The extract from Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art book I had already read last year as a part of my Cinema Studies course. Nevertheless, it’s concepts are certainly applicable across many disciplines, though in relation to Integrated Media and the study of Korsakow films we are undertaking at the moment, the ideas are something you have to construe a little bit to grasp in terms of multi-linear media.

The main points in the reading concern the most basic of narrative devices: time, space, the order of both of those, and arguably the most important, cause and effect. The question is how these will translate to films that cannot rely on a single narrative thread to be compelling; where traditional film has concrete motivations to proceed a story, non-linear media relies on the user to decide on these motivations.

A game I referred to much last year in the Networked Media course was Dear Esther, which is exemplary of a kind of non-linear storytelling, where the story is told in fragments, and delivered at random at certain checkpoints. The pace is thus dictated by the player, who can meditate on one area for as long as they like, and then choose where to proceed next. Of course there are many criticisms of the game, most regarding it’s supposed linearity, nevertheless it upholds an ideal of a story that is not reliant on linear time or space.

The extract from Film Art eventually moves onto experimental and abstract film. At a glance of course these hold very little narrative, but the text explores the use of visual and aural relations to create a kind of rhythm, that can be interpreted into a story. It mentions a particular film called Ballet Mecanique that seems to just show random images over several minutes.

Both the traditional techniques and the one shown in Ballet Mecanique showcase how relations are made between shots to help build the narrative, which – provided your aim is to create a narrative – is how multi-linear films such as Korsakow can achieve a narrative.

ACMI is a great example of contemporary non-linear storytelling though, and it’s permanent exhibition Screen Worlds is a more physical form of the non-linear narrative, where participants can explore a mediated history of TV, film, and video games in an open plan space to compose a narrative. The space relies heavily on the relation of space (you can follow a loosely built chronology of media) to give a sense of time passing.