Blog 11: Small World

I enjoyed exploring the interactive film, Small World, by Florian Thalhofer, but I have to admit, I was slightly confused by it. I realize what it has to do with the narrative structures we have been talking about, but I can only guess what its relationship to space and postmodernism could be. At first it was difficult to enjoy the abstractness of the photos that were brought up, but after a few of them, I started appreciating them and recognizing their connection to the bits of story being told.

The narrative structure is obvious: once the scene is finished, squares pop up that you are allowed to click on. It seemed to me that the choices narrowed as you progress through the film. The little red box at the top right seemed to keep track of how many slides you had gone through. The narrative wasn’t continuous, because when I had gone through all the scenes, it told me it was “the end.” So rather than being a continuous story, it had one specific ending; how you got to the end was your own choice, though. The links to different pages related to each other. Even though they were on several different pages, I could tell that each grouping followed one another.

The relationship to space might refer to the placement of the boxes that you clicked on once the scene was finished. Something interesting that I noticed was that all of the music, except for one song, was from Americans bands. The one song that wasn’t from an American band was by Belle & Sebastian, a Scottish pop band, who also sings in English. This seemed a little different considering that the main version of the film is in German. When I went back to the site and watched the version in German, the songs were not played for as long as they were in the English version. Perhaps this was a way to make the English speakers feel more connected to the foreign origin of the film?