Hyperink Cinema: An Investigation

As N. Katherine Hayles has cautions critics to avoid ‘applying critical models designed for print’ to works of electronic literature in fear that ‘the new possibilities opened for literary creation and interpretation will simply not be seen, she neglects to consider whether the models conceived for electronic literature might be used on works of print, and whether this might cause the scholarly community to reevaluate works using this new critical framework. This idea forms one of the central ideas in my thesis, that the recent proliferation of images and other visual media into print fiction demonstrates that the digital is being ‘remediated’ into print, to use Jay David Bolter’s term, and thus it seems prudent to apply the critical apparatuses developed for hypertext to these works in order that one doesn’t miss the ‘new possibilities’ brought about by this shift.

Therefore, a similar approach seems appropriate when examining the films that fall under the new category called ‘hyperlink cinema,’ a term coined by Alissa Quart that acknowledges the influence of the internet and multitasking on the narrative structure of said films. As with the remediation of the digital into print, examples can be found that predate our modern conceptions of when such a shift would likely have begun, sometime in the late 1980s perhaps, but the majority of the films accepted as falling under this umbrella were produced in the past fifteen years.

While Quart and Roger Ebert seem to mostly define the hypertext film as one in which the characters inhabit separate stories, where we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another, an explanation that is adequate for the audience of their reviews if not the scholarly community, a more specific analysis of how such films achieve these narratives is warranted. Therefore over the next few weeks, I will be exploring different films in an attempt to provide an adequate description of the genre, a beginning from which scholars can investigate the digital influence on the narrative of film. These investigations will also serve me as I prepare to present a paper on this topic at the PCA/ACA National Conference in St. Louis this March.

Grounding this inquiry will be the work of George P. Landow, who has developed four axes by which one can analyze a text to determine of it meets the criteria of hypertext: reader choice, intervention, and empowerment; inclusion of extralinguistic texts; complexity of network structure; and degrees of multiplicity in and variation in literary elements. I may modify these definitions a bit, such as suggesting that ‘extralinguistic texts’ be interpreted as devices which are non-native to the genre of film, and to focus heavily on the complexity of the network structure, analyzing how different facets of a film are ‘linked’ to others, and how that is akin to the links contained in a hypertext.

And while this exercise will allow me to simultaneously research a paper and provide content for this space, I also hope that you find it enjoyable. While the majority of the content will be of this nature, and hopefully will exceed the current pace of three posts a month, there will likely be thoughts on other things too, such as a link between comics and film that I need to read up on and perhaps some insights into the economic costs of airport screenings. Feel encouraged to add your voice to the mix, but more than that, I hope you find what you red here interesting.

A New Direction (Hopefully)

Over the past few months, I have pondered whether or not to cede this forum to wherever it is all the abandoned internet observations go to die. However, I still have a readership of a few dedicated friends and colleagues and I do not want this forum, and the specific connections it engenders, to go away and therefore be of no use to me or anyone else. At the same time, a resounding emptiness has settled over the intellectual part of my brain as I have finished my thesis and all that remain are the formatting changes the graduate college will invariably cast upon me whether I followed their style guide to the letter or not. However, such a project leaves many future avenues for investigation, hopefully by me as I further my academic career, so I have decided to use this space to write, in short pieces, about the questions I hope to answer.

My thesis dealt with the influence of the digital on print, specifically how such influence affects composition and narrative in contemporary novels like House of Leaves and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that contain a variety of visual media. Meanwhile, I have become a fan of the films of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, in which narratives are related in a nonsequential and often disjointed manner, especially in 21 Grams. Rudimentary research revealed to me the existence of a genre of film called hyperlink cinema, of which Inarritu's films are primary examples. As I already am interested in what Jay David Bolter has called the 'remediation' of the digital into other media, such a term suggests that hyperlinks, which are a component of hypertexts, are being remediated into film and influencing their narratives. I am skeptical of a straightforward interpretation such as this, but it bears investigation, and I will hopefully be conducting it here with the intention of presenting a paper at the 2010 PCA/ACA Conference in St. Louis this March.

With my primary research interests centering around the graphic construction of narrative, it should surprise no one that I have a scholarly interest in comic books. In yet another attempt to develop a conference paper for the University of Florida's ImageNext (which I hope to attend assuming I can get a travel grant), I want to investigate the use of the nine-panel (or even six-panel) page in contemporary comics, especially as it is used to as individual panels and a larger cohesive picture at the same time. This is much less grounded in theory at this stage, and much more supported by my singular amazement at one particular page in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing. But as proposals are due at the end of the year, I should hopefully stumble upon something before too long.

Several colleagues have expressed surprise at my willingness to put all my scholarly ideas in a public forum before I take steps to insure they are published (thereby giving me all the credit). I find that a bit of an antiquated view, and think the benefits of outside discussion greatly outweighs the slim chance that my work will be hijacked or plagiarized. In addition, writing is a lonely business, and working out ideas here will allow me to keep plodding towards my ultimate goal of working full time as an academic, hopefully helping me deal with the fact that I have to work more and more in my service industry job just to make ends meet. Help keep the eyes on the prize, so to speak.

Please, let me know what you think about this decision, and more than that, feedback will do nothing but help me as I implement these plans. Many of you are academics, or at least academically inclined, and I suspect that you have an idea or two about such topics already. In fact, I would be open to using this space with other authors who are attempting to jumpstart their own research in a similar fashion, assuming of course that the content was relatively the same.