating worldviews and respective textual strategies, whereas post-modernists often presume a computer determined de-centered and split self, whose non-confidence, distraction, and alienation they reassure through split worldviews and textual strategies.

Contrary to such post-modern and media determinist arguments, I claim that the computer serves us so well only because we can cognitively and perceptually manipulate its generated textual signs in order to forge comprehensible non-arbitrary articulations.18 Therefore, fashionable claims such as that of Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media, according to which the nature and ability of computers to contain a large and easily accessible database will lead computer-based artworks to resist narrative tendencies, or the related implication that computers will forge users’ modes of perception and cognition, is fallacious.19 Neither the arbitrary nature of abstract cultural sign systems (e.g., language or computer data-base), nor its sign’s material qualities are in and of themselves determinant of the manner of their reception, as is often claimed by media determinists. Rather, it is the other way around. It is only because we can cognitively and perceptually manipulate signs in order to forge conventions that will render non-arbitrary articulations comprehensible that sign systems serve us so well.20 This is because people exploit those potentialities that best reward their ingrained cognitive, affective, or sensual faculties. Computers, despite their database characteristic, also allow the tracing of narrative trajectories. Hence, as long as narratives are cognitively, affectively, or sensually engaging, this computer potentiality will be exploited.

This does not mean, however, that the “nature” of computers has no bearing upon the artworks it allows to be produced, or that computer-based narrative audio-visual texts must replicate traditional narrative cinema in order to achieve the latter’s engaging attention. A similar process occurred with television. Witness the failure of television to deeply engage attention when screening uninterrupted feature films. This is probably due to the television’s screen size, its conditions of reception (at home), and its multi-channel transmission. This did not lead however to television’s failure to deeply engage attention through narrative and the use of cinematic strategies. It means that its narrative strategies had to change in order to adapt to television’s peculiar faculties. Thus, television has devised 20- to 40-minute programs with multi-threaded, interlacing narratives such as ER, Seinfeld, or 24,21 more fitting its “nature” yet consonant with the cognitive faculties of its audience.

Just like television, the digital revolution can be taken to use cohering narrative strategies to engage the audience’s attention while adapting these to the computer’s peculiar nature, so long as its peculiar nature is used in ways that correspond to human cognitive faculties. For digital based films to generate deep cognitive, affective, and sensual engagement rather than shallow distraction, the human cognitive strive for coherence must be taken into account.

An intimation of the fruitful evolution of hyper-narratives which the nature of computers encourages can be seen in the production of the films Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998) or Sliding Doors (Peter Howitt, 1998). These films offer different and optional futures for their protagonists. As noticed by David Bordwell however, these deeply engaging hyper-narrative films offer only two or three options and are carefully designed so that coherence, dramatic succession, and a sense of closure are maintained.22 Hence, while the offering of many or unlimited narrative options as suggested by postmodern hyper-narrative theorists is a great philosophical idea, devising such films, while computationally possible, is bound to generate at best a gaming puzzle-solving activity and at worse disengaging incoherence and cognitive confusion due to the short memory overload imposed by such films upon their viewers.

Post-modern films, however, are predicated on split attention and are unaware of the incompatibility between their viewers’ striving for coherence and the arbitrary requirement for a split-typed cinematic reception. They position a split subject that is distracted and frustrated.

