64-82
Describes approaches to how a story can evolve:

1. 64-67, Knowledge-based Approach: don’t really understand
2. 67-70, Simple-Link Approach: basically the way hypertext/links work; user clicks his way through a story
3. 70-74, Multiple Character Approach: user interacts with characters (see 72: story engine) and learns the story from them
4. 74f, Puzzle Approach: user moves from puzzles to puzzle and learns the story on the way; ARGs do this -> downside: Sean Stewart: TNAG
5. 75-78, Traffic Circle Approach: user starts at a central place from where he goes down story lanes and always returns to the central place
6. 78fSingle-Stream Cinematic Sequence Approach: moving pictures tell something in their order, even if the user is able to choose in what order to watch them
7. 80-82, Folded Approach: not sure this is a real category (perhaps he just wanted to present his past creative work); a main character tells sth (as a moving picture?) -> user can click on screen anytime -> detail about that scene is then told by 12 characters discussing it -> user can click on on of the 12 to hear his perspective (second fold) -> user can make main character talk to that character (third fold)

72
Definition-story engine:
“the term story engine is used to describe a set of software algorithms designed to make decisions regarding how a computer-based story should proceed.” The user does something and the story engine responds in a certain way.

93
“the metalinear form extends the writer’s narrative voice so the writer can say more things in more ways.”

95
“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” William Stafford, from WRITING THE AUSTRALIAN CRAWL, February 1982

201
“Metalinear narrative is the name proposed by this research for this new narrative form. The metalinear narrative is a collection of small related story pieces designed to be arranged in many different ways, to tell many different linear stories from different points of view, with the aid of a story engine which sequences the story pieces.”

202
“Metalinear narrative has three primary components:

• An abstract story structure composed of narrative primitives which a writer can manipulate and rearrange according to her creativity. The story structure provides the narrative framework, or spine, for the many linear narratives to be produced from the metalinear narrative
• A representation of story granules to be resequenced in various ways. This repre­sentation includes annotations of how each granule fits into the story structure and the narrative relationships between the story granules
• Methods of resequencing story granules based on their representation and the pro­vided abstract story structure. The story engine chooses granules which fit the sto­ry structure according to predetermined narrative styles

My thesis is that a writing tool which offers the author these three key elements, as well as knowledgeable feedback about narrative construction and context during the creative process, is essential to the task of creating metalinear narratives of significant dimension.”

205
“Met­alinear narrative may make it easier for all of us, not just a few of us, to tell our stories.” -> empowerment

“Any way that humankind has invented to lie to each other should be part of your storytelling toolkit.”

Storytelling generations

Bard 1.0 – old dead Greek blind guys
Bard 2.0 – Greek theatre – parallel bards
Bard 3.0 – book – scalable bards
Bard 4.0 – cinema – parallel scalable bards
Bard 5.0 – digital storytelling (not the Hartley type)

2
Definition-BIM
BIM is “The process of creating and using digital models for design, construction and/or operations of projects.”

21
“For decades, aerospace, automotive and shipbuilding companies have designed their complex products virtually, working closely with their suppliers, and used the models to drive their fabrication equipment. In effect they build the product twice, once virtually to ensure optimization, then physically in exact compliance with the model, at a high level of quality and production efficiency, in safe clean conditions with a skilled and well-trained workforce. This has contributed enormously to improved productivity, safety and product quality in those industries.”
“The Key Concepts of BIM
Most of the important benefits of BIM can be tied to three fundamental concepts:

1. Database Instead of Drawings
2. Distributed Model
3. Tools + Process = Value of BIM”

22
I would call it the increasing level of use of BIM. It starts with a simple model, goes on to a model in time (the virtual construction process of a building), adds project management, then links costs to to those project elements, allows photo realistic illustrations, and provides a model the owner can use for maintenance purposes.

• “Design models – architectural, structural, MEP and site/civil
• Construction model – breaking the design models down into construction sequences
• Schedule (4D) model – linking the work breakdown structure to project elements in the model
• Cost (5D) model – linking costs to project elements in the model
• Fabrication model – replacing traditional shop drawings and driving fabrication equipment
• Operations model – for turnover to the owner”

24
“Although it can be said that we are still in the “wonder years” of this industry transformation, one thing is clear, we are not going back.”

