Narrative films were originally called photoplays and were at first thought of as a merely additive art form (photography plus theatre) created by pointing a static camera at a stagelike set. Photoplays gave way to movies when filmmakers learned, for example, to create suspense by cutting between two separate actions [...] to create character and mood by visual means [...] to use a "montage" of discontinuous shots to establish a larger action [...] After thirty years of energetic invention, films captured the world with such persuasive power and told such coherent and compelling stories that some critics passionately opposed the addition of sound and color as superfluous distractions. [...] One of the lessons we can learn fromt he history of film is that additive formulations like "photo-play" or the contemporary catchall "multimedia" are a sign that the medium is in an early stage of development and is still depending on formats derived from earlier technologies instead of exploiting its own expressive power. [...] Today the derivative mind-set is apparent in the conception of cyberspace as a place to view "pages" of print or "clips" of moving video and of CD-ROM as offering "extended books". The equivalent of the filmed play of the early 1900s is the multimedia scrapbook, which takes advantage of the novelty of computer delivery without utilizing its intrinsic properties. [...] Therefore, if we want to see beyond the current horizon of scrapbook multimedia, it is important first to identify the essential properties of digital environments, that is the qualities comparable to the variability of the lens, the movability of the camera, and the editability of film, that will determine the distinctive power and form of a mature electronic narrative art.