A Non-linear Tradition -
Experimental Film and Digital Cinema
Malcolm Le Grice
Because digital applications in the field of cinema are beginning to have significant commercial potential, two features - interactivity and non-linearity - are becoming widely debated. If there is to be a recognisably new "digital-cinema", these two concepts will probably be inseparable in its realisation.
It is difficult to find many examples from the history of the arts which might be seen as pre-figuring interactivity - direct involvement of the user in modifying the art object itself is genuinely new territory.
Non-linearity, on the other hand, has precursors. Cinematic structures which break with the assumptions of single track, single resolution narrative, can be seen to have strong rootsd in a number of directions explored in experimental film and video during its eighty year history.
The current fashionability of the term "non-linear" creates some problem of definition. We hear much of non-linear editing systems - called non-linear because shots or sequences can be easily accessed from a computer hard disc and easily assembled and re-assembled in a different order from the one in which they were stored. But normally, the principles on which they are combined in the finished product conform to linear narrative concepts. The technology allows non-linearity - the concepts remain linear.
Given the current hype and imprecision it is unwise to assume that concepts of non-linearity are unproblematic. Here are a few questions which just scratch the surface of the issues:
Is linearity synonymous with narrative? Are there forms of sequential structure which are linear but not narrative? Can concepts of dramaturgy be applied to linear structures which are non-narrative? Given that, for the viewer, the sequence in which any time-based work is experienced is inevitably "linear" how are non-linear concepts and experiences embodied in a work?
Starting from the experimental cinema, with the risk of over simplification, there have been two broad directions or features of its history which can be related to the current notions of non-linearity.
- The first direction is abstraction - in the sense of non-representational imagery.
- The second is the break with narrative form - including work which incorporates photographic representation.
Abstraction and Anti-narrative
In the strictly non-representational form of cinema "Abstract Cinema", the model for the experience and the aesthetic framework was derived from painting and music.
Though I prefer to define "abstraction" as the process of separation of the component features and qualities from the "whole" of an object and as such it is not synonymous with non-representation, in cinema, as in the other arts, the manipulation of non-representational elements like colour and shape have become the widely understood connotation. Given this popular connotation of "Abstract Cinema", the attempts made by experimental film and video makers to break with the constraints of narrative - the second major feature - may be seen as a more general characteristic in its history.
This resistance to narrative and the search for alternatives is already evident in theoretical writing in the 1920's by, for example, ernand Leger or Dziga Vertov and has been expressed not just as "non-narrative" but polemically as "anti-narrative" in the more recent and crucial writings of Peter Gidal (1). Whilst the resistance to narrative form is confirmed in theoretical work on experimental film, it is most evident in the search for alternative cinematic structures in works themselves. This fundamental search for cinematic forms which do not conform to a linear narrative structure and resolution is the main characteristic differentiating experimental film from mainstream cinema and is ultimately its major claim to radical intervention at all levels - aesthetic, ideological and political.
So "Abstract Cinema", based on colour, shape, movement and rhythm and without representational imagery, as in the films of Walter Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger, John Whitney of Harry Smith, are an aspect of the non-narrative enterprise but the majority of non- or anti-narrative works are based on or include photographically representational imagery: non-narrative is not synonymous with non-representation.
Narrative and ideology
What is it in narrative against which the experimental cinema has reacted?
In the same way in which physical space can be represented in two dimensions by a set of conventions - most predominantly the perspective system developed in the 14th century, events in time are represented by conventions, most predominantly narrative. As perspective represents an apparent coherence in spacial relationships so narrative is a method by which events - real or imaginary - are given coherence through the representation of sequential connections. Like perspective, the form of coherence constructed by narrative is only one particular method by which temporal events and their "casual" relationships may be represented (modeled). But, the adequacy or otherwise of the resulting "unity" produced by the narrative form - its "truth-factor" is, like the particular spacial coherence of perspective, the reult of an interplay between the subject (in its various meanings) and the conventions of linkage or representation. However ubiquitous, narrative remains a particular method of representation, and like perspective, it is not a neutral or natural system its effect is to "place" its spectator/listener both psychologically and ideologically.
Because these narrative conventions have become dominant cultural norms this process of placement is largely unconscious. Its invisibility allows the dominance of a convention to become integral to the fusion between social order and culture. Constrained within a predominant convention not only the listener but the narrator as well remain unconscious of its function. The particular conditions of the placement - its ideological and psychological effects - its detailed techniques and devices (grammar) - only become evident through resistance, the creation of other models and the search for other conventions.