“When I think about these [story/media] outlets, I think about them in terms of like OK if they have the individual arc and then I have the overall arc in the full story, and it becomes about how I pace it, how I get it to an audience, and how I have them interact with it.”

Definition “story architecture”:
“Story architecture to me is kind of the idea of what effectively is a kind of fluidness of creative, technology in terms of how you actually deliver these things, how do you scale them, how do you get them to these various outlets. How do you make it an experience that somebody is going to be engaged by and want to continue to you know hopefully tell somebody else about. And then, you know, business. The last part is kind of entrepreneurial, you know, how do you actually derive your revenue streams from this. How do you actually look at it in a meaningful way, so it is ?impactful? [5:26 min] for yourself.”

“Once you have the data, and it is the future of everything, you know, if we look and we say search was the future, you know, a number of years back, it really is about discovery, it really is about filtering. And a lot of this discussion throughout the day, throughout this whole thing, you know, this conference, is going to be about how do people discover and find you in a world that is swelling with content.”

“What is interesting is, like, normally we started with like a three act structure in a screenplay. In the case of some of the work we have been developing it starts with the build of a universe, bible, game bible, show bible, where we kind of go through and define the world, define the interactions, define the characters, define the rules, and then from there it becomes this amazing kind of depth of information where you know more about the subject than you ever did before.”

“For both artists and audiences, art’s capacity to ensnare attention is crucial: for the artist, to accrue status; for the audience, to motivate engagement.”

“engagement in the activity—matters before meaning”

“Repetition is the simplest form of elaboration, but since pure repetition holds little interest, repetition of a bold idea with variation offers him the best prospects of holding the attention of listeners with the imaginative resources he has.”

“Yet if we normally engage in art simply because it can command our attention, meaning, in academic contexts, elbows its way to the fore, because the propositional nature of meaning makes it so much easier to expound, circulate, regurgitate, or challenge than the fluid dynamics of attention.” Academia analyses meaning in art, because attention is fluid and dynamic and difficult to hold still and analyse.

“The average shot length in Hollywood movies has been shrinking as viewers have learned to assimilate film faster and to cope with the information rush of the modern world. Nabokov has influenced writers from acclaimed oldsters (Italo Calvino, W. G. Sebald, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Orhan Pamuk) to feisty youngsters (Zadie Smith, Marisha Pessl) by introducing into fiction something akin to modern film’s reduction in shot length, its rapidity of changes of subject or perspective.”

“Character is one kind of pattern particularly significant for social animals: identifying individuals and discerning consistent differences of personality”

“Character clues come thick and fast in fiction.”

“At a more general level, humans are extraordinary open-ended pattern detectors, because we so compulsively inhabit the cognitive niche. Art plays with cognitive patterns at high intensity. The pleasure this generates is an essential part of what it is to be human and matters both at the individual level, for audiences and artists, and at the social level, for the patterns we share (in design, music, dance, and story). The pleasure art’s intense play with patterns affords compels our engagement again and again and helps shape our capacity to create and process pattern more swiftly. Perhaps it even helps explain the so-called Flynn effect, the fact—and it seems to be one—that IQs have risen with each of the last few generations”

“And with their high intensity of pattern and their fixed form, works of art should provide ideal controlled replicable experiments for the study of both rapid and gradual pattern recognition in the mind.”

“Traditional models [of innovation] based on a distinction between publicly funded pure research and commercial development based on patents and other forms of intellectual property no longer appear relevant to the needs of a networked economy depending heavily on amateur production.”

“The 19th century model of cultural innovation“: The individual inventive genius (Faraday).

“The 20th century model of technical innovation“: Large scale research institutions (universities) + (private) industrial research laboratories.

The 21st century model of innovation: amateur collaborative innovation

“In most sectors of the economy, the rate of technological progress has slowed substantially [in the 21st century].” (Boeing 747, fridge)

“motives [for amateur collaborative innovation] like these do not co-exist well with a profit motive.”

“amateur innovation is unlikely to be promoted by policies that sharpen financial incentives. On the contrary, the greater the potential for well-informed market participants to extract profits from a given activity, the less willing amateurs will be to make uncompensated contributions.”

