Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
it enables me to drive legally. And yet, that card could be a useful document in
the making of a documentary about the construction of identity.
This other context is what makes any conscientious creator feel the arbi-
trariness of giving a narrative function to any document in a film. Two ques-
tions a responsible author must ask themselves repeatedly in every project: “Is
my use of this document respectful of the meaning it evokes outside of my
film's context?” and “Am I making the most effective use of this document for
my own narrative?” (The answers to these questions often contradict.) A pho-
tograph or film clip in one of my projects may serve an insignificant need if
in the end I must tell only one story, told one way, in a fixed order, by only
me. But, given the freedom to re-purpose my material to accommodate a vari-
ety of other possible narratives, I may be able to exhaust more of the possible
significations any photograph or film clip may offer. Though a documentary
can have only one (sometimes unknowable) fabula (representation of time)
to reference, multiple syuzhet (plot and rhetorical structure) can be the re-
sult of numerous restructurings and revisions of the author's narration. But
with multiple syuzhet, the perception of the order of events can progressively
change in the mind of the viewer making a single “truth” difficult to validate.
The John F. Kennedy assassination and its panoply of documentaries and re-
enactments represent a single and elusive fabula exemplary of this conundrum.
Akira Kurosawa's film
Rashomon
(1950) is another example that constructs its
meaningfulness on this intractable problem.
Multimedia enabled creators to design multi-threaded narratives. But we
have crossed a junction where many authors realize that branching structures
still have profound limitations. While we have experienced branching story
structures in many nonfiction multimedia works, an accounting of each possi-
ble version can be made with a matrix and a linear equation. Hence in branch-
ing stories, the narrative trail gains more possible tributaries and alternate
routes, but adds no responsive mechanism to the potentially dynamic inten-
tions of its authors and the changing interests of its audience. Only intelligent
systems developed to accommodate this change allow autonomous, dynamic
and even modular characteristics to be realized. Only systems that use aleatoric
mechanisms can produce an experience that represents the complexity and
arbitrary characteristics of a documented reality.
One such system that explored a similar set of concerns in the making of
documentary is the “Autonomist storyteller system” (Davenport & Murtaugh
1997: 446). These authors saw the limitations of affecting the viewer with the
television documentary, and wanted to find another way to engage the viewer
interactively while allowing for recombinant narrative structures to be deter-