Footnotes

1. As Sobchak, Wolf, and others have noted, narrative cinema, due to the computerization of its production processes, is experiencing a loss of deep engagement and is shifting its traditional narrative strategies. See Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space (Rutgers University Press, 1987); Mark Wolf, Abstracting Reality, Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (New York: University Press of America, 2000).
2. K. Brooks, “Metalinear Cinematic Narrative: Theory, Process, and Tool,” (PhD diss. MIT, 1999); Marsha Kinder, “Narrative Equivocations between Movies and Games,” in The New Media Book, ed. Harries (London: BFI Publishing, 2002); Lev Manovich, “Old Media as New Media: Cinema,” in The New Media Book, ed. D. Harries (London: BFI Publishing, 2002); Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997).
3. See in particular Jameson’s critique of postmodernism in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Jameson’s apt use of the metaphor of schizophrenia to describe this episteme refers to a deep sense of alienation.
4. R. Mayer and R. Moreno, “Aids to Computer-Based Multimedia Learning,” Learning and Instruction 12 (2002): 107-119.
5. J. Sweller, Instructional Design in Technical Areas (Carnberwell, Australia: ACER Press, 1999).
6. On the constructivist, active viewer, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). See also Edward Brannigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992).
7. Noel Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988): 138–47.
8. Witness for example Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts (USA, 1993) which consists of several coincidentally interlacing narrative trajectories that nevertheless cohere within and in-between themselves.
9. See Jacques Derrida, On Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
10. This premise is quite different from “open-ended” or multi-threaded narratives that are premised on inward, structurally coherent narratives that do offer cohering trajectories. The film Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, Germany, 1999) offers an exemplary case of such structural coherence.
11. This notion concerns the narrative aspect of moving audio-visual texts. These texts can also engage through affective or sensual attachments, but these are usually short-lived attractions if unsupported by narrative. Manovich, who refuses to consider computer-based narratives in the sense outlined here, is therefore led to predict short attachment/attraction-based works. See also a sensation aesthetic model for new media in Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (London: Routledge, 2000).
12. Marsha Kinder, “Narrative Equivocations between Movies and Games,” p. 126.
13. Kinder bases her comprehension of narrative on de Lauretis’s postmodern notion of narrative. On textual poaching see also Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers (New York: Routledge, 1992).
14. Marsha Kinder, “Narrative Equivocations between Movies and Games,” p. 127.
15. For a more thorough critique of Kinder’s position (as well as of Manovich’s position), see Nitzan Ben Shaul, “Can Narrative Films Go Interactive?” New Cinemas Journal 2, no. 3 (2004): 149-162.
16. This is evidence that split screens, as a peculiar formal strategy enhanced by the digital revolution, in themselves do not need engender split attention. Further cohering split-screen strategies can be found in the experiments conducted by the Russian revolutionary avant-garde filmmakers, particularly in the films of Vertov and Eisenstein. See Annette Michelson, ed., Kino Eye, the Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” in Film Form, ed. Jay Leida (New York: HBJ Books, 1949).
17. Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction (Tel Aviv: Open University, 1993): 159-163.
18. For a good critical discussion of media determinism, see Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1974).
19. Hence he writes that narrative “is only one aspect of cinema that is neither unique nor, as many will argue, essential to it.” Further on he suggests that “the distinct logic of a digital moving image … subordinates the photographic and the cinematic to the painterly and the graphic,” representing a return “to pro-cinematic practices.” Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2001): 293–96. See also a sensation aesthetic model for new media in Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (London: Routledge, 2000). It should be pointed out however, that while films also engage through affective or sensual attachments, these are usually short-lived if unsupported by narrative. Hence Manovich, in dismissing narrative, is led to predict a cinema consisting of short attachment/attraction-based works.
20. On our cognitive ability to manipulate arbitrary material signs, see Jean Piaget, The Psychology of the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
21. ER (NBC, 1994–), Seinfeld (Sony Pictures TV, 1990–99), 24 (Twentieth-Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002–).
22. David Bordwell, “Film Futures,” SubStance 97, 31 no. 1 (2002): 88-104.

References

Ben Shaul, Nitzan. “Can Narrative Films Go Interactive?” New Cinemas Journal Vol. 2, Number 3 (2004): 149-162.

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Bordwell, David. “Film Futures.” SubStance 97, 31 no. 1 (2002): 88-104.

Brannigan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film. London: Routledge, 1992.

Brooks, K. Metalinear Cinematic Narrative: Theory, Process, and Tool. PhD diss. MIT, 1999.

Carroll, Noel. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000.

Derrida, Jacques. On Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” In Film Form, ed. Jay Leida. New York: HBJ Books, 1949.

Gertz, Nurith. Motion Fiction. Tel Aviv: Open University, 1993.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Kinder, Marsha. “Narrative Equivocations between Movies and Games.” In The New Media Book, edited by D. Harries. London: BFI Publishing, 2002.

Manovich, Lev. “Old Media as New Media: Cinema.” In The New Media Book, edited by D. Harries. London: BFI Publishing, 2002.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Mayer, R. and Moreno, R. “Aids to Computer-Based Multimedia Learning.” Learning and Instruction 12 (2002): 107-119.

Michelson, Annette, editor. Kino Eye, the Writings of Dziga Vertov. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997.

Piaget, Jean. The Psychology of the Child. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space. Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Sweller, J. Instructional Design in Technical Areas. Carnberwell, Australia: ACER Press, 1999.

Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken Books, 1974.

Wolf, Mark. Abstracting Reality, Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age. New York: University Press of America, 2000.