“Any correlation between the capacity of a site to capture AdSense revenue and the value of the site to its users is indirect and tangential at best.”

“innovation in a network economy typically requires contributions from widely distributed sources and yields benefits that are diffuse and hard to capture. There is no easy way of relating the rewards of innovation to the value of individual contributions.”

“The vast majority of market returns from internet services are tied to advertising.”

“Amateurs have little or nothing to gain from intellectual property rights and are correspondingly unwilling, and often unable, to pay others for the right to use patented or copyright items that derive much of their value from the collective contributions that make up the network.”

First step in policy for networked innovation: “it is necessary to encourage creativity in all its forms. Since the outcomes of creativity cannot be prescribed in advance, policies to encourage creativity must rely on providing space for creativity, including access to the necessary resources, free time for creative workers to pursue their own projects and the communications networks necessary to facilitate creative collaborations.”

“technical and cultural innovations are increasingly intertwined”

Explains the advantages and disadvantages of the following technologies.

Absolute Positioning

• GPS
• Cell Positioning (mobile phone towers)
• WLAN Positioning
• Self-Reported Positioning

Proximity Recognition

• RFID
• Bluetooth
• Infrared Communication

Wireless Communication

• WLAN
• GPRS
• Bluetooth
• Infrared Communication

Virtual Content

• Triggered Content
• Augmented Reality
• Mobile Augmented Reality

xix
“it was the recent advances in communication technologies – in particular the adoption of the Internet, mobile communication, and positioning technologies – that opened new design spaces for pervasive play.”
“Researchers and companies around the globe come up with new playful ways of using mobile and positioning technologies. Even mainstream conventions of what it is to play a game are shifting. Playfulness is seeping into the ordinary. Everyday life is becoming interlaced with games.”

xx
“The plethora of similar yet not identical labels illustrates not only that pervasive games are part of the zeitgeist, but the difficulty of grasping this new playing field.” Very good!
“As with all game design, pervasive game design is second-order design: The designer does not design play but the structures, rules, and artifacts that help bring it about.” Very important for entarchs!
“Activities that blur the border between ordinary life and game are almost automatically packaged with numerous ethical issues.”

xxi
“[There are] major shifts in how the struggle for public space, the blurring of fact and fiction, and the rise of ludus in society are changing the way we perceive the world.” Societal change!

Scroll down to “THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT OF THIS ARTICLE!!!”

“”salience determines whether an audience will gather around and share media, not production values. In the time before hyperdistribution, audiences had a severely limited pool of choices, all of them professionally produced; now the gates have come down, and audiences are free to make their own choices.” (Pesce, “Hypercasting”, n.pag.)”

“”media people often criticize the content on the Internet for being unedited, because everywhere one looks, there is low quality”: he points out that “what they fail to understand is that the Internet is strongly edited, but the editorial judgment is applied at the edges, not the center, and it is applied after the fact, not in advance“”

“By industry standards, the production values for much of the content shared through such systems may be low, but the entertainment value – or more generally, the salience – of such content for its viewers is evidently high enough to attract large numbers of users; in the process, we can observe the emergence of new content genres from machinima to mash-up, as well as the revitalisation of older forms (such as the short film) in new contexts. This is a process of format innovation, of creative prototyping, which is likely to have impacts on audiovisual formats well beyond present online video hotspots.”

“the technologies and processes of television – once constituting an effective and powerful network for widespread content distribution – have now been outclassed by the Internet, to the point that in the absence of significant innovation on part of television operators, many users themselves have begun to do the industry’s work of shifting content from one network to the other”

“”Buy a chunk of radio spectrum, or a satellite transponder, or a cable provider: none of it gives you any inherent advantage in reaching the audience. Ten years ago, they were a lock; today, they’re only an opportunity.” (Pesce, “Nothing Special”, n.pag.)”

“users [...] have “come to understand that the sharing of media is an act of production in itself”

“users who are increasingly embracing the produsage and sharing of their own media content, and of hybrid content mash-ups incorporating a wide variety of sources: such users can no longer be wooed effectively and consistently even with the higher production values which the industrial model of audiovisual content production may be able to provide, if the same model also entails their return to a relatively passive position as viewers and audiences; instead, they must be embraced through new models which allow for their participation, their creative contribution, even their leadership in content production and distribution.”

