Database cinema
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One of the principal features defining traditional cinema is a fixed and linear narrative structure. In Database Cinema however, the story develops by selecting scenes from a given collection. Think of a computer game in which a player performs certain acts and thereby selects scenes and creating a narrative.
New Media objects lack this strong narrative component, they don’t have a beginning or an end but can start or stop at any point. They are collections of discrete items coming from the database. Lev Manovich first related the database to cinema (Database as symbolic form (Cambridge. MIT Press, 1998) in his effort to understand the changing technologies of filmmaking techniques in media landscapes. According to Manovich, cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of modern age but the computer age introduced its correlate, the database: "As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world."
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[edit] Database artists
Manovich considers filmmakers Peter Greenaway and Dziga Vertov as pioneers in his database cinema genre. He explains how Greenaway sees the linear pursuit as standard format of filmmaking lagging behind modern literature in experimenting with narrative. Greenaway’s system for reconciling database and narrative uses sequences of numbers. They act as a narrative shell, which makes the viewer believe he is watching a story.
Dziga Vertov can be seen as an even earlier database filmmaker. Manovich cites Vertovs Man with a Movie Camera (Russia, 1929) as the most important example of database imagination in modern media art. The film has three levels: Cameraman filming the shots, audience watching the finished film and shots from street life in Russian city’s edited in chronological order of that particular day. While the last level can be seen as text or ‘the story’, the other two can be seen as meta-texts. By the use of meaningful effects, discovering the world by this ‘kino-eye’ Vertov uses the normally static and objective database as a dynamic and subjective form.
Manovich stated that new media artists working on database concepts could learn from cinema precisely because cinema has in fact always been at the nexus of database and narrative while the movie was still in the editing room. Manovich points out especially Vertov achieved a successful merging between database and narrative into a new form .
[edit] Implicit/explicit
The semiological theory of syntagm and paradigm (originally formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure and later worked on by Roland Barthes) helps to define the relationship between the database-narrative opposition. In this theory the syntagm is a linear stringing together of elements while at the paradigmatic each new element is chosen from a set of other related elements. In this case, the elements in syntagm dimensions are related in praesentia: it is the flow of words we hear, or the shots we see. On a paradigmatic dimension the elements are related in absentia: they exist in our minds or stuffed away in a database. To quote Manovich: “the database of choices from which narrative is constructed (the paradigm) is implicit; while the actual narrative (the syntagm) is explicit”. In New Media projects, this is reversed according to Manovich. The paradigmatic database is tangible, while the syntacmatic narrative is virtual.
[edit] Soft Cinema
Manovich himself has been experimenting on the subject with his project [Soft Cinema]http://www.softcinema.net/ in cooperation with Andreas Kratky. Soft Cinema consists of a series of installations where different kind of inputs such as films, dynamic visualization, installation, architectonical environment, print, catalogue and DVD form a large database. Real-time automatic editing software, using systems of rules defined by the authors, creates narrative and non-narrative short films.
[edit] References/further reading
Vanevar Bush: As We May Think, 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly
Lev Manovich: Database as a Symbolic Form, Cambridge ,MIT Press 1998
Jan Baetens: review Soft Cinema. Navigating the Database, published: November 2005
Lev Manovich & Andreas Kratky: Soft Cinema. Navigating the Database. MIT Press, Cambridge , Mass. , 2005, DVD with 40-page booklet, ISBN: 0-262-13456-X
