"I Leave to Several Futures (Not to All) My Garden of Forking Paths": Proto-Interactivity in Late Fragment and the Tracey Fragments

At the Toronto Film Festival in 2007, two Canadian feature films with similar titles were shown, two days apart--one in a conventional cinema, the other in a packed screening room with a VJ running the action. Together they present a fascinating contrast in the current debate around interactive narrative, though neither is fully interactive in itself. The Tracey Fragments has a pre-determined structure, yet its use of split-screen imagery amounts to a kind of proto-interactivity. Late Fragments consists of three loosely related subplots over which the DVD-viewer has some control by clicking on a mouse. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Both of these films are based on principles of melodrama, yet use new digital tools to offer us virtual worlds beyond the conventions of traditional narrative. Both are symptomatic of the increasing artifice of cinema through digital technology, a network of images in constant (or potential) flux, no longer enclosed within a single frame. The split screen in The Tracey Fragments gives us a visual mosaic from which each audience member constructs a personal mise-en-scene; the database of scenes in Late Fragment grants the viewer more conscious control through choosing to shift from one scene to another. However neither of these films is interactive to the degree that the viewer determines the outcome of the plot as in a 'choose your own adventure' game. In both, the familiar tropes of empathetic engagement are inflected by formal strategies which may either reinforce or undermine the integrity of our perceptual experience. Looking more closely at the structure and reception of these two films will give us deeper insight into the potential--and the challenges--of non-linear narrative. Classical narrative encourages immersive participation by creating characters that we can empathize with by identifying with their desires and their vulnerability. The physical or emotional jeopardy of these characters is developed through a set of causal relationships that build a dramatic arc--not a database of unstructured information, but a strategic plotting. The ongoing debate over narrative design in interactive forms hinges on the question of viewer immersion in a game, a puzzle, or a story. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If a satisfying experience of narrative requires a willing suspension of disbelief--or as Janet Murray calls it, active creation of belief (1)--then how can this reconciled with the evaluation and decision-making process which pulls us out of immersion in the fictional world to click a mouse, press a button, or touch a screen? On the other hand, how can we engage in interactive play under any illusion that we are really authors of the story/game, knowing the framework has been designed with limits on our choices--unlike Borges's famous Garden of Forking Paths in which all possibilities are present? What role do the benchmarks of Aristotelian narrative--character empathy, conflict and rising action, dramatic resolution--play in our navigation of these new worlds in which time and space are fractured? How does each address the dialectic between haptic immersion and cognitive choice? How are attraction and spectacle reconciled with drama? At one end of the debate, Lev Manovich argues that because narrative is based on authorial control in contrast to the neutrality of database options, then interactivity and narrative are natural enemies serving opposing purposes. (2) Nitzan Ben-Shaul agrees that the multi-tasking of interactive engagement hinders the participant's immersion in dramatic narrative, demanding that the viewer/player be equally attentive to a flow of several audio-visual occurrences unrelated in space and non-consecutive in time. (3) In contrast, Janet Murray claims that interactive engagement is different but equal: Because of our desire to experience immersion, we focus our attention on the enveloping world and we use our intelligence to reinforce rather than to question the reality of the experience. …

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