“how, then, may the television industry reconfigure itself to participate in this information and entertainment space, while remaining financially sustainable?”

“Three related strategies are now becoming visible”

• IP Networks as the New Backbone
• Harnessing Video- and Filesharing
• Harnessing Users as Produsers

“the field of television (or more broadly, audiovisual content distribution) beyond broadcasting is today in considerable flux, with new technological, corporate, operational, and content models emerging with great frequency.” Creative destruction!

IP Networks as the New Backbone
“a gradual replacement of other networking infrastructures with IP-based networks”

Harnessing Video- and Filesharing
“”The age of hyperdistribution demands the development of new economic models which can harness piracy, for profit” (“Piracy”, n.pag.)”
“outsourcing of part of the distribution effort to audiences – a process of what has been called “crowdsourcing”"
“”today the broadcaster aggregates audiences, aggregates advertisers, puts commercials into the program breaks, and makes a lot of money doing this. But … wouldn’t it be economically more efficient for the advertiser to work directly with the program’s producer to distribute television programming directly to the audience, using hyperdistribution?”"
“The answer to this question would require a cost-benefit analysis of conventional and new models which takes into account factors such as

• continued advertising income from commercials inserted into downloadable content, and from general Website advertising,
• direct pay-for-access fees, including potential premium fees for commercial-free versions of the content,
• additional income from content which could not have been broadcast on conventional networks due to scheduling limitations or limited mass appeal (a long tail market),
• cross-promotion effects for content shown on conventional television channels,
• savings resulting from the ability to potentially bypass broadcast or cable distribution altogether,
• additional revenues from sales to a potentially global audience, but also
• reduced revenue from global syndication deals,
• a potential decline in advertising on traditional television channels,
• losses from the unauthorised redistribution of downloaded content,
• the uncertainty of content success or failure in an unknown environment,
• and the likelihood of increased competition with other commercial and enthusiast content creators.”

“”Why has YouTube become the redistributor of these clips? Because none of the copyright holders made an effort to distribute these clips themselves.“”
“”the fundamental paradox of hyperdistribution” is that “the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.“”
“the gradual erosion of existing boundaries between professional and amateur content [...] may allow for the emergence of new content genres to wider recognition, as well as for the discovery of new on- and off-camera talent, and could therefore also be seen as a pathway into the industry proper, similar to (but offering a significantly wider intake than) short film competitions and other events.”
“If direct download and filesharing models can be shown to be financially sustainable, then, this may ultimately even lead to a bifurcation of the television industry into live broadcasting (which may well find increasing commonalities with industries staging sports, musical, and theatrical events) and drama production (which is necessarily closely aligned with the movie industry), with these two components gradually drifting apart as the medium which once held them together, broadcast and cable television, declines in importance. Simultaneously, we may see the emergence of new direct-to-download drama production houses, and direct-to-streaming live channels, which can no longer meaningfully be said to belong to the same overall industry.” THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT OF THIS ARTICLE!!!

Harnessing Users as Produsers
“the core problem emerging from this discussion is that many new genres for audiovisual content in an Internet-based, produsage-driven environment have yet to be invented and identified”
“we may well see a similar shift from compilation and collective hosting to syndication and aggregation. In this model, video content would be widely dispersed across the network, and its availability would be highlighted through frequently updated RSS-style content feeds” -> www.koldcast.tv
“The television industry in Australia and elsewhere (and in particular in those nations where fast and cheap broadband access is readily available) is now approaching a tipping point [...]. Beyond that point lies a substantial structural transformation of the industry, and an opportunity for new business models and content formats to emerge.”
“significant potential for fundamental changes to conventional broadcasting models“

Elaborates on the types of cinema that exist in the western world (mostly Hollywood)

8
“”The urges to disorder and totality of the competing modernities of the 1920s, dreams/projections then, seek generalization, institutionalization in the mid-1930s. They seek to control the social gaze—in short, to govern.”"

