Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema

Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema
Author: A. Cameron
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2008-07-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0230594190

Since the early 1990s there has been a trend towards narrative complexity within popular cinema. This book examines a number of contemporary films that play overtly with narrative structure, raising questions of chance and destiny, memory and history, simultaneity and the representation of time.

Puzzle Films

Puzzle Films
Author: Warren Buckland
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2009-01-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1405168617

Drawing upon the expertise of film scholars from around the world, Puzzle Films investigates 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. Unites American ‘independent’ cinema, the European and International Art film, and certain modes of avant-garde filmmaking on the basis of their shared storytelling complexity Draws upon the expertise of film scholars from North America, Britain, China, Poland, Holland, Italy, Greece, New Zealand, and Australia

Hollywood Puzzle Films

Hollywood Puzzle Films
Author: Warren Buckland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2014-05-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 113625627X

From Inception to The Lake House, moviegoers are increasingly flocking to narratologically complex puzzle films. These puzzle movies borrow techniques—like fragmented spatio-temporal reality, time loops, unstable characters with split identities or unreliable narrators—more commonly attributed to art cinema and independent films. The essays in Hollywood Puzzle Films examine the appropriation of puzzle film techniques by contemporary Hollywood dramas and blockbusters through questions of narrative, time, and altered realities. Analyzing movies like Source Code, The Butterfly Effect, Donnie Darko, Déjà Vu, and adaptations of Philip K. Dick, contributors explore the implications of Hollywood's new movie mind games.

Beginning film studies

Beginning film studies
Author: Andrew Dix
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2016-05-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1784997749

Beginning film studies offers the ideal introduction to this vibrant subject. Written accessibly and with verve, it ranges across the key topics and manifold approaches to film studies. Andrew Dix has thoroughly updated the first edition, and this new volume includes new case studies, overviews of recent developments in the discipline, and up-to-the-minute suggestions for further reading. The book begins by considering some of film's formal features - mise-en-scène, editing and sound - before moving outwards to narrative, genre, authorship, stardom and ideology. Later chapters on film industries and on film consumption - where and how we watch movies - assess the discipline's recent geographical 'turn'. The book references many film cultures, including Hollywood, Bollywood and contemporary Hong Kong. Case studies cover such topics as sound in The Great Gatsby and narrative in Inception. The superhero movie is studied; so too is Jennifer Lawrence. Beginning film studies is also interactive, with readers enabled throughout to reflect critically upon the field.

Stop the Clocks!

Stop the Clocks!
Author: Helen Powell
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012-04-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9781848851757

The clock plays a significant part in our understanding of temporality, but while it simplifies, regulates and coordinates, it fails to reflect and communicate the more experiential dimensions of time. As Helen Powell demonstrates in this book, cinema has been addressing this issue since its inception. Stop the Clocks! examines filmmakers' relationship to time and its visual manipulation and representation from the birth of the medium to the digital present. It engages both with experimentation in narrative construction and with films that take time as their subject matter, such as Donnie Darko, Interview with a Vampire, Lost Highway and Pulp Fiction. Helen Powell asks what underpins the enduring appeal of the science fiction genre with filmmakers and audience and how cinematography might inform our conceptualisation of other imagined temporal worlds, including the afterlife. She examines the role of angels and vampires in contemporary cinema, as well as the distinctive time schemes of new media and their implications for rethinking time and the moving image through digitalisation. Broad based and accessible, Stop the Clocks! will appeal to a wide interdisciplinary audience and provides a useful sourcebook on undergraduate and postgraduate courses in film and other arts and media-based disciplines.

The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema

The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema
Author: Linda Ruth Williams
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2005
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780253218360

This bold and original book examines in detail a relatively new genre of film--the erotic thriller. Linda Ruth Williams traces the genre's exploitation of pornography and noir, discusses mainstream stars (including Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone) as well as genre-branded direct-to-video stars, charts the work of key producers and directors, and considers home videos as a distinct form of viewing pleasure. She maps the history of the genre, analyzing hundreds of movies from blockbusters such as Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and In the Cut to straight-to-video film titles such as Carnal Crimes, Sins of Desire, and Night Eyes. Williams's witty and illuminating readings tell the story of this sensational genre and contribute to the analysis of mainstream screen sex--and its censorship--at the beginning of the 21st century. She shows that as the erotic thriller plays out the sexual fantasies of contemporary America, it also provides a vehicle for marketing those fantasies globally.

The Mind-Game Film

The Mind-Game Film
Author: Thomas Elsaesser
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2021-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135884048

This book represents the culmination of Thomas Elsaesser’s intense and passionate thinking about the Hollywood mind-game film from the previous two decades. In order to answer what the mind-game film is, why they exist, and how they function, Elsaesser maps the industrial-institutional challenges and constraints facing Hollywood, and the broader philosophic horizon within which American cinema thrives today. He demonstrates how the ‘Persistence of Hollywood’ continues as it has adapted to include new twists and turns, as well as revisions of past concerns, as film moves through the 21st century. Through examples such as Minority Report, Mulholland Drive, Source Code, and Back to the Future, Elsaesser explores how mind-game films challenge us and play games with our perception of reality, creating skepticism and (self-) doubt. He also highlights the mind-game film's tendency to intervene in a complex fashion in the political moment by questioning the dominant power’s intent to program both body and mind alike. Prescient and compelling, The Mind-Game Film will appeal to students, scholars, and enthusiasts of media studies, film studies, philosophy, and politics.

Cinema and Narrative Complexity

Cinema and Narrative Complexity
Author: Steffen Hven
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Experimental films
ISBN: 9789462980778

This book considers films that have experimented with new, increasingly complicated 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.