Database Cinema and interactive documentary practices -Martha Kinder and Chris Marker
Summary: Database Cinema and interactive documentary practices
By: Slav
Martha Kinder – “Designing a Database Cinema”
In 1997 cultural theorist Martha Kinder went to University of Southern California to work on “The Labyrinth Project” an applied research project developed in the digital media lab in collaboration with Pat O’Neil. This work produced three pieces for an exhibition, as well as a DVD rom and used 35mm film, found footage, audio narration and an interactive interface.
Interface designer Rosmary Comella and graphic designer Kristy H.A. Kang, worked with a team of students, alumni, and free lance professionals with Martha Kinder and executive producing. In combing archival and new content, Kinder states that the goal was to create “electronic fictions” but what was resulted was “interactive documentaries”. In further examination she classifies the work under two subgenres of interactive documentary; personal memoir and the second an “archeological exploration of a specific location through layers of time”. Kinder indicates that both are interrelated in that both sub-genres blur boundaries of fiction and rely on artifacts.
In contrast to Lev Manovich’s opnion to database narrative, Kinder states that database memory is : “Two compatible structures whose combination is crucial to the creative expansion of new media since all narratives are constructed by selecting items from databases (that usually remain hidden), and then combining these items to create a particular story. Despite the cyber-structualist dream of totality, the database, like the narrative, is always selective”.
Kinder indicates that all the Labyrinth project is “database narrative” where stories are all crucial to language. Although it does not have a clear cut beginning or ending, it presents a narrative field of story elements for the user.
Kinder speaks about the convergence of cinema with new media has shaped a series of database narratives in films such as “Ground hog day, slackers, Natural born killers and Run Lola Run”. She also refers to Crhis Marker’s CD –Rom Immemory (1999) and film Level 5.
Kinder touches on pre-digital interactive narrative models shown in books such as Laurence Sterne’s comic novel “Tristram Shandy” where the narrator makes a hypothetical lady reader go back and re-read a chapter.
In closing, Kinder reflects on previous narrative structures rather than future utopian structures and the evolution of storytelling through the combination of design, choice and chance.
Chris Marker – Immemory
Chris Marker is known for “essay films” where there is an unusual use of narrative as text where it is rhythmically interwoven with the image. This creates a complex montage structure which can be described following Gilles Deleuze’s “audio visual image’. This results in a new role of the viewer where they must actively participate in the film.
Dominant themes in Chris Marker’s works are recollection and memory. He uses film, installation and CD-ROM as a process of recollection and Marker uses images as a function and catalyst of changing views of history and past events.
First shown in 1990 at the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, Marker’s work “Zapping Zone, Proposals for an imaginary Television” used film, video, television, photography and computers as part of the installation. In the animation pieces, viewers can control some aspects with a mouse click that loops the sequences creating new narrative connections. Compared to Tarkosk’s film Stalker (1978) where the zone is a place that follows no logical views, in Marker’s “Zapping zone” there is no straight path to knowledge and that stories rather than one single history is the result.
In Marker’s CD rom work “Immemory” (1997) the zapping is replaced by a mouse click and memory is gained through seven “zones”. Themes of memory and archive are also reflected in this work and a number of paths can be taken by the viewer to review images and sequences. The motif of the journey also is apparent in this work and it does not present recollection and memory as a history book but rather as geography. The navigation allows multiple ways to branch off into other zones.
Questions:
1) What are different implications of Manovich and Kinder’s differences in the definition of Database Cinema?
2) Does Chris Marker’s Immemory reflect Manovich’s or Kinder’s definition of Database Cinema?