Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema

Puzzle Films examines the influence of a new storytelling epoch on contemporary world cinema. Identifying and analyzing films that reject classical storytelling techniques and instead embrace nonlinearity, time loops, and fragmented spatio–temporal reality as their narrative form, these films blur the boundaries between different levels of reality, are riddled with gaps, deception, labyrinthine structures, unreliable narrators, and overt coincidences. Drawing upon the expertise of film scholars from around the world, this edited collectioninvestigates 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. At a time when many a film is asking more––not less––of fans and cineastes, Puzzle Films will help viewers keep pace with a form of narration that captures the anxiety and ambiguity of our time.

Introduction: Puzzle Plots: Warren Buckland. 1. The Mind–Game Film: Thomas Elsaesser. 2. Making Sense of Lost Highway : Warren Buckland. 3. “Twist Blindness:” The Role of Primacy, Priming, Schemas, and Reconstructive Memory in a First–Time Viewing of The Sixth Sense : Daniel Barratt. 4. Narrative Comprehension Made Difficult: Film Form and Mnemonic Devices in Memento: Stefano Ghislotti. 5. “Frustrated Time” Narration: The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman: Chris Dzialo. 6. Backbeat and Overlap: Time, Place, and Character Subjectivity in Run Lola Run: Michael Wedel. 7. Infernal Affairs and the Ethics of Complex Narrative: Allan Cameron and Sean Cubitt. 8. Happy Together? Generic Hybridity in 2046 and In the Mood for Love: Gary Bettinson. 9. Revitalizing the Thriller Genre: Lou Ye’s Suzhou Riv er and Purple Butterfly : Yunda Eddie Feng. 10. The Pragmatic Poetics of Hong Sangsoo’s The Day a Pig Fell into a Well: Marshall Deutalbaum. 11. Looking for Access in Narrative Complexity. The New and the Old in Oldboy: Eleftheria Thanouli

Warren Buckland is Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is author of Directed by Steven Spielberg and The Cognitive Semiotics of Film, and co–author (with Thomas Elsaesser) of Studying Contemporary American Film .

"Barratt makes excellent use of graphics to help illustrate the strategies employed by Shyamalan to prevent the first–time viewer anticipating the aforementioned twist . . . ultimately though, Buckland′s collection does provide a thought–provoking study of what has become an important genre in contemporary cinema." (Scope Book Reviews, 1 February 2011) "A timely and insightful guide to some of the more complex and labyrinthine currents in recent cinema, drawing on an admirable range of examples from around the globe. Geoff King, Professor of Film and TV Studies, Brunel University