WiSe 21/22: Cinema and Narrative Complexity
Steffen Hven
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Since the beginning of the 1990s films such as Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994), Lola rennt (Tykwer, 1998), Amores Perros (Love’s a Bitch, Iñárritu 2000) and Memento (Nolan, 2000) have become emblematic of an international surge within the landscape of moving images to develop increasingly demanding and challenging narratives. From forking path to multiple draft narratives, from puzzle films to mind-game movies, this course examines how narrative complexity has become a defining trait of audiovisual popular culture. How do the main formal devices and storytelling strategies (e.g., non-linearity, time loops, and the fragmentation of spatiotemporality) relate to earlier narrative traditions such as classical Hollywood cinema and European art cinema? How does narrative complexity challenge its audience in terms of the performance of cognitive tasks of meaning-making and what is its role in the film’s overall arrangement of affect (its moods, atmospheres, and emotional appeal)? How are various storytelling logics (e.g., mosaic, modular, database) used to explore issues ranging from personal identity, human interconnectedness, memory, structural societal inequalities to how (media-)technologies alter the human condition? Located somewhere in the encounter between film and spectator, the complexity of ‘complex narratives’ turns out to be a complex phenomenon itself.
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