Using Interactive Data Visualization to Explore Non-Linear Movie Narratives Rasagy Sharma & Venkatesh Rajamanickam
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THE PARSONS INSTITUTE 68 Fifth Avenue 212 229 6825 FOR INFORMATION MAPPING New York, NY 10011 piim.newschool.edu press, elaborate blog posts, YouTube videos, spirited Using Interactive Data discussions on forums such as Quora and Reddit, meticu- Visualization to Explore lously created infographics and so on. Movies with ever Non-Linear Movie Narratives more complex narrative structures are eagerly consumed and vigorously analyzed by movie lovers all over the world. RASAGY SHARMA & VENKATESH RAJAMANICKAM Through a visualization of the movie (500) Days of Summer (2009) we show that data visualization, which KEYWORDS Arc diagrams, interactive data visualization, help readers understand complex information, can play movie narrative, narrative visualization, non-linear an important role in not only understanding complex narrative; narratives, but also enable analysis of their form and substance both quantitatively and qualitatively. PROJECT DATE July-September 2013 In section two of the paper, we provide historical background, trace the reasons for the rise, and present URL http://rasagy.in/500days/ the purpose and consequences of non-linear movies. Section three looks at movies as data source and presents ABSTRACT For the process of storytelling, various related work on visualizing narratives, followed by case narrative structures have been explored to make a simple study of our visualization of the movie (500) Days of story more interesting to the audience. A non-linear Summer in section four. The paper ends with conclusions narrative is one such structure. While techniques such as and perspectives for future work in section five. in media res, flashbacks, and flash-forwards have been used since ancient times, these techniques have been 2 NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES extensively used in several movies in the past two decades. 2.1 THE RISE OF NON-LINEAR MOVIES Such movies keep the viewers interested even after they Allan Cameron claims that in the past twenty-five years leave the theatre, and lead to several in-person and online “popular cinema has displayed a turn towards narrative discussions. complexity.”1 Among other factors, he argues, digitization This paper highlights how data visualization can has made it easier for filmmakers to divide their plots into also help extend the movie experience and aid in complex segments that scramble linearity and manipulate discussions around the narrative. Apart from letting temporal sequences. users relive special moments from a movie, such Storytellers have been using non-linearity to hook a visualizations can also summarize the overall audiences, build expectations, and create suspense for structure and timing of the non-linear narrative, thousands of years in the oral and written literary and explore cues and elements of continuity used. tradition. However, cinema has suffered the lack of this For the purpose of demonstration, this paper uses device, as it has no built-in tense system as language does. the non-linear narrative of the movie (500) Days As Brian Henderson points out, “One cannot write of Summer (2009) to create an interactive data visual- a sentence without indicating tense but one can apparently ization using the D3.js JavaScript library. make a shot, and therefore perhaps a film, without indicat- ing tense. In written discourse the tense structure must be 1 INTRODUCTION renewed with every sentence and, concomitantly, a single Non-linear movies are as old as movies themselves. How- sentence may subvert that structure.”2 ever it is only in the past twenty-five years that they have Mainstream cinema has mostly made chronologically been gradually accepted into the mainstream. Discussions ordered and causally related narratives. But where com- about such movies have also increased among film prehensible shifts of tenses is to be achieved, filmmakers scholars, professional movies critics, and general movie have used language ranging from explicit dialogue setting enthusiasts. The recent movie Interstellar (2014), for up a return to the past, to the direct intervention of example, came with a book The Science of Interstellar language in the form of titles or voice-over. Other devices written by Kip Thorne, the California Institute of Technol- include: indirect dialogue, music, and visuals such as blurs, ogy physicist who served as science advisor on the film, ripples, fades, or dissolves. However, because of the nature and Christopher Nolan, the film’s director. A Google of the recording medium—first celluloid film and later search for “Interstellar explained” returns twelve million magnetic video tape—and the possibility to jump from results. Top results lead to in depth articles in popular one place to another, or cut the movie into pieces that PIIM IS A RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT © 2015 PARSONS JOURNAL FOR FACILITY AT THE NEW