15f
“”an aesthetic of astonishment,” but also that the subjectivity it promoted was not only flexible and mobile but also significantly social. The dynamism of the cinematograph as event, rather than narrative, induces its spectators not to anchor themselves as the narrated objects of a screen performance, but to mobilize themselves as hectic and excited participants in an event that leads them not to contemplation but to sharing. It is a brief moment of innocence before the regulation of cinema into an industrial formation, an Eden from which the stories of good and evil would soon eject it. But it is vital to an understanding of cinema’s utopian capabilities that we acknowledge how, in this formative instant, it was able to activate rather than absorb its audiences.”

16
“the Lumière cinematograph was anchored not in literary or popular genres of the novel and theater but in the crowd. Social, public, and active, the event of cinema articulated the modernization of urban experience.”

18f
“[The other scenes of the Lumières] are resolutely scenes of everyday life in the modern world among the bourgeoisie, showing their work and their leisure, with a strong emphasis on technological achievements.”

19
“Alternatively, in a familiar if by now largely discredited argument, we might perhaps be tempted to see the Lumières as the fathers not of film but of documentary.”

23
“Film not only opposes the presumption of a “natural” vision that sees the “real” world as an assemblage of objects: it proposes another, synthetic vision.”

38
“Narrative, then, is not an essential quality of film, but only a potential and secondary quality arising from the production of time in the differentiation within and between frames.”

39
“By the same token, the cinematic event, as a process of perpetual change, does not depend on a prior external world.”

46
“The cyborg process that transforms living labor into fixed technologies allows the skills of all the dead to participate in the creativity of the present.” Black Book film idea
“The stolen labor of those lost, anonymous artisans comes back to life when the frame itself begins to move.”

66
“film’s visual coherence depends on suturing light, eye, and brain, optics, physiology, and psyche”

67
“The ending of the well-made film structures everything that went before.”

79
“if it is the case that a film is a product of social forces, then film scholarship cannot ignore the critical importance of individuation as a result of social process, however unwanted or illusory.”
“”If the artist’s work is to reach beyond his own contingency, then he must in return pay the price that, in contrast to the discursively thinking person, he cannot transcend himself and the objectively established boundaries”
“the passage through the individual author actually strengthens the claims of art to communicate the social, something it could not do if it were free of the individuation that so deeply marks contemporary society.”"
“”every idiosyncracy lives from collective forces of which it is unconscious”"

83
“Where the ancients disputed the necessity of ontegeny with theories of autocthony and parthenogenesis, since the birth of cinema we moderns maneuver at the unclear frontier between human and machine.”

85
“The idiosyncracy of the line as a trace of its maker and the idiosyncracy of infinitesimally graduated differences in interpretation are the social grounds on which cinema moves from the presentation of objects to the stimulation of concepts.”

97
“At some point in the near future when historians recognize that the photomechanical cinema is a brief interlude in the history of the animated image, representation will become, like narrative, a subcode of interpretation rather than an essence of motion pictures.” Because everything will be digital and everybody will be empowered to manipulate content if he wants to, the motion picture will not (and already isn’t) a representation of truth. If at all, it represents an idea of the creator(s), but not reality. Lessig’s focus on remix.

100
“A norm offers itself as a model for subsequent makers, a stable structure that can hold good for decades, like the three-minute pop song, or longer, like the Petrarchan sonnet. Norms legitimate particular practices and sanction deviations.” Many motion picture norms are being challenged at the moment!
“The double contingency of cinematic norms is indeed a function, as Parsons argued, of relations between interlocutors.”

101f
Definition Total Film:
“Total film aspires to bring to the audience a diegesis that can be understood, mentally appropriated, totally. By making the world a theme, it calls the audience to possess it as a whole, and to identify their thought with the world imaged on screen rather than with individual figures, though often enough a protagonist, Christ or Tom Cruise, will provide the rhetorical gateway through which absolute possession can be depicted.”

105
“Their fear was partly that the scale of investment required to wire hundreds of thousands of cinemas worldwide, coincident with global economic depression, would cause studios to go for the safest and most standardized forms of entertainment.”

