61
3.2 WHAT THEN OF MOVING IMAGE DOCUMENTS?
Greisdorf and O’Connor (2002) demonstrated a wide range of responses in a simple experiment of
putting a set of pictures into categories—dierent terms for the same object in an image, dierent
levels of generality (landscape with horse and rider or cowboy, e.g.), and dierent categorical as-
sumptions (cookie with food or with tire, ferris wheel, and other round objects, etc.).
Augst and O’Connor (1999, p. 345) asserted about lmic documents:
Mechanism has posed a major barrier to user control over locus of insertion, depth of pene-
tration, and [duration] of engagement. For decades, the lm scholar sat in a dark room and
watched the serial unrolling of the text. Sometimes this was in a theater where no control over
the text was available; sometimes this was in a room with a projector that could be stopped,
reversed, slowed, speeded up. In each case, however, the engagement required serial viewing.
Even the scholar with access to lm production equipment or later, videotape, could not escape
the serial nature of the engagement.
ey note also, quoting promotional material for an early video digitizing system: “…the ability to
jump anywhere on digital video still won’t help you nd where to jump (p. 348).
3.3 WAY POINTS FOR HUNTING, BROWSING, AND
MEANDERING
Perhaps when the conditions of lm projection will change, through technical progresses which
promise to allow us to have access at will to lms, it may become possible to walk leisurely, to
wander, to loaf about, stroll and loiter … delighted to explore the ordered depth of a lm, to ap-
preciate a thousand details in a sequence while experiencing the unique character of the whole.
Baudry (1980)
Many people today think tracking is simply nding a trail and following it to the animal that
made it. I think the true meaning of reading tracks and signs in the forest has been pushed into
the background by an overemphasis on nding the next track… If you spend half an hour nd-
ing the next track, you may have learned a lot about nding the next track but not much about
the animal. If you spend time learning about the animal and its ways, you may be able to nd
the next track without looking. . . . Tracking an animal… brings you closer to it in perception.
Rezendes (1992)
e Meander River (Anatolia, Turkey) once formed a crucial conduit for Mediterranean trade
and trac between Europe, North Africa, and Asia. At its mouth sat the foremost Aegean port
city Miletus, acclaimed for the origins of Greek philosophy and science. Historians Herodotus
3.3 WAY POINTS FOR HUNTING, BROWSING, AND MEANDERING
62 3. CODA: PROVOCATIONS ON FILMIC RETRIEVAL, HUNTING, et al.
and Strabo mention the Meander’s winding ways, which were so striking that “meander” came
to mean riverine sinuosity and to stand for anything twisting and curving. e geomorpho-
logical process of meandering is as intricate, twisting, and turning as the curving Meander
River. A meandering river takes time while it covers a broad area, scouring the hardest rock,
depositing the quickest sands. It is deeply spatial, temporal, and specic—continually nding
its trajectory, while making it. It is profoundly responsive to the lay of the land, the nature of
the climate, the character of human interventions, and a multitude of other vectors.
Meandering privileges exploration: a messy process, with stumbling, learning from failures,
following contingent relations, a going back and forth. Meandering foregrounds the searching
in the notion of re-search. It invokes a model of engineering in terms of ingenuity, a bricolage
and tinkering that acknowledges and interacts with various kinds of knowledge and expertise,
that is capable of adjusting itself to local situations and demands, instead of simply following
the straight lines of rule-driven reasoning.
e Meander confounded early lawyers concerned with boundaries and scientists concerned
with the mechanisms of meandering streams. Meander symbolized irregularity, complexity,
ambiguity, and instability. In the latter part of the twentieth century precisely these ‘mean-
dering’ qualities brought out the value of multiple perspectives in arts and sciences; the weak
ontology of becoming became as valuable as the traditionally more privileged strong ontology
of being; the inductive, analogical, and emergent as valuable as control and generalizability
(O’Connor and Copeland 2003: 99). e understanding of probability and complexity pro-
vided new forms of explanation and new ways to operate even within elds long founded on
‘ideal’ characteristics and laws.
Klaver (2014)
Among the initial reasons for conducting research on the structure of lmic documents was
browsing, as described by O’Connor:
e value of a broad notion of browsing and the consequent utility of a surrogate which fa-
cilitates the inspection of the collection in a variety of ways is suggested in a number of areas.
Bates and Arnheim both posit a playing with concepts freed from the cause-eect of the external
world, as well as from the linear constraints of language. Cadbury and Poague, in considering
aesthetic experience, posit a “consciousness we have attending to our exploratory behavior when
we don’t mean to use it and results guide action rather than the action of continuing to explore
it.” (Cadbury and Poague, Film Criticism: A counter theory, p. 276) Similarly, Leide refers
to Koestler on creativity, particularly the activity of "homo ludens" deriving a "eureka response"
from the convergence of parallel thoughts on dierent planes. is recalls the quote regarding ‘free
play with concepts and the description of concept building as the recurring of the same picture in
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