Cinema and Narrative Complexity. Embodying the Fabula

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, a number of films from international filmmakers have experimented with increasingly complicated narrative strategies--including such hits as Run, Lola, Run, 21 Grams, and Memento. This book sets those films and others in context with earlier works that tried new narrative approaches, including Stage Fright and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, to show how they reveal the limitations of most of our usual tools for analyzing film. In light of that, Steffen Hven argues for the deployment of an 'embodied' reconfiguration of the cinematic experience, one that allows us to rethink such core constituents of narrative understanding as cognition, emotion, and affect. Cinema in the interstices -- Narrative ambiguity in the classical cinema -- Modern(ist) cinema: logic of the encounter -- Towards the embodied fabula -- The complexity of complex narratives -- Memento and the embodied fabula.