Choose words above and make the film.
A line, or several. The answer is films that can play them as a sequence, then single shots.
Each text is made into a film twice: composed, and as plain search (the best shot for each line). The numbers compare them. Texts still under copyright are listed without their words: paste your own copy and it stays in this browser.
The Shannon Engine began inside the Cineosis Lab, where a periodic table of cinematic signs and Christian Metz's grand syntagmatique were built to describe how films hold together. It was first pointed at the fourteen poems of Where You Go When You Leave, cut against the recorded voice, and it is being tuned toward the work of Mark Anthony Thomas. The aim is wider than those poems: any voice, transcript or recording, whether a poem, a nursery rhyme or a meeting, should be able to become a film made from the archive.
In 1948 Claude Shannon described communication as choices made from a finite repertoire, where each symbol takes time and each choice changes what may follow. Here the repertoire is not clips but edits: open a scene, stay in it, hold a shot, return to a place, cut away, alternate between two people, suspend an action, close where the film began. The archive is fixed. What the words change is which edits are possible next, and which shots can carry them.
In 1959 he added a fidelity criterion: you say what must survive the passage from one form to another, and you measure what was lost. The words carry relations (a thing happens every evening; one person waits while another leaves; someone cannot leave; a sentence turns on "but"), and the film is judged on whether those relations can still be seen. Which relations matter is an editorial decision. The engine reports; it does not decide.
A search engine answers each line with a clip. The engine plans before it cuts. It divides the words into scenes (stanzas, a conversation, runs of sentences) and gives each scene a world: the one film in the archive that can play the most of that scene's lines. It then cuts inside that world, forward in its time, so a place accumulates. It leaves a world only when the world has nothing for a line, as a cutaway, and comes back.
Grammar changes the cut. "Every evening" returns to the same place. "While" alternates two people; "after" tells the earlier event first. "Cannot leave" holds the lead-up and never shows the departure. "But" keeps the image on screen while the sentence turns it. In a conversation the speakers share a room, and what they talk about becomes cutaways.
The Search tab asks which films can play a passage, and shows them as sequences in their own order. When the archive is thin for a line, the film says so, and the line can be taken to Search, and from there to the wider Moving Image Archive, to forage for what is missing.
The Tests tab holds poems chosen because each asks something different of a film: Keats's urn (a picture that cannot move), Bashō's pond (one event, one sound), Cook Ding (a craft followed joint by joint), the Shield of Achilles (a world inside an object), Ars Poetica (a poem that should not mean but be), a nursery rhyme, a meeting. Each is made twice, composed and as plain search, and measured: how often the cuts stay in their scene's world, how many relations survive, how many lines the archive cannot answer. These are checks of structure, made with the same readings the engine uses, so they are necessary and not sufficient. Watching is the test.
It does not know where inside a clip a gesture happens; it enters each clip at a prepared reading point. It cannot tell that two films show the same person; a strand is held together by name or pronoun, film and place. It reads only the relations it has words for, and none of the voice's tone. New language is read by the lab server with the same model that read the shots; without the server the page knows only the texts prepared for it.