Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula 9789048530250

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Cinema and Narrative Complexity

Cinema and Narrative Complexity Embodying the Fabula

Steffen Hven

Amsterdam University Press

For Gefion

Cover illustrations: (front) Photo: Ruth Harriet Louise - Buster Keaton, The Cameraman (1928), directed by Edward Sedgwick; Collection Christophel / RnB © Metro Goldwyn Mayer; (back) frame from Memento (2000), directed by Christopher Nolan. Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 94 6298 077 8 e-isbn 978 90 4853 025 0 doi 10.5117/9789462980778 nur 670 © S. Hven / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

I. Introduction

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II. Cinema in the Interstices 25 Introduction 25 Cinema and its two Temporal Modes 26 The Cognitive Fabula and Linear Storytelling 29 Film-Philosophy and the Challenge of Contemporary Cinema 41 III. Narrative Ambiguity in the Classical Cinema 53 Introduction 53 Narrative Transgression in Stage Fright 58 Defamiliarization and Beyond 69 IV. Modern(ist) Cinema: Logic of the Encounter 83 Introduction 83 Cinema and the Modern 84 Hiroshima mon amour – A Cinematic Love Affair 93 V. Towards the Embodied Fabula 111 Introduction 111 Towards an Embodied and Enactive Approach to Cognition 113 Embodying the Narrative Experience 121 VI. The Complexity of Complex Narratives 137 Introduction 137 21 Grams – How Much Does Life Weigh? 141 The Fabula and the ‘Decomplexification’ of the Narrative Continuum142 A Problematic Combination: Classical Narratology and Complexity Theory 150 ‘Forking Paths’ – Complex Storytelling in Lola rennt 157 Are Forking Paths Linear? 161 Embracing the Narrative Rhythm of Lola rennt 166 VII. Memento and the Embodied Fabula 175 Introduction 175 Realism and Constructivism: A Narratological Deadlock 180 The Defamiliarization of Narrative Perception 193

VIII. Conclusions The Embodied Fabula and Beyond

205 210

Bibliography 215 Notes 229 Acknowledgments 245 Index 247

I. Introduction No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?[...] Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity. ‒ Thoreau 1995, 72

The brilliance of Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) lies in its complex narrative structure, which imposes a sensation of temporal disorientation upon its viewers that mirrors the anterograde amnesia suffered by its main character, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). Thereby the film allows the spectator to enact – rather than merely observe – the amnesia of what has become ‘the archetypal example of the character who suffers from a loss of memory’ (Elsaesser 2009, 28). Consequently, Memento stands out as one of the most vivid representatives of a contemporary body of films that have challenged the long-dominant opposition between classical Hollywood storytelling and the tradition of (European) art cinema (cf. Kovács 2007, 33-48).1 Pulp Fiction (Tarantino 1994), Lola rennt ([Run Lola Run] Tykwer 1998), Being John Malkovich (Jonze 1999), Fight Club (Fincher 1999), Amores Perros ([Love’s a Bitch] Iñárritu 2000), Oldboy (Park 2003), 21 Grams (Iñárritu 2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry 2004), 2046 (Wong 2004), Inception (Nolan 