Database Cinema - Database Artists

Database Artists

Manovich considers filmmakers Peter Greenaway and Dziga Vertov as pioneers in his database cinema genre. He explains how Greenaway sees the linear pursuit as standard format of filmmaking lagging behind modern literature in experimenting with narrative. Greenaway’s system for reconciling database and narrative uses sequences of numbers. They act as a narrative shell, which makes the viewer believe he is watching a story.

Dziga Vertov can be seen as an even earlier database filmmaker. Manovich cites Vertovs Man with a Movie Camera (Russia, 1929) as the most important example of database imagination in modern media art. The film has three levels: Cameraman filming the shots, audience watching the finished film and shots from street life in Russian cities edited in chronological order of that particular day. While the last level can be seen as text or ‘the story’, the other two can be seen as meta-texts. By the use of meaningful effects, discovering the world by this ‘kino-eye’ Vertov uses the normally static and objective database as a dynamic and subjective form.

Manovich stated that new media artists working on database concepts could learn from cinema precisely because cinema has in fact always been at the nexus of database and narrative while the movie was still in the editing room. Manovich points out especially Vertov achieved a successful merging between database and narrative into a new form .