The cinetrix would be the first to admit she's only an occasional reader of David Bordwell's blog [something about the lingering resentment she harbored as an impoverished grad student that she was financing summer homes for him and Kristen with each subsequent edition of Film Art she was compelled to buy]. But damn if the brother doesn't take a good long look at something I've been pondering of late: the consequences of dividing a DVD into chapters.
The DVD made a movie more like a book.
This sounds odd, because we think of digital media as replacing print. Yet consider the similarities. You can read a book any way you please, skimming or skipping, forward or backward. You can read the chapters, or even the sentences, in any order you choose. You can dwell on a particular page, paragraph, or phrase for as long as you like. You can go back and reread passages you’ve read before, and you can jump ahead to the ending. You can put the book down at a particular point and return to it an hour or a year later; the bookmark is the ultimate pause command.
We tacitly acknowledge the resemblance between the DVD and the book when we call the segments on a DVD its chapters, the list of chapters an index, and the process of composing the DVD its authoring.
In the classroom I encounter this phenomenon most often grading student papers. Bordwell doesn't have a whole lot to say on specific chapter titles, but especially in the assignment where they may chose the sequence they analyze, the kiddies often locate it in the narrative not by plot summary but by title. [And this after we've gone through auteur theory.] I just don't think they realize that filmmakers generally don't conceive of their films in chapter form and those catchy descriptive titles are usually the 11th-hour work of some underpaid grunt in marketing.
The cinetrix has no unified field observations to offer on the topic. She was mostly wondering whether other educators had encountered this. And for the rest of you lucky folks, any favorite, slapped-on-after-the-fact titles gracing some of your favorite [pre-DVD technology] classic films? Share away in the comments, s'il vous plait.