SCHOOL INFORMATION MAPPING AND PARSONS INSTITUTE FOR INFORMATION MAPPING USING INTERACTIVE DATA VISUALIZATION TO EXPLORE NON-LINEAR MOVIE NARRATIVES RASAGY SHARMA & VENKATESH RAJAMANICKAM they afforded, has enabled film makers to scramble posters, photographs, large placards, newsreels, and sequence and experiment with the narrative structure unusual voice-overs. of films. Arrival of digital film and easy to use editing Andy Warhol, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, tools has only extended this possibility even further. Andrei Tarkovsky, Nicolas Roeg, Robert Altman, and This infinitely manipulatable medium has given rise Woody Allen made important non-linear art house movies to complex plots and story situations. Jason Mittel writing from the sixties through the eighties. But these directors, about contemporary television, argues that many contem- just as the earlier directors, served a knowing audience porary narratives foster an “operational aesthetic,” in for whom experimentation was almost a norm, or at least which audiences take pleasure, not only in the story, but something expected. in the technical craft through which the story is conveyed. Thus, it was not until the nineties, and with critical Mittel suggests that they embrace “a game aesthetic, invit- and box-office success of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction ing audiences to play along with the creators to crack (1994), that non-linear movies exploded into the public the interpretive codes to make sense of their complex consciousness. Other important non-linear films of the narrative strategies.”3 nineties and the first decade of the 21st century include: Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994), Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking 2.2 HISTORY OF NON-LINEAR MOVIES Express (1994), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), Almost as soon as film was invented, avant-garde David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), Alejandro González artists began experimenting with the structure of narrative, Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003), challenging continuity and orderly unfolding of a story, Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), Michel Gondry’s Eternal to create the early non-linear films. Intolerance (1916) is Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Shane Carruth’s considered one of the masterpieces of the silent era and Primer (2005), and Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. it displays four parallel stories from different ages in the World (2010). world history. Movies with intricate plot structure with an arrange- Luis Bunuel collaborated with Salvador Dali in Un ment of events not just complex, but complicated and Chien Andalou (1928), in which disturbing erotic and perplexing; the events not simply interwoven, but violent images are arrayed in non-sequential order. entangled, came to be made for mainstream movie The Power and the Glory (1933) used flashbacks to tell audience. The Guardian writer Phil Hoad writes, the life of the central character who died in the first scene. “The world, as it hit the 21st century, seemed to agree: This film influenced one of the greatest films of all-time, non-linear found perfect subject material in globalized Citizen Kane (1941). complexity. Both the haphazard mesh of human interac- Russian filmmakers Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein tions in booming world city-states, and the butterfly-flaps- and Alexander Dovzhenko experimented with the possi- its-wings patterns of cause and effect on a shrinking planet bilities of nonlinearity. Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), seemed best dealt in disorderly fashion.”5 The trend was Vertov’s The Man With a Movie Camera (1929) and further fuelled by the parallel growth of the social Internet, Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) hint at a nonlinear experience. which became a platform where movie enthusiasts sought Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1950) to extend the movie experience by endlessly analyzing and played with conflicting points of view to create a unique collectively solving the puzzling narrative structures. narrative structure. In the late fifties and sixties, Alain Resnais, working 2.3 PURPOSE AND CONSEQUENCE OF NON-LINEAR with experimental writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and NARRATIVES IN MOVIES Marguerite Duras, and drawing on ideas developed Among the plethora of non-linear movies that came out in by those writers in their fiction writing, employed the last twenty years, some movies appear to have worked narrative structures that closely mirrored the structure better than the others. Film scholars and critics have of the story’s emotions in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) speculated at length on the reasons for this. and Muriel (1963). A contemporary of Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Complex story (Narrative): The events a non-linear once