Peter Greenaway, one of the few prominent film directors concerned with expanding cinema's language, once complained that "the linear pursuit—one story at a time told chronologically—is the standard format of cinema." Pointing out that cinema lags behind modern literature in experimenting with narrative, he asked: "Could it not travel on the road where Joyce, Eliot, Borges and Perec have already arrived?" While Greenaway is right to direct filmmakers to more innovative literary narratives, new media artists working on the database-problem can learn from cinema "as it is." For cinema already exists right at the intersection between database and narrative. We can think of all the material accumulated during shooting as forming a database, especially since the shooting schedule usually does not follow the narrative of the film but is determined by production logistics. During editing, the editor constructs a film narrative out of this database, creating a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films that could have been constructed. From this perspective, every filmmaker engages with the database–narrative problem in very film, although only a few have done so self-consciously.

Many of Greenaway’s films progress by recounting a list of items, a catalog without any inherent order (for example the different books in Prospero’s books). Working to undermine a linear narrative, Greenaway uses different systems to order his films. He wrote about this approach: "If a numerical, alphabetic colour-coding system is employed, it is done deliberately as a device, a con-struct, to counteract, dilute, augment or complement the all-pervading obsessive cinema interest in plot, in narrative, in the I'm now going to tell you a story' school of film-making." His favourite system is numbers. The sequence of numbers acts as a narrative shell that "convinces" the viewer that she is watching a narrative. In reality, the scenes that follow one another are not connected in any logical way. By using numbers, Greenaway "wraps" a minimal narrative around a database. Although Greenaway's database logic was already present in his "avant-garde" films such as The Falls (1980), it has also structured his "commercial" films. The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) is centered around twelve drawings in the process of being made by a drafts-man. They do not form any order; Greenaway emphasizes this by having the draftsman work on a few drawings at once.