Onyx Project

I found The Onyx Project fascinating. A few ideas --

I doubt it's vaguely like a matter of replacing film. As story, they don't function anything alike. A normal (itchy word, but I'll leave it) film is based on external story and operates mostly temporally, Memento and some others notably aside. Even the nontemporal stories progress in a very linear manner -- we see scene after scene. Even the time we spend on any given scene is dicatated, as it is not in a book. We've seen something of how tremendously difficult plot has been to accomplish in linked text. I can't imagine that a medium that relies on inevitably temporal sound and action footage would be easier. Imagine what they had to do -- and what they had to NOT do! -- to get the music to work.

I don't think one can use this like film is usually used. No, it's way closer to a hypertext or a long poem. So, for instance, many of us felt that we never found the "main thread." But the main story was not the failed mission; the main story was the re-examination of values, the revery after the failed mission. Accordingly, we were swimming in the main thread from the first frame, just as we should have been.

That said, perhaps someone could have made a regular (another of those words) movie out of this material. It sounds promising. But if they did, it would not duplicate this piece; in fact, the overlap would be rather small, I think. Imagine the parameters one would work with as a screenwriter. You want to start as late in the action as you can and end a early as you can, Hemingway-style, right? So you plant an opening in combat. You show the officer's decisions. You show the men being heroic. You show the men's wives or children or lovers; you have to find some kind of action for them to involve themselves in, so they're not talking heads. You show the soldiers dying. You show some dramatic portrayal of how the families react. You show the officer reconsidering, at max a few frames, or some indication that he will confront his superiors or that he has had some change of heart. Then roll credits, right?

That entire story ends more or less where this starts. Maybe the film film (well, that's a little better) would be a better piece of art. But I don't see any kind of equivalent in it.

Part of what fascinates me here is that the use of linking seems to have forced the Onyx staff into a revealing choice: The piece is organized by language and linguistic connections almost entirely, unless I missed something. The whole business of analyzing jumps and threads is very remniscient of working with hypertext. One decides what continuities are available to the reader. I must say I was astonished at the degree of continuity that was accomplished - not so much the feeling of "Hey, story," but that with the exception of when we wound up repeating conversation, the talk seemed continous, and didn't feel like we'd jumped to something totally different. I need to see how they did that again, but there's now way that didn't take a lot of time and thought. The first words I heard people use to describe it recalled conversation, and conversation, though it wanders logically and associatively is a temporal event.

I did feel that they had the lead onscreen too much, and they should have had him speaking voice off, with some relevant visuals. I wonder whether I'm not displaying some naivete about film process, however. A tremendous amount gets communicated just by where and things are placed onscreen. And I have to imagine that the sequence of which things get placed in which places onscreen makes a difference. If so, one could well break sequence in some sort of visual syntax by linking to a <jump> instead of a <thread>. So that, for instance, if we notice that the music has to be fairly repetitive and low-key to survive the shifts in action, it may be that screen organization, color, backdrop, and various more and less abstract visual themes must also be kept relatively low-key. If so, we have demands diametrically opposed from what drives a standard movie. In the movie, we want action, even to maximize action; in this, it may be necessary to reduce action sharply.

On the other hand, that seems to limit drastically the sensual potential of the medium. But so, in a way, does the principle of harmony in music.

Interestingly, I found the film most effective when the speaker was onscreen, at least during the events in which he was talking about his wife. The VO seemed very familiar and natural over the news clips. But I kept expecting his wife to have fuller interaction, especially when her expression indicated that she seemed to want to speak.

But, you see, something like this might have simply been a matter of camera position. For instance, if the camera seems to be within reach of the character, or nearer to the character's face than the distal reaches of his or her body, then the viewer considers him or her self with the character. If the character is farther, the viewer is fewing a character outside of him or her self -- a third person. The camera will often move between one and another position, and back and forth, but not without consequence.

I'm not sure I see as clear a motive for Onyx's use of film as I do for radical experimentation with etext. There seems less necessity to mother the invention. Clearly, streaming multimedia does just fine in a digital and networked environment, whereas text functions differently onscreen and online.