Hyperlink Cinema

Hyperlink cinema is a term coined by author Alissa Quart, who used the term in her review of the film Happy Endings (2005) for the film journal Film Comment in 2005. Film critic Roger Ebert popularized the term when reviewing the film Syriana in 2005. These films are not hypermedia and do not have actual hyperlinks, but are multilinear in a more metaphorical sense.

In describing Happy Endings, Quart considers captions acting as footnotes and split screen as elements of hyperlink cinema and notes the influence of the World Wide Web and multitasking. Playing with time and characters' personal history, plot twists, interwoven storylines between multiple characters, jumping between the beginning and end (flashback and flashforward) are also elements. Ebert further describes hyperlink cinema as films where the characters or action reside in separate stories, but a connection or influence between those disparate stories is slowly revealed to the audience; illustrated in Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's films Amores Perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), and Babel (2006).

Quart suggests that director Robert Altman created the structure for the genre and demonstrated its usefulness for combining interlocking stories in his films Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993). She also mentions the television series 24 and discusses Alan Rudolph’s film Welcome to L.A. (1976) as an early prototype. Crash (2004) is an example of the genre, as are Altman's The Player (1992), Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), City of God (2002), Syriana (2005), and Nine Lives (2005). Elements of hyperlink cinema can also be seen in the earlier film Kanchenjungha (1962), by Satyajit Ray.