This is a matter of theory but primarily, to become effective in the cultural discourse, it requires the establishment of new forms in practice - working in and transforming experience, concepts and meanings.
Ideologically we can interpret the innovations of cubism and the development of non-narrative forms in cinema as a process of dislodging the fusion between social (state or economic) power and dominant conventions of representation. At the same time the process creates new conventions by which we can understand and experience our world.
Towards the Non-linear
Historically, experimental film has grappled with these issues bit-by-bit through developments of the cinematic language within the discourses of art and cinema. At the risk of constructing my own repressive historical narrative, we might note some key stages and fundamental concepts in the process.
Chronologically, the earliest challenge to narrative cinema came from the direction of abstract film almost certainly beginning with the work of uturists Bruno Cora and Arnaldo Gina made between 1910 and 1914 (well documented but now lost or destroyed) and carried on in the early twenties by Walter Ruttman, Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger (2) and (3). Innovations are largely imported from the developing ideas in contemporary painting and based visually on manipulation of shape, line, tone or colour. Brought into the temporal arena of cinema, this import forced formal solutions involving shape transformation, movement into and across the screen and the rhythm both of the changes within the frame and the "beat" created by montage. Though the images of Abstract Cinema are essentially non-representational (they may have residual anthropomorphic or object references), they are not outside meaning or interpretation either in the images or the logic of their transformation. Indeed, abstract transformations can even parallel the identification and consequence of narrative.
However, the solutions found for the temporal structure in abstract film has been most predominantly analogous to musical structure. This was both an intrinsic parallel which emerged from the practice of abstract cinema and a theoretical quest mainly deriving from Wassily Kandinsky who sought a broader philosophical and formal basis for a "language" of abstraction.
Viking Eggelling's abstract film "Diagonal Symphony" relates directly to a theoretical enterprise, following Kandinsky, where he sought a "Generalbase der Malerei". This represented a systematic attempt by Eggeling to establish a language of visual form and fundamental rules of transition equivalent to those which had guided the development of western music (4). In fact, the work itself is more mathematical then musical in character and pre-figures the development of computer film through its "programmability". It is probably the first hint of one of the later widely used experimental film strategies where an arithmetic system becomes the basis of a non-narrative but temporal structure.
Abstract Cinema remains a major and radical challenge to the hegemony of narrative at the level initiating new structural principles. At its most radical, it demands a priority for physical experience over interpretation creating an extreme point of reference both for dominant and experimental cinema.
The more general Experimental or Avant-garde cinema which is based on representational (photo-cinematic) imagery is not as simply differentiated from narrative form. Common to both experimental and dominant cinema, images which derive from the interaction between a camera and the world inevitably establish the conditions where the viewer becomes "implicated" in the scene through the camera and the decisions of the cinematographer. Irrespective of the subject before the camera, this basic identification into the cinematic scene (spectacle) is filtered or mediated through the camera as "viewpoint/trajectory". The camera and cinematographer unavoidably act as the representative of the viewer establishing the psychological and symbolic traces through which the viewer must pass and out of which meanings are formed by juxtaposition. This process of identification - the collusion of the viewer in becoming subject to another viewpoint - another authority and power - extends from the act of the camera to the represented objects (people, things of landscapes).
Strategies of resistance to this fundamental identification have become incorporated into the traditions of experimental cinema. Many of these have been based on affirming the separate identity of the image - as a pattern of light and colour on a screen - from its object reference. Transforming or manipulating the imatge itself - "Adebar" by Peter Kubelka or my own "Berlin Horse" for example - shifts the experience of the viewer away from a passage through the image to its denotation towards an experience of the image construction and transformation itself. Other strategies, as in Michael Snow's Back and Forth", have foregrounded the operation and movement of the camera so that it no longer remains invisible, its condition as mediator is made evident and problematic in the meaning of the work.
In addition to the basic condition of identification through representation shared by experimental and narrative cinema, the juxtapostion of cinematic sequences inevitably creates for both assumptions of causal (or "motivated") linkage. These linkages, if confirming to dominant convention also confirm established meanings within the juxtapostion, - as in action montage - if they do not conform directly to established forms they demand interpretation.
It is in establishing a new basis for the creation and interpretation of linkages in the montage of cinematic sequences that the experimental cinema is most radically challenging. Experimental cinema has explored a range of approaches to the connection of sequences including mathematical systems, randomness, musical analogy, unconstrained subjectivity creating conditions of montage all of which counteract and create alternatives to narrative structure. As with the strategies which work on the image itself, those which work on montage may be initially expressed in terms of resistance, but through the developing practice of experimental cinema, have established a range of new formal models. Many of the works which make up this history employ a combination of strategles working on both the image and the montage.
