Cinema and narrative complexity

Since the mid-1990s, an international cycle of films has experimented with increasingly complex narrative strategies. In their exploration of nonlinear temporalities, the dissolution of Cartesian individuality, and a fascination with the role of and reliance on memory, such 'complex narratives' render the limitations of prevalent film-analytical tools visible and call for an 'embodied' reconfiguration of the cinematic experience. Yet such creative potential is not limited to recent filmic examples. Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula examines how a broad range of 'complex' films including Stage Fright (Hitchcock, 1950), Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima, My Love, Resnais, 1959), Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, Tykwer, 1998), 21 Grams (Iñárritu, 2003), and Memento (Nolan, 2000) question favoured interpretative strategies. In its endevaour to reconfigure prevalent modes of organizing and apprehending cinematic narratives, this book develops the concept of the 'embodied' fabula. AUP S17 catalogue text 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 analysing 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 affec