Abstract
Until the second half of the twentieth century, linguistic and formalist theories highly influenced the understanding of both visual media and the spaces derived from them. In particular, theories of linguistics were applied to the study of filmic narrative structures in formalist critical theories. However, this type of formalistic analysis has been employed less frequently since Deleuze's works on cinema were published in the 1980s. Since Deleuze's intervention, it has become less common to approach cinema purely as a language – in both French meanings of langage and langue. Indeed, the search for a 'cinematographic syntax' – understood during the formalist period as a series of rules or principles governing the structure of a language, rather than its Greek meaning of 'arrangement' (σύνταξις) – was replaced by the search for narrative spaces governed by geometrical rules, including narrative spaces shaped by non-Euclidean geometries.
This paper will investigate how Deleuze, through his works on cinema, moved cinematographic narrative away from the sphere of linguistics and how in this way he developed a rapprochement of audiovisual narrative to geometrical spaces, mainly to non- Euclidean geometries. In fact, it is the contention of this paper that Deleuze's theory is deeply influenced by the effect video technology in the 1980s had on the spatial organization of audiovisual narratives. In addition, if one takes Deleuze's theories on cinematographic and audiovisual narrative as a starting point of investigation, it is posible to identify the influence of Mandelbrot's fractal geometry on the structure of audiovisual narrative spaces. Significantly, in the last twenty years, digital technology has made the development of fractal geometry possible, thereby directly changing the ways in which audiovisual narrative spaces are organized.
In this paper, then, I will first briefly analyze the influence of structuralism on the analysis of cinematographic narrative. Subsequently, I will discuss Deleuze's theorizations on the cinematic medium. In the final section, I will explore how film narrative may be seen as an example of spatial organization which is directly influenced by technological improvements, and how digital technology generates a kind of fractal ordino in audiovisual narrative.