Document Type
Article
Abstract
This essay argues for an analysis of the narrative models of postmodern cinema by looking at them as visualization forms re-mediated (Bolter and Grusin 1999) by new media's formal structures. Instead of being organized in a classical way through causal and temporal logics, contemporary storytelling models seem to be structured according to "casual," "catalogue" and "homogeneous" aggregative logics following the "database" and "navigable space" visual forms of new media (Manovich 2001). The conventional "narrative" paradigm (Metz 1974; Branigan 1992, Jullier 1997) in postmodern film seems to be fully "fragmented," following textual organization models similar to computer logic and aesthetics. This essay aims to classify these new models as "database forms" (aggregation of events, by "accumulation," or "catalogue"), and "navigable space forms" (aggregation of events by "loop/repetition," "hyperlinking" or the "network" of stories). They show the importance of the "space paradigm" over the "temporal" one in the postmodern film. What is fundamental now seems to be the way of "composing" the images and the storytelling with them, that is the film's "spatial dimension." For this reason, this paper defines the cinematic image (and the image tout court) in the postmodern era as "image-interface," because it behaves like the computer interface, that is as a "spatialized image," for every kind of data with which every user/spectator wants to interact. The aim of this essay is to explore and define new forms of storytelling visualization, of space and time in contemporary postmodern cinema, supporting a prolific osmosis between "film theory" and "new media theory".
Repository Citation
Armentano, Chiara. ""The Image-Interface": New Forms of Narrative Visualization, Space and Time in Postmodern Cinema." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 3, 2008, pp. 1–43. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss3/2