The other day, I spent an irritating hour battling a Word Document. It carried an application form we had to fill in, and some fool had misdesigned the thing. Type in your details, and they shifted the rest of the text onto a new page. It was a muddle.
We couldn’t reformat the page, however, because the same fool had ‘protected’ the form and sealed it up with a password. Copying and pasting the text into a new document was impossible, as was saving the file with a new name.
Then followed a further hour searching for and downloading apparently ‘free’ programmes that promised to remove the password. None did, because the free trial features were limited to discovering passwords of five characters or less.
Eventually, I found the Ultimate ZIP Cracker. This is also a paid for programme, but it does have one advantage over its competitors, in that one of its free trial features is the offer to simply remove the protection on documents. It won’t actually tell you what the password is, but for my purposes with the crappy application form, it was perfect.
Author: Robert (Page 207 of 328)
James Harkin’s essay in The Observer Film Quarterly, adapted from his new book Cyburbia, highlights non-linear storytelling in film-making, and asks what these techniques say about the state of our culture. When Kubrick made The Killing in this fashion, the film was considered to confusing for the audience, and the project was shelved. A generation later, such films were making millions, with Pulp Fiction probably taking credit as the ‘breakthrough’ film. Pictures like Crash, Syriana and Amores Perros weave disparate narratives and characters together, by way of a key event (usually dislocating and disturbing). Others, such as Memento, withhold key events until the end of the film to keep us guessing.
Harkin is right to say that non-linear techniques have become mainstream. I would go further, and suggest that they are in danger of becoming cliché. Any film in need of an extra layer of depth can play about with the timeline in the sure knowledge that a fairly standard plot turn can be transformed into a ‘twist’ if you delay its arrival. Even the one-trick pony that is He’s Just Not That In To You makes claims at complexity, by opting for an interlinked ‘ensemble cast’ of characters who are all one coincidence away from each other.
Its clear that our interpretation of film has been profoundly influenced by the slew of modern, non-linear story-telling. Visual cues and clues that were not in common use a few years ago, are commonplace now. Our visual language, the grammar of film and TV, has evolved, and in a short space of time, too. This was illustrated to me last week, via a second viewing of David Lynch’s Mullholland Drive. I had first seen the film soon after its arrival on DVD, and I remember how confused I found its structure, and lack of revelatory moments. However, watching it again recently, the same scenes are not nearly so confusing. After four years of Lost on our screens every week, the transition between the first and second ‘worlds’ that Naomi Watts’ character inhabits is easy to spot. One might argue that I think this only because I’ve seen it twice, and that someone who saw the film for the first time would be confused, but I don’t think so. The clues in shot and edit which reveal the riddle are easy to pick up on. There is no big revelatory moment, where we are told which of the two worlds is ‘real’ (for Watts’ character) and which is imaginary… but that doesn’t matter. It is enough to discover that the two worlds are a Through the Looking Glass mirror image of one-another. It is merely this interplay between the first and second acts that is the solution to the riddle. Once we’ve worked out what is happening, it doesn’t actually matter that the characters themselves never get that far. (By contrast, The Matrix is told in a completely linear way, despite the fact that the characters have to fundamentally rethink their entire world).
Laura Harring in Mulholland Drive (2001)
My point here is not to provide spoilers, or even make a boast that I’ve finally managed to work out what Mullholland Drive is about. Its not even to show how the very essence of the film is contained within its structure. Its simply that, to my eye, a film that does this now looks normal and mainstream, in a way that it did not when it was released eight years ago: In 2001, when the internet and digital culture was still vainly struggling to conform to the linear, walled structures that other media had forced upon it.
I think that this is just one example of what James Harkin has put his finger on: that our new digital tools are altering the way we think. We are now comfortable making hyperlinks between our own thoughts and others. As well as thinking bigger and smaller, its normal to think meta as well…
Harkin’s essay is a personal joy, because we used to talk about this stuff all the time at Fifty Nine, and I’ve seen every single one of the films he references, for precisely the reasons he cites them in the first place. I would love to think that Sweet Fanny Adams in Hyperspace Eden, our sprawling internet film by Judith Adams, could be added to that canon of films. While in Mullholland Drive, you can only sit back and watch as the visual refrains (blue keys, cowboys, name badges for waitresses) flow by, in Sweet Fanny Adams… we built actual hyperlinks between them. Four years ago there was no YouTube. Bandwidths were small, delivering video online was a niche activity, and embedding hyperlinks into those movies was a right royal pain in the arse. Now its easy, as the Interactive Jacuzzi Girl demonstrates.
There’s a lot of banter around about how print is dying and the net is taking over. Here’s a couple more ways in which print and the web are in symbiosis.
First, James Bridle at BookTwo.org says:
Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book.
Image below. I’m glad it has been typset so well. Its reminiscent of Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet.
James Brindle archived two years of twitters into a hardback book. Photo by STML
Meanwhile, Adam from downBOUND has edited HeadTweets, a book of Old Wives Tales/Conventional Wisdom on the subject of headaches. The pithy one-liners are the the perfect contributions to solicit online, and Twitter seems the perfect tool for the job.
Note here how the web doesn’t short-circuit the entire publication process. These are projects that still require an editor (maybe not so much in James’ case) and a designer in order to make them readable.
Update
The ridiculously huge Daily Dish blog will be self-publishing a book version of the popular A View From Your Window feature. No mention of where the revenues for this will go.
Update December 2009
There will be no revenues for the Daily Dish book. Its a labour of love.
Here’s the conundrum I am grappling with today, concerning the Northern Line on the London Underground.
When you embark at London Bridge, the Northbound and Southbound lines are arranged in what I would describe as the Continental style. That is, to the right of each other. It is the left set of doors that open. However, when you disembark at Angel, the two lines are arranged in the Commonwealth style. That is, they are to the left of each other.
How is this possible? It must mean that the two lines twist around one another, like a double-helix. Either that, or we have some sort of Subway Named Mobius beneath London. Can anyone explain the peculiar engineering or physical geography that causes this to be the case?
I wonder, do maps of the actual underground network exist anywhere online? Not the Harry Beck maps, or its Google representation but a accurate scematic of the actual tracks, junctions and stations. I fancy it might be quite a fascinating labyrinth.
Underground Ad Space. I only use this image 'cause I haven't taken one of the actual tube trains yet.
Update
A rollercoaster that’s a mobius strip.
Another Update
Eurostar enters the fourth dimension?
Every day thousands of travellers take the Eurostar to a strange and foreign land. No, not Paris; the Fourth Dimension. Although many visitors to Paris don’t realise it, at the heart of the city is a portal to hyperspace. As you emerge from the Paris subway into the financial district at La Défense you are greeted by a huge four-dimensional cube.
English PEN (my new employers, for those who haven’t been paying attention) have just published a letter in The Times, backing an ammendment to Coroners & Justic Bill by the the Liberal Democrat Evan Harris:
On Monday Parliament will have a unique opportunity to repeal the arcane and antiquated offences of seditious libel and criminal defamation. These two crimes date from an era when governments preferred to lock up their critics than to engage them in debate, and are incompatible with the universal right to freedom of expression. Their repeal is long overdue, and will send a powerful signal to states around the world which routinely use charges of sedition and criminal defamation to imprison their critics and silence dissent.