110
“”the montage combination of a series of segments is not interpreted by the mind as a certain sequence of details, but as a certain sequence of whole scenes—and scenes, moreover, which are not depicted but arise within the mind in image form”"

114
“Eisenstein’s challenge in the years after the 1928 “Statement” is no longer to invent a dialectical form of cinema in which sound and image would, through their conflicts, produce an art form of an entirely new kind. Instead, total cinema must face the necessity of their coexistence and act as if with the knowledge that their struggle has already been resolved. At this stage, totality has been achieved by nominating music as the pinnacle of the sonorous hierarchy and the graphic, compositional line as the governor of the visual, thus finding in the analogy between the moving lines of melody and of graphical cinema the core of a newly harmonious and whole filmmaking practice.”

119f
“In some of his earliest writings Eisenstein had already decried narrative along with the star system and the individualist ethos of Hollywood. We should not be surprised that a director who once dreamed of making a film of Marx’s Capital should produce a film that takes the form of a well-formed thesis rather than a well-made play.”

129
“Sixty years later, the montage of effects has become the montage of affects, and total cinema serves no longer the needs of the anti-Nazi struggle, but the perverse desire for the simulacrum that permeates the contemporary blockbuster.”

143
“television, with its ability to transmit live, had usurped the critical priority of cinema. [...] broadcasting usurped the documentary role of cinema”

143f
“In any film, the diegetic world is often more cogent, more coherent than the everyday. When the film is a fiction, the diegesis will also be more symmetrical, more logical, and more just than we know our world of experience to be. As a result, something radically unstable filters into realist narrative diegesis, a competition between the demands of verisimilitude and those of formal elegance.”

149
“So realism runs between two risks.” “realism is “concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality—but in order that it should ultimately be life itself that becomes spectacle, in order that life might in this perfect mirror be poetry, be the self into which film finally changes it.”" “”realism in art can only be achieved in one way—through artifice”, a “necessary illusion,” but one that “quickly induces a loss of awareness of the reality itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with its cinematographic expression”"

160
“Hollywood was trying, in the later 1930s, to image success.”
“Some studios did achieve something akin to a stable house style. The characteristic sound libraries built up by individual studios clearly marked their products with an authorial stamp.”
“Though RKO is often pointed out as uncharacteristic in that there was no single genre or stylistic language that singled out its product, its lack of house style and apparent disinterest in searching for one is typical of classicism.”

161f
“Films enact rather than depict social change, especially the evolution of media and communications technologies.”

162
“RKO’s task in the 1930s was to make new objects, to be ahead of the crowd while still in touch with them. It wanted to change cinema, not the world. RKO, like Hollywood in general, inherited a rapidly evolving consumer in the wake of the Jazz Age and the Depression, but it was happier following trends than assuming ideological leadership.” RKO was a bit like the first entarch might be soon.

163 footnote 2
“Sound-on-film technologies were seen as an extension of these existing technologies.” The technology was patented and hindered innovation. Freed from these hurdles sound evolved as an integral part of motion pictures, before it was just an extension. Today’s new technologies are used as extensions as well, but need to become integral parts of a bigger whole.

163
RKO (?): “Formed out of the combined strengths of the Film Booking Office (a small studio established by Joseph Kennedy) together with RCA (the radio division of General Electric) and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain, prime sites for film release in major cities, Radio-Keith-Orpheum had interests in telephones and telegraphy, music publishing and recording, the vaudeville circuit, and the NBC chain of radio stations. Not surprisingly, the company turned to the musical.”
“Flying’s [the movie Flying Down to Rio] most elaborate dance number is the Carioca, and one can imagine RKO’s flagship theater, the 6200-seat Radio City Music Hall, opened in 1932, encouraging visitors to take it up as the latest dance craze.”

164f
“Today, films take on postcinematic lives on television, cable, video, and DVD, and so live longer than the time it takes to make them, with important implications for their stylistics. But in the heyday of the Hollywood system, production was long and distribution mercilessly short. To exist in the arc light for those few burning hours lent the films something of their passionate innocence, their innocent criminality, the ease with which they evoked and dismissed poverty, disease, prostitution, addiction, and shame. Where Eisenstein sought to rouse in the name of the nation and Renoir bowed to the preeminence of the world, Hollywood had nothing to present but its own illusion. Its only value, the ground of its existence, was entertainment. Hence the mayfly brilliance of its films; hence their mayfly-brief life.”

