FRAME BY FRAME
What shape might film theory take in a post-film world? How might new interfaces – such as the web and more specifically the blog – make possible new structures and discourses of criticism? Whereas a paper book containing a frame-by frame analysis of a two-hour feature film is a practical impossibility, a web site devoted to such a project is unlikely, but possible.
[FRAME 1]
Parameters and Constraints
1. Blue Velvet is approximately two hours long.
2. The analysis is to be conducted frame-by-frame, which is to say: frame step-by-frame step on an Apple PowerBook G4, which turns out to be approximately 24 „frames“ per second.
3. In Blue Velvet there are approximately 172,800 frames, at approximately 24 frames per second. (Everything here – all the calculations – are approximate. I use the word „frame“ here in a sort of metaphorical way. Many thanks to Stuart Willis and Will Luers for input regarding DVD frame rate.)
4. A frame-by-frame analysis of Blue Velvet would take 473 years assuming one frame is presented per day.
5. I hope to offer 2 or 3 frames per week.
6. Annotations are to be no longer than 5 sentences per frame. Sometimes there will be no annotations at all–just the frame.
[Dank an Klaus Volkmer für den Hinweis.]