Though we might see Melies as the primitive originator, outside Abstract Cinema, the first intentionally non-narrative but clearly representational work emerged from dadaism and surrealism. The crucial reference points are well know - Rene Claire's "Entracte", the Bunuel, Dali collaboration on "Un Chien Andelou" and "L'age dor' and Germaine Dulac's "Seashell and the Clergyman".
It is not coincidental that the emergence and codification of Psychoanalysis was a crucial influence on the development of Surrealism from the anarchic, nihilistic drive of Dada. Both movements for which, despite manifestos, there is no hard dividing moment, were vehemently anti-bourgeois. They recognised the constraints on thought and behaviour which came not just from censorship of the subjects of art but from the fundamental constraint in the structure of laguage and conventions.
Psychoanalysis itself questions the way in which linearity in the narrative is capable of representing the underlying causal structures. Its reference to dreams and free-association are both instances where the dominant forms of causal representation are loosened or dissolved to permit cross references between layers of memory in turn to create different connective hierarchies. In many ways, the constructions of experience implicit in psychoanalysis represents another parallel to the dissolution by cubism of the single spacial view point of perspective and the dissolution by experimental Cinema of the single linear resolution to social interactions of narrative.
The Experimental Cinema, in resisting the cultural unification of narrative has also resisted the establishment of a single new unifying form. In this its references remain provisional rather than dogmatic and the psychoanalytic model is no exception. The resistance to linear causality and pre-determined consequence by definition precludes the acceptance of a new unifying form. This is not a matter of fashion and novelty, as has often been interpreted in the art world, leading to the cynicism of the post-modern, but a reflection of a fundamental shift in philophical assumptions of the knowable. Knowledge and experience have become irreversibly problematic whilst the attempt to give form to experience remains the unavoidable basis of artistic practice.
Within the Experimental Cinema the development of a form of non-linear "provisionality" which took on the issue of subjective content is best seen in the work of Maja Deren. Her "Meshes of the Afternoon" has many of the normal components of a narrative work - there are distinct characters in a staged enactment, which are filmed through conventional camera set-ups employing long, medium, close-up and point of view shots. There are also sections of montage which describe or represent moments of coherent action. However, in major aspects of its form, the interpretation of the meaning of the sequential montage is significantly shifted from narrative through the device repetition and development or variation in the repetition. Each repetition of a simple and basic action sequence introduces new variations of detail requiring re-interpretation. The work describes a spiral passage - the linear perceptual passage of the viewer - through a symbolic experience where each spiral collects (allows a review) of the material from that place in the spiral on the previous circuit. Again however, the continued spiral does not lead towards a new definitive interpretation but only serves to increase the complexity of interpretation available to the previous as well as the present experience. The form acts, a little like psychoanalysis, to initiate a re-interpretation of the covert matrix of interconnected symbolic memories as represented in the film. But it also acts to set up a formal relationship of the viewer of the work where the meanings must be made and reviewed by the viewer independently of the film's maker as it becomes increasingly apparent that any resolution is unrealiable - subject to change - problematic - provisional.
In this film, as in many works from the Experimental Cinema, the inevitable linearity of the presentation is not subservient to the representation of a linear coherence of consequence. Instead it initiates a construction (comprehension) of the images where their relationships are non-linear. The connective linearity of the work models a relationship of the "content" which is non-consequential - thus speculative descriptive terms like "spiral", "matrix", "psycho-associative" of Deren's own description of the exploration of "verticality" as opposed to the common "horizontal" trajectory of conventional narrative. Deren's film is an exemplar in Experimental Cinema of the development of non-linearity as an aesthetic experience, and, through the participation of the viewer in the self-construction of meaning - forced by the form, not simply available to the critical cineaste - it is also a key point in cinema of a symbolic interactivity.
Digital Cinema
Looking more closely at the structure of cinematic narrative the issue of linearity begins to be clarified. The classical narrative is constructed through the representation of characters who interact with each other through a series of incidents depicted in a social or natural environment. The story or plot is a schema made up of the events in the "causal" sequence in which they are represented to have taken place. The narration itself is more complex than the plot in that it may re-order the disclosure of these events, through representing recollection, premonition or separate exclusive viewpoints - flash-back, jump-cut, parallel action - and may incorporate the represented subjectivity of narrator or even reference the subjectivity of the reader. Both plot and narration may conform to structures of dramaturgy - the controlled psychological effect of phasing the release of information to create intrigue, suspense, apprehension and pleasure in resolution.
