SEQUENCE :: As the Cinema is capable of extreme shifts of time and space, the possibility has opened (and is almost exclusively utilized) to carry a story across the expanse of any and all material and cognitive potential, compressed into a duration, and confined within a frame. Many scenes will be created; so many, in fact, a form of organization will be required to mediate between the scene and its act.
This is the sequence. It is a unit specific to the rapidly-interchanging fixed aspect of the Cinema, a quality exclusive to the medium. The theatrical play also shares its structuring by act and scene; although, each act normally accounts for no more than 5, 6, 7 scenes, given the limitations of the stage's construction, as well as the immersive requirements of live performance. Thus, the theater has a natural tendency for scenic continuity, or what elsewhere has been described as a slice of life.
Historically, the length of a film's sequence was limited by the celluloid that could fit within a reel. This division, of approximately 8-15 minutes, still maintains itself even in the digital age. A sequence serves to glue a sweeping idea or agenda over a multitude of chronology and setting; it is a macro-action which turns the wheel of the act closer to its realization, but not of such autonomous import as to contain the entirety of the dramatic blue-print within its scope.
A unit is a subdivision of unity.
Unity, per Aristotle, being a quality of wholeness, defined as the containment of a beginning, middle, and end. The prominence of the sequence in the Cinematic structure, and its manner of manifesting out of necessity, speaks to me as a determining, internal proof: our paint is the entire material world, the brush is montage; that which is photographed, the momentary existence grafted out of its historical generation, drives the will of the Cinema. This is the reason why Stanley Kubrick required many takes, or why Jean-Luc Godard ran through the Louvre.
In the revolution Jean Renoir has painted with 'La Marseilles' (1938), “[it] is like an extended theatrical piece, made up of discrete ‘scenes’… as if theater, and along with it, appearance, were integral components of life” – theatricality and artifice being a means for discovering reality, instead of contrasting it. The narrative is on the ground floor of the revolution, our emotional associations attached to characters practicing a function closer to the Shakespearean fool (a passive / analytical agent in a forward moving background), than of the classical-dramatic convention of the individual seeking a consistent want through action. Much like its carrier species, language suffers as well from a great identity crisis: itself of a distinct and static form :: a word appearing just as a word, (for example, “word”) – yet simultaneously a charged metaphor, instantly conjuring the image(s) of something beyond textual representation – language being both of itself (the alphabetical construction of the word “word“) and of another (“word” immediately directing the mind to an idea of a basic element in grammatical syntax).
It is always itself and something else.
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