“Dialectical Polyptych: an interactive movie installation” seeks to explore new possibilities of interaction in the film view in an immersive and intuitive way, offering the viewer the role of film editing in real time through transparent interfaces.
2.1. The Film Narrative and the Editing
The editing is one of two basic components in audio-visual production (Bedoya, 2003), the other component in the audio-visual language is the framing or selection unit. According to Deleuze (Deleuze, 2014), the evolution of cinema grows up with the editing, the mobile camera and the emancipation of taking views. Griffith had contributed to the editing by giving emotional impact through the long shot, medium shot, close-up, subjective camera (point of view of the character) and travelling (moving camera) (Gosciola, 2003). Thus, Griffith wanted to involve the spectator emotionally through scale changes in the shot, giving the public a progressive emotion. Porter expanded the idea of linear narrative with the use of parallel-editing to depict two simultaneous events or points of view (Musser, 2012; Jenkins, 2013). This technique alternates two or more scenes that often happen simultaneously but in different locations. Like Porter’s technique, “Dialectical Polyptych” prototype also invokes parallel editing but from the result of spectator interaction.
For interactive cinema, technological advances are not enough. It is also necessary to point out new solutions to the narratives. In the beginning of the XX century, Kuleshov (1994) argues that “the essence of cinema, the medium that allows obtaining an artistic impression, is the editing”. For Eisenstein (2002) editing is “the primary means for a really important creative transformation of nature” and “cinematography is, first of all, editing”. Pudovkin said: “the editing builds scenes from the separate pieces” (Pudovkin, 1929). The combination of these pieces forms different meanings depending on the chosen sequence. Thus, if given the user the possibility, there will be a similar editing to what happens on the Internet with hypertext, where the user also chooses the “pieces” of text to be read.