Underlying the formal structures of narrative are the complex processes fo the identification between the audience/viewer and the represented characters - acting vicariously for and on behalf of the viewer in the "play" - and the psychological/ideological effect of the story resolving the moral dilemmas of the subject in society through its narrative resolution. The issues of linearity or non-linearity are not fully defined in this description of narrative process.
For the viewer of a film, the experience inevitably takes place in linear sequence. This is, incidentally, equally true of the viewing of a painting or the interaction with a CD Rom. This (apparent?) continuity of consciousness in time is - excepting the fantasies of time travel - a condition of our personal subjective singularity and the irreversibility of time.
In a sense, all our perceptions and consciousness take place in a "time-line" but it is evident that from these discrete temporal elements - our perceptions - we are able to construct concepts which are not themselves fundamentally temporal. For example, from our temporal perceptions we can model spacial relationships, or link temporal events ot construct a hierarchy which is not itself linearly causal - as in the psychological associations of memory.
So, in the history of experimental as in conventional narrative cinema, the inveitability of "perceptual" linearity must be accepted, both in the condition of the viewer and particularly in the predetermined sequence of presentation of the work (even if, as with some presentations by the quintessential underground filmmaker, Jack Smith, the reels of a particular film might be shown in different orders at different screenings).
The problem then of narrative is not the linearity of presentation or perception but the ideology hidden beneath the unproblematic "linearity" - the particular causal chain of representation - made invisible and velidated in dominant culture. This linearity of causal sequence is by definition authoritarian. Even if the content is transgressive or anarchic, the form locks the audience into a consequence which unifles the subject impotently with and within the narrative. It is the linear coherence of the narrative and its conclusion which represses the subject (viewer) by implicitly suppressing the complexity of the viewer's own construction of meaning. Transmitted as a culturally validated convention, narrative subsequently becomes a model by which experience is interpreted, becomes a filter for the life experience outside the cinematic.
The compute, which is fundamentally based on what is called Random Access Memory - which has little to do with randomness in the sense of the generation of random numbers - but is the designation of the non-sequentiality of memory addressing - intrinsically opens up the condition of non-linearity. Non-linearity is a factor of Random Access Memory - unlike in linear media, film, audio tape, video - though the computer remains (temporarily?) tied to partially sequential devices like CD Rom, its basic structure of storing and controlling data is sequential only in as far as the sequentiality is specified. However, the non-linear potential and its application does not ensure that its products are constructed around the philosophical, ethical, ideological and psychological issues of non-linearity in human discourses. The tradition of Experimental Cinema and Video, has already developed the basis for exploring these artistic concerns, not as a response to the new technology but as a consequence of artistic reflection on the human condition and the search for contemporary expressive models, indeed, the forms developed in this artistic tradition are more suited to the intrinsic opportunities offered by computer technology for a non-linear and interactive cinema than are those derived from the narrative film.
(1) "Materialist Film", Peter Gidal, Routledge, London and New York, 1989
(2) "Experimental Cinema", David Curtis, Studio Vista London, 1971
(3) "Abstract Film and Beyond"m Malcolm Le Grice, Studio Vista London and MIT, 1977
(4) "Viking Eggeling" by Louise O'Konor, Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1971
Malcolm Le Grice
Publicity Material
After studying painting in Plymouth and at the Slade, Malcolm Le Grice, was one of those artists who, in the 60's experimented with a wide range of media. He made some video and performance work which he showed at the first Arts Laboratory in Drury Lane in 1967 and some computer work which was shown at Event One of the Computer Arts Society in 1970, but his main impact as an artist was as an Experimental Film-maker. His earliest films were amongst the first British work to make an impact internationally through tours in Europe and the USA. His work has continued to develope and change including performance , multi-projection works for TV and more recently exploration of video, digital and interactive computer systems. As well his work as an artist, Le Grice has published widely on the history and theory of Experimental Film and has been deeply involved at various times in the cultural support for experimental film and video having been a one of the founders of the London Filmmakers Cooperative Film workshop, the originator of the film department at St. Martin's School of Art and a member of funding committees of the British Film Institute and the Arts Council of Great Britain. After twelve years as Head of Design and Media at the University of Westminster he is currently the professor of Design and Media Research at the Central Saint Martins College of Art in London.