Spatial dialectics: montage and spatially organised narrative in stories without human leads

摘要

This article analyses and formulates mechanisms for creating meaningful and engaging narrativity in interactive movies not based on character, where the dialectic relationship between architectural space and the rules that govern montage shape the narrative structure. Formalist analysis of Dziga Vertov's film Man with the Movie Camera (USSR, 1929) highlights two significant terms which play a central role in the formulation of the rhetorical argument of the moving image. 'Punctus-contra-punctum montage' ('counterpoint montage') describes a technique that exploits analogies in form or content between adjacent clips, to produce meaningful thematic sequences; while Lev Kuleshov's 'artificial landscapes'—the imaginary, creative geographies constructed of moving images that exist only on the screen—offer a way of arranging media spatially. A proof-of-concept, prototype production, Cambridge City Symphony (Alifragkis & Penz 2006), where these approaches are instantiated as rule-sets, and handled by the computer, illustrates how these produce engaging interactive narrativity.