A television documentary is constructed not only of pictures and sound, but also time. Time is the universal though unrecognized factor that underlies all the work. As real life itself does, so television productions unroll continuously and unrelentingly from beginning to end. They don’t speed up, slow down, reverse or stop. Without the regular and continuous unrolling of time they don’t exist. Stop a film or a video and time is killed; sound and movement vanish; the film dies. Start time moving again and the production springs into action.
Time on television is not continuous as it is in life. Television time moves forward in discrete steps. On film, wherever we are in the world, time steps forward in paces of one twenty-fourth of a second. Television is different. In Britain and Europe, each step is one twenty-fifth of a second after the last; on American television it is one thirtieth. (In both cases a frame consists of two fields, each providing half of the lines which make up the television picture: field one draws the odd-numbered, field two the even-numbered lines.) The distinction is the result of different electricity mains frequencies. Thus do the chance decisions of engineering history influence quite unrelated fields.
When time is stopped, sound vanishes utterly but vision merely freezes. Without time, the very idea of sound—the movement of particles of air over time—loses its meaning. Sound is an analogue quality; it can be divided and subdivided down to the infinitely small—almost, though never quite, to zero. But vision is digital, atomic. Without time, vision, like physical matter, reveals itself as constructed of a series of discrete units. Beyond these, one cannot go. The indivisible atoms of television are the frames. An illusion usually called persistence of vision is what makes the viewer perceive movement when presented with a series of still frames.
To say that a thirty-minute film is a string of 43,200 individual frames, though true, tells us little. In the physical world, atoms are grouped in an ascending hierarchy to construct reality. Every sculptor knows that there are many graduations in between a piece of stone and the atoms of which it is ultimately composed. The precise nature of each level determines the character of the whole. The stone is made up of grains, the grains are constructed from crystals, the crystals are built of molecules and molecules themselves of atoms. Similarly a book is made up of chapters, the chapters of paragraphs, each paragraph of sentences, each sentence of words.
Film and video productions are constructed in a similar way. A film is made by joining together a series of sections, the sections are constructed from sequences, the sequences are built up from shots, and the unit of the shot is the frame. The meaning of a text cannot be deduced from knowing which words it contains, though in the end it is made up of nothing else. A documentary cannot be described solely in terms of the frames of which it is composed, though in the end here too there is nothing else. As with the atoms in stone or words in a book, a documentary depends on the arrangement, the order, the selection and the composition of the frames which make it up.
There is an exact correspondence between the number of frames and the length of the work. One can say a that thirty-minute film consists of 43,200 individual frames, a thirty-minute British video of 45,000. But one cannot say how many shots or how many sequences—there is no conversion table one can apply. A shot may have a hundred frames or a thousand. A sequence may have ten shots or fifty.
Nevertheless there is a relationship. The length of shots, of sequences, of sections, are still, though in a rough and inexact way, reflections of the length of the complete production. The number of frames in a shot, of shots in a sequence, of sequences in the entire work, will be of a similar order. Rhythm and pace demand that a short work contains shorter shots and shorter sequences than an extended production. A thirty-second commercial will have far shorter shots than a one-hour documentary. An extended film composed entirely of three-second shots would be unwatchable. A five-minute production made up only of ten thirty-second shots would be unconscionably slow. Thus film and video, like many other human creations that strive for an organic naturalness, are characterized by some of the self-similar qualities of fractals.
Self-similarity is that property of an object which makes areas of that object, when magnified to any scale, look similar both to the whole and to each other. A commonly given example is that of a coastline. At any magnification, from a representation in a printed atlas down to close observation by the naked eye, the edge of a sea shore looks similarly ragged. So much so that it is impossible to determine the scale of the image from its appearance alone. Similarly, when looking down at the ground from an aircraft, unless one can see objects like trees or buildings whose size is known, it is almost impossible to tell the height at which one is flying. Fractals are mathematical constructions which—amongst other qualities—display self-similarity. It is their self-similarity than brings fractals closer to nature than the rigid geometry of the drawing board. Fractals can be used to create convincing images of clouds, mountains, shorelines, forests, flowers. The self-similarity of film and video timings bring these works closer to the qualities of the real world too.
Though there is no limit to the possible magnification of a mathematical fractal, a real natural feature like a shoreline cannot be magnified indefinitely. Ultimately one arrives at the atoms of which the grains of sand are composed. By definition an atom can be divided no further. And so it is with a film.