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: 322
Release: 2014-05-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1136256288

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.

Impossible Puzzle Films

Impossible Puzzle Films
Author: Miklos Kiss
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2017-01-18
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474406742

Narrative complexity is a trend in contemporary cinema. Since the late 1990s there has been a palpable increase in complex storytelling in movies. But how and why do complex movies create perplexity and confusion? How do we engage with these challenges? And what makes complex stories so attractive? By blending film studies, narrative theory and cognitive sciences, Kiss and Wilemsen look into the relation between complex storytelling and the mind. Analysing the effects that different complex narratives have on viewers, the book addresses how films like Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive and Primer strategically create complexity and confusion, using the specific category of the impossible puzzle film to examine movies that use baffling paradoxes, impossible loops, and unresolved ambiguities in their stories and storytelling. By looking at how these films play on our mind's blind spots, this innovative book explains their viewing effects in terms of the mental state of cognitive dissonance that they evoke.

Name That Movie

Name That Movie
Author: Paul Rogers
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2012-03-16
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1452116350

Can you identify the film from the images? A fun and challenging visual quiz for movie buffs! The house on the hill in Psycho. The Big Kahuna burger in Pulp Fiction. The giant dinosaur sculptures in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. In Name That Movie, celebrated illustrator Paul Rogers tests our visual knowledge of the world of cinema, highlighting both obscure and instantly recognizable references to 100 classic films, from the golden age of cinema to the blockbusters of today. The rules of the game are simple: each film gets six line drawings, delivered in sequence, and—here’s the clincher—no movie stars. Complete with answer key and index, this entertaining book will delight cinephiles who will see their favorite films in a whole new light.

The Everything Movie Word Search Book

The Everything Movie Word Search Book
Author: Jennifer Edmondson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2009-11-18
Genre: Crafts & Hobbies
ISBN: 1605500488

Enjoy hours of fun with 150 word searches perfect for any movie buff! Famous lines, glamorous stars, and unforgettable characters! Movie buffs will love the latest Everything word search book. Great film moments, characters, and locations are incorporated into 150 fun movie-based puzzles. Each jam-packed puzzle is based on a popular movie, including: -Gone with the Wind -Napoleon Dynamite -To Kill a Mockingbird -The Graduate -P.S. I Love You -Million-Dollar Baby -Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl Gamers of all ability levels will relive their favorite movies in this word search book. This entertaining collection provides hours of fun for puzzlers young and old!

Moving Viewers

Moving Viewers
Author: Carl Plantinga
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2009-04-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780520943919

Everyone knows the thrill of being transported by a film, but what is it that makes movie watching such a compelling emotional experience? In Moving Viewers, Carl Plantinga explores this question and the implications of its answer for aesthetics, the psychology of spectatorship, and the place of movies in culture. Through an in-depth discussion of mainstream Hollywood films, Plantinga investigates what he terms "the paradox of negative emotion" and the function of mainstream narratives as ritualistic fantasies. He describes the sensual nature of the movies and shows how film emotions are often elicited for rhetorical purposes. He uses cognitive science and philosophical aesthetics to demonstrate why cinema may deliver a similar emotional charge for diverse audiences.

The Way Hollywood Tells it

The Way Hollywood Tells it
Author: David Bordwell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 618
Release: 2006
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520232275

Publisher description

A Dictionary of Film Studies

A Dictionary of Film Studies
Author: Annette Kuhn
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2012-06-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0191034657

Written by experts in the field, this dictionary covers all aspects of film studies, including terms, concepts, debates, and movements in film theory and criticism, national, international and transnational cinemas, film history, film movements and genres, film industry organizations and practices, and key technical terms and concepts in 500 detailed entries. Most entries also feature recommendations for further reading and a large number also have web links. The web links are listed and regularly updated on a companion website that complements the printed book. The dictionary is international in its approach, covering national cinemas, genres, and film movements from around the world such as the Nouvelle Vague, Latin American cinema, the Latsploitation film, Bollywood, Yiddish cinema, the spaghetti western, and World cinema. The most up-to-date dictionary of its kind available, this is a must-have for all students of film studies and ancillary subjects, as well as an informative read for cinephiles and for anyone with an interest in films and film criticism.

Making Sense of Mind-Game Films

Making Sense of Mind-Game Films
Author: Simin Nina Littschwager
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501337068

Mind-game films and other complex narratives have been a prominent phenomenon of the cinematic landscape during the period 1990-2010, when films like The Sixth Sense, Memento, Fight Club and Source Code became critical and commercial successes, often acquiring a cult status with audiences. With their multiple story lines, unreliable narrators, ambiguous twist endings, and paradoxical worlds, these films challenge traditional ways of narrative comprehension and in many cases require and reward multiple viewings. But how can me make sense of films that don't always make sense the way we are used to? While most scholarship has treated these complex films as narrative puzzles that audiences solve with their cognitive skills, Making Sense of Mind-Game Films offers a fresh perspective by suggesting that they appeal to the body and the senses in equal measures. Mind-game films tell stories about crises between body, mind and world, and about embodied forms of knowing and subjective ways of being-in-the-world. Through compelling in-depth case studies of popular mind-game films, the book explores how these complex narratives take their (embodied) spectators with them into such crises. The puzzling effect generated by these films stems from a conflict between what we think and what we experience, between what we know and what we feel to be true, and between what we see and what we sense.

Puzzling Stories

Puzzling Stories
Author: Steven Willemsen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2022-08-12
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1800735928

Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream—but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.