166
“Altman and Williams both argue that recorded sound doesn’t reproduce a real world: it represents it. But the Hollywood soundtrack doesn’t even represent the world: it orchestrates a diegesis.”

169
“Sobchack’s point, or a part of it, is that we never see with any other than our own eyes save when we see through the eyes of the cinematic apparatus itself.” Not sure I understand.

183
“Narrative depends on symmetry-breaking: ultimately, there is narrative because the universe is expanding.”
“Through these distinctions and differentiations established by breaking the pure symmetry of zero, the chaos of becoming can be bound into stability.” Not sure I understand.

184
“repetition is primordial, and things or events repeat themselves as ever-renewed copies of an original that does not exist” In the end there are but a few original stories.

192
“With Leone’s 1960s Western cycle (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West), the European vision returned to the U.S. market in hybrid form: an Italian film based on a Japanese original made in Spain with German money and a Californian star.”

210f
“In its competition with television, its pursuit of adult themes and expanded horizons, greater explicitation and more persuasive spectacle, cinema in the 1960s abandoned classical restraint in favor of a televisualization of the profilmic. This is how time is metamorphosed in the new Hollywood, in accordance with its rival, sister medium.”

218
“The Wagnerian ambition for cinema to become a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total multimedia experience, has not been lost: it has been dispersed. The film offers only one part of an experience, the second part of which is provided by the soundtrack, promoted as a discrete item.”

218f
“Toys, computer games, fan fiction and Web sites, novelizations, comics, soundtrack and concept albums, fashion accessories, and collectibles, many of them manufactured by wings of the same horizontally integrated corporation, extended the reach of the event film while reducing the cinema premiere to the status of product launch for a raft of brands on a synchronized lifestyle marketing strategy.” -> entarch

242
“Contemporary cinema is more ambitious than contemporary philosophy, but neither undertakes to understand the universe any longer.”

247
“It is not, then, that the world has become simulation, but that cinema events have become spectacle, addressing atomized audiences intrapersonally, turning their gaze inward as the supposed triumph of consumerism decays into poverty, injustice, and ecological catastrophe.”

279
“What makes moving pictures move, as both affective and narrative devices, is conflict. Resolution of conflict may be commercially necessary, ideologically desirable, and rhetorically acceptable as a way of stopping that movement, but it is rarely the privileged moment that reveals the film’s motivations.”

301
“The concept of “culture,” like its offspring “tradition” and its parent “civilization,” today blocks rather than facilitates the communication of change.” -> painful creative destruction
“History films invite us to inhabit our own societies, cultures, and nations, but to do so they must construct all three. That is the history effect in cinema.”

333
“The task of cinema is to deliver audiences to films, and the task of audiences is to constitute films as objects of consumption.”

333f
“Buying the ticket and entering the auditorium are acts of surrender to the economic and filmic machinery of cinema. Watching (as opposed to necking or walking out) is a surrender to the film itself. Ethnographic research on film, however, is always after the fact, never conducted where spectatorship happens, in the cinema itself where any attempt to elicit a response ruins the experience it tries to capture. Cinema has its own uncertainty principle.” The difference between film and the film industry!

336
“Informationalization is the process through which economic domination becomes information domination.”

338
“”space and time becoming more and more expensive in the modern world, art had to make itself international industrial art, that is, cinema, in order to buy space and time”"

356
“Cinema responds by aiming not for endurance but for extension: to universalize itself in space, rather than to secure its survival in time. Here at last it becomes quite clear why special effects must always be cutting edge: because they are not designed to endure, merely to expand. In that expansion, they will form a void at their heart, a void that sucks in souls, in which the audience audiences, a singularity of blinding energy, in which existence is momentarily obliterated, that we call the sublime.” Not sure I understand.

360
“No technique is essentially avant-garde, progressive, or subversive: every technique is capable of becoming merely technical, a tool for further and repurposed productions.”

365
“Neither total nor infinite, the struggle for twenty-first-century cinema is the struggle for not yet finite, not yet infinite, ecological, human, and technological community. If beyond the dimensionless plenum of the commodity there is to be a cinema effect, it will arrive as an art of time, the struggle to construct what no one ever lost: the future.” Not sure I understand.