The Fine Art of DVD Chapters

[Antoine Doinel]

A very academic, and interesting, article on the art of DVD chapters.

[Sanjuro]

I liked the point about multiple subtitle tracks for Histoire(s) du cinema. I own DVDs in order to watch the films I like multiple times and generally I'll watch a favourite movie at least once with no subtitles, perhaps the 3rd or 4th time I see it, in order to to enjoy the whole picture. In the same way a non-French speaker could work their way one layer at a time through Histoire(s) du cinema. As many people have pointed out there's too much information to throw everything up on the screen at once but since I own the DVD I don't need to take in everything in one pass. I'm pretty sure I could remember what all the clever title puns mean after one viewing, for example.

Obviously it'd take longer to appreciate the whole thing (surely not as long as learning French though), but eventually you'd get to the point where you could enjoy all the visual and audio information at once with only minimal subtitling. I know Godard didn't intend it to be watched this way, and I'm sure he'd have something condescending to say about us non-French speakers, but surely the point of it being on DVD is to be able to watch it several times.

[MichaelB]

When I was planning the BFI's Jan Svankmajer set, I'd been wrestling with the issue of commentaries - although I wasn't convinced that they'd work very well on individual films (because they tend to be very short, very rapid and with extremely complex images and montages that defy adequate verbal analysis - certainly during the ultra-brief period the relevant bits are on screen), I did come up with a mad idea that would involve grouping the films into several different categories and running continuous commentaries over them, typically lasting 20-30 minutes depending on the combined running time of the films.

So, for instance, a discussion of Svankmajer's use of tactilism would run over The Fall of the House of Usher, Dimensions of Dialogue, Down to the Cellar and Darkness/Light/Darkness, whereas a discussion of Svankmajer's adaptations of 19th-century Gothic and quasi-Gothic literature would run across The Castle of Otranto, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope. As you can see from even that brief example, The Fall of the House of Usher would effectively get two partial commentary tracks running across it, but I thought it would be easy enough to program the disc so that everything would run smoothly.

Needless to say, while it certainly was feasible on a technical level, and I even went as far as discussing it with two potential commentators (one of whom was surprisingly keen), the plan proved far too complex and expensive to implement in practice, and in the end we decided not to opt for commentaries at all. The "programmes" that simply play a small selection of films in particular themed groups is what remains of the original concept - interestingly, Adrian Martin was just about the only critic who drew attention to this in his review.

[colinr0380]

An interesing article though I felt it was rather dismissive of chapters used in 'conventional' ways in its search for a novel way of presenting films on disc. In a way though narrative films don't necessitate complex chaptering, just as books wouldn't exactly be benefitted by organising them according to the number of words each chapter contains or of locations where the action is set.

I mostly just watch films from the beginning straight through - where chaptering becomes useful is in getting quick access to scenes without having to labouriously fast forward from the beginning to reach them. I do agree with the article that in that sense chapters are useful and that the breakdown into smaller, intelligently chosen and well annotated chunks are the sign of a lovingly prepared disc, compared to some discs I've seen which just break films down into equal twenty minute sections that still require a certain amount of fast forwarding to reach specific scenes.

I guess there may also be authorship issues in that some scenes with fast paced action, many quick cuts or huge amounts of detail would require smaller, but fuller in information terms, chapters than a long dialogue scene (say Marta's seven minute speech to the camera in Winter Light) with little movement?

I think the article is moving beyond discussing DVD chapters to a wish for more interactivity in the way a viewer can structure their entertainment, rather than just having to experience a film linearly or in primitive slices of the way that they are chaptered. I think though that a different way of interacting with a film first depends on the film itself encouraging interactivity, rather than the DVD medium splintering films up into standalone sequences - such as Timecode allowing the viewer to control which quarter of the screen can be heard at any time.

MichaelB raises a good point about shorter films being grouped in different ways. I was remined of music video collections such as the Palm Pictures Directors Label series or Criterion's Beastie Boys Anthology. The structure of the Beastie Boys discs are interesting since a choice is made on an initial menu screen to view the videos with commentaries or to view them with the ability to choose combinations of different soundtracks and angles. In that way DVDs are revolutionising the decisions about the way groups of discreet short films are presented (chronologically, by theme, by duration or language etc) and allow the viewer to choose (or 'program') different combinations of the material within pre-defined limits. One of the advantages of the extra capacity of Blu-Ray that I could see is the ability to give many more of these kinds of options, from multiple commentary tracks (or collections of commentary snippets that play over parts of each program) to simply the ability to put more content onto a disc that would allow for more choice in the way material can be grouped.

In terms of films though I think a lot of viewers like to be led by a filmmaker and experience a narrative or a series of images that have been placed in a specifically intended sequence by a filmmaker (that is something which I think may become much more important in the future - not the novelty of the content but the way in which it has been ordered by a creative person controlling the project - look at the DVD of Keane which presents the director's cut and Steven Soderbergh's alternate edit of the material), not just to be presented with a mass of material that they then have to order in a way which pleases them. There may be occasions after viewing when people may want to experience isolated sequences again or to perform a quick scan of the film without watching the entire thing and that is where chaptering comes into its own as a way of helping that process, but I do feel the success or failure of a film depends not just on isolated action or impressive moments but the placement of scenes together and they way that they relate to each other to build tension or create a mood. As for changing the nature of narrative films, I think it will be more of a collaborative thing than a huge change - after all films were broken down into relatively self-contained scenes (which sometimes stand beautifully on their own isolated from the larger narrative, or act as a kind of microcosm of it, or encapsulate the entire reason for the film's existence!) long before the advent of DVD.