Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula [Hardcover]

Since the mid-1990s, a number of films from international filmmakers have experimented with increasingly complicated narrative strategies—including such hits asRun, Lola, Run,21 Grams, andMemento. This book sets those films, among others, in context with earlier works that tried new narrative approaches, includingStage FrightandHiroshima, 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.

Steffen Hvenis a doctoral student at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

I. Introduction
II. Cinema in the Interstices
Introduction
Cinema and its two Temporal Modes
The Cognitive Fabula and Linear Storytelling
Film-Philosophy and the Challenge of Contemporary Cinema
III. Narrative Ambiguity in the Classical Cinema
Introduction
Narrative Transgression in STAGE FRIGHT
Defamiliarization and Beyond
IV. Modern(ist) Cinema: Logic of the Encounter
Introduction
Towards an Embodied and Enactive Approach to Cognition
Embodying the Narrative Experience
VI. The Complexity of Complex Narratives
Introduction
21 GRAMS – How Much Does Life Weigh?
The Fabula and the ‘Decomplexification’ of the Narrative Continuum
A Problematic Combination: Classical Narratology and Complexity Theory
‘Forking Paths’- Complex Storytelling in LOLA RENNT
Are Forking Paths Linear?
Embracing the Narrative Rhythm of LOLA RENNT
VII. Memento and the Embodied Fabula
Introduction
Realism and Constructivism: A Narratological Deadlock
The Defamiliarization of Narrative Perception
VIII. Conclusions
The Emblc†