Funnily enough, the aforementioned Manovich’s article about the database-narrative approach continues with a subchapter about “Database Cinema”[1]—a description of certain filmmakers’ attempts at creating non-linear, interactive, implicit narratives using this specific medium. It points out the obsoleteness of the modernist notion of medium specificity, about how every medium should develop its own unique language, and states that the contemporary cultural climate demands the reevaluation of cinema as a medium prioritizing narrative (through time-based sequencing as opposed to e.g. photography as a medium prioritizing database—through existing mostly as part of random-access mediums, such as catalogs, taxonomies, and lists). Given the new dominance of the database with the introduction of digital media and the internet, there comes up a possibility of arriving at new narrative methods that take into account that its elements are database instances.

He cites Peter Greenaway and Dziga Vertov as two practitioners of the methods that work to sabotage the idea of a “plot” and emphasize the potential of the database–narrative symbiosis. With Greenaway, Manovich points to his methods of using certain systems of pretty much just making sense of the sequencing of the recorded video material. With Vertov, who Manovich calls a “database filmmaker”, there is an interesting way of “activating” the usually static form of the database into something more dynamic and spirited. Vertov’s methods include for example a meta-narrative technique of beginning the movie by filming the editing room and particular captioned shelves with numbered and catalogued shot material. Vertov’s relevance to new media is the creation of new meaningful visual language for film through the means of a particular argumentation of the sequencing and manipulation of seemingly unrelated clips—he merges database and narrative into a new form.