Interacting with pictures: film, narrative and interaction

As the technical difficulties of delivering filmic imagery on interactive devices are overcome, the problems raised by combining such imagery with interaction become more obvious. Though film, whether conceived in terms of classical Hollywood or other cinema, has proved a remarkably powerful medium of expression, how helpful is it to adopt filmic practices for interactive media? By analysing film’s methods we might be able to identify practices which we can borrow and reapply in the newer medium; suggestions in this regard have been made by Persson (1998), Boyd Davis and Athoussaki (1999) and Clarke and Mitchell (2000), among others. But more fundamentally, by determining the criteria which have given us film’s pictorial ‘language’ over the past hundred years, we can increase our understanding of the guiding principles of depictive media and perhaps reapply those principles to newer forms. Rather than proposing specifically cinematic lines of development for interactive media, the argument presented here tends to liberate rather than constrain: we cannot easily foresee those visual practices which subsequently become defining characteristics of a medium or genre and we should experiment freely, as film pioneers have done.