Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema


Book Description

Since the early 1990s there has been a trend towards narrative complexity within popular cinema. This book examines a number of contemporary films that play overtly with narrative structure, raising questions of chance and destiny, memory and history, simultaneity and the representation of time.




Puzzle Films


Book Description

Drawing upon the expertise of film scholars from around the world, Puzzle Films investigates a number of films that sport complex storytelling--from Memento, Old Boy, and Run Lola Run, to the Infernal Affairs trilogy and In the Mood for Love. Unites American ‘independent’ cinema, the European and International Art film, and certain modes of avant-garde filmmaking on the basis of their shared storytelling complexity Draws upon the expertise of film scholars from North America, Britain, China, Poland, Holland, Italy, Greece, New Zealand, and Australia




Cinema and Narrative Complexity


Book Description

This book considers films that have experimented with new, increasingly complicated narrative approaches, including Stage Fright and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, to show how they reveal the limitations of most of our usual tools for analysing film.




The Mind-Game Film


Book Description

This book represents the culmination of Thomas Elsaesser’s intense and passionate thinking about the Hollywood mind-game film from the previous two decades. In order to answer what the mind-game film is, why they exist, and how they function, Elsaesser maps the industrial-institutional challenges and constraints facing Hollywood, and the broader philosophic horizon within which American cinema thrives today. He demonstrates how the ‘Persistence of Hollywood’ continues as it has adapted to include new twists and turns, as well as revisions of past concerns, as film moves through the 21st century. Through examples such as Minority Report, Mulholland Drive, Source Code, and Back to the Future, Elsaesser explores how mind-game films challenge us and play games with our perception of reality, creating skepticism and (self-) doubt. He also highlights the mind-game film's tendency to intervene in a complex fashion in the political moment by questioning the dominant power’s intent to program both body and mind alike. Prescient and compelling, The Mind-Game Film will appeal to students, scholars, and enthusiasts of media studies, film studies, philosophy, and politics.




Hollywood Puzzle Films


Book Description

From Inception to The Lake House, moviegoers are increasingly flocking to narratologically complex puzzle films. These puzzle movies borrow techniques—like fragmented spatio-temporal reality, time loops, unstable characters with split identities or unreliable narrators—more commonly attributed to art cinema and independent films. The essays in Hollywood Puzzle Films examine the appropriation of puzzle film techniques by contemporary Hollywood dramas and blockbusters through questions of narrative, time, and altered realities. Analyzing movies like Source Code, The Butterfly Effect, Donnie Darko, Déjà Vu, and adaptations of Philip K. Dick, contributors explore the implications of Hollywood's new movie mind games.




Cinema of Confinement


Book Description

In this book, Thomas J. Connelly draws on a number of key psychoanalytic concepts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Joan Copjec, Michel Chion, and Todd McGowan to identify and describe a genre of cinema characterized by spatial confinement. Examining classic films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, as well as current films such as Room, Green Room, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, Connelly shows that the source of enjoyment of confined spaces lies in the viewer's relationship to excess. Cinema of Confinement offers rich insights into the appeal of constricted filmic spaces at a time when one can easily traverse spatial boundaries within the virtual reality of cyberspace.




Virtual Reality Cinema


Book Description

Award-winning cine-maVRicks Eric R. Williams, Carrie Love and Matt Love introduce virtual reality cinema (also known as 360° video or cine-VR) in this comprehensive guide filled with insider tips and tested techniques for writing, directing and producing effectively in the new medium. Join these veteran cine-VR storytellers as they break down fundamental concepts from traditional media to demonstrate how cine-VR can connect with audiences in new ways. Examples from their professional work are provided to illustrate basic, intermediate and advanced approaches to crafting modern story in this unique narrative space where there’s no screen to contain an image and no specific stage upon which to perform. Virtual Reality Cinema will prepare you to approach your own cine-VR projects via: Tips and techniques for writing, directing and producing bleeding-edge narrative cine-VR projects; More than a hundred photos and illustrations to explain complex concepts; Access to more than two hours of on-line cine-VR examples that you can download to watch on your own HMD; New techniques developed at Ohio University’s Game Research and Immersive Design (GRID) Lab, including how to work with actors to embrace Gravity and avoid the Persona Gap, how to develop stories with the Story Engagement Matrix and how to balance directorial control and audience agency in this new medium. This book is an absolute must read for any student of filmmaking, media production, transmedia storytelling and game design, as well as anyone already working in these industries that wants to understand the new challenges and opportunities of virtual reality cinema.




Impossible Puzzle Films


Book Description

Narrative complexity is a trend in contemporary cinema. Since the late 1990s there has been a palpable increase in complex storytelling in movies. But how and why do complex movies create perplexity and confusion? How do we engage with these challenges? And what makes complex stories so attractive? By blending film studies, narrative theory and cognitive sciences, Kiss and Wilemsen look into the relation between complex storytelling and the mind. Analysing the effects that different complex narratives have on viewers, the book addresses how films like Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive and Primer strategically create complexity and confusion, using the specific category of the impossible puzzle film to examine movies that use baffling paradoxes, impossible loops, and unresolved ambiguities in their stories and storytelling. By looking at how these films play on our mind's blind spots, this innovative book explains their viewing effects in terms of the mental state of cognitive dissonance that they evoke.




The Classical Hollywood Cinema


Book Description

'A dense, challenging and important book.' Philip French Observer 'At the very least, this blockbuster is probably the best single volume history of Hollywood we're likely to get for a very long time.' Paul Kerr City Limits 'Persuasively argued, the book is also packed with facts, figures and photographs.' Nigel Andrews Financial Times Acclaimed for their breakthrough approach, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson analyze the basic conditions of American film-making as a historical institution and consider to what extent Hollywood film production constitutes a systematic enterprise, in both its style and its business operations. Despite differences of director, genre or studio, most Hollywood films operate within a set of shared assumptions about how a film should look and sound. Such assumptions are neither natural nor inevitable; but because classical-style films have been the type most widely seen, they have come to be accepted as the 'norm' of film-making and viewing. The authors show how these classical conventions were formulated and standardized, and how they responded to the arrival of sound, colour, widescreen ratios and stereophonic sound. They argue that each new technological development has served a function within an existing narrational system. The authors also examine how the Hollywood cinema standardized the film-making process itself. They describe how, over the course of its history, Hollywood developed distinct modes of production in a constant search for maximum efficiency, predictability and novelty. Set apart by its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this book is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s. Now available in paperback, it is a 'must' for film students, lecturers and all those seriously interested in the development of the film industry.




The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema


Book Description

This bold and original book examines in detail a relatively new genre of film--the erotic thriller. Linda Ruth Williams traces the genre's exploitation of pornography and noir, discusses mainstream stars (including Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone) as well as genre-branded direct-to-video stars, charts the work of key producers and directors, and considers home videos as a distinct form of viewing pleasure. She maps the history of the genre, analyzing hundreds of movies from blockbusters such as Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and In the Cut to straight-to-video film titles such as Carnal Crimes, Sins of Desire, and Night Eyes. Williams's witty and illuminating readings tell the story of this sensational genre and contribute to the analysis of mainstream screen sex--and its censorship--at the beginning of the 21st century. She shows that as the erotic thriller plays out the sexual fantasies of contemporary America, it also provides a vehicle for marketing those fantasies globally.