Spatial dialectics: montage and spatially organised narrative in stories without human leads

1 Introduction In the 1920s and 1930s, the fascination with the city as a complex phenomenon resulted in an unprecedented increase in moving-image works, which aimed either directly or indirectly to compose visual cinematic poems, that encapsulated the dynamics of modernity. Such daring formalistic experimentation with the iconography of urban landscapes is now generically referred to as 'city symphonies'. of Cambridge, under the supervision of Dr. François Penz, focuses in the study of select theoretical work on cinema, architecture and urban planning. This functions in parallel with the systematic analysis of the filmic legacy from the 1920s as a means of detecting, retrieving and automating the reproduction of syntactic editing rules and narrative structures, that will enable the contemporary author to generate meaningful and engaging cinematic storytelling about modern cityscapes. The city symphony form makes it possible to construct a cinematic rhetorical argument about the city without resorting to traditional dramatic action, based on main protagonists. The shot-by-shot formalist analysis of an existing moving image work, Dziga Vertov's Man with the Movie Camera (USSR, 1929), has supplied the research groundwork on spatially organ-ised narratives and alternative editing techniques. These results have been incorporated in the design of Cambridge City Symphony (Alifragkis & Penz 2006), an NM2 project that experiments with non-linear cinematic narrative and the spatial arrangement of a Abstract This article analyses and formulates mechanisms for creating meaningful and engaging narrativity in interactive movies not based on character, where the dialectic relationship between architectural space and the rules that govern montage shape the narrative structure. Formalist analysis of Dziga Vertov's film Man with the Movie Camera (USSR, 1929) highlights two significant terms which play a central role in the formulation of the rhetorical argument of the moving image. 'Punctus-contra-punctum mon-tage' ('counterpoint montage') describes a technique that exploits analogies in form or content between adjacent clips, to produce meaningful thematic sequences; while Lev Kuleshov's 'artificial landscapes'—the imaginary, creative geographies constructed of moving images that exist only on the screen—offer a way of arranging media spatially. A proof-of-concept, prototype production, Cambridge City Symphony (Alifragkis & Penz 2006), where these approaches are instantiated as rule-sets, and handled by the computer, illustrates how these produce engaging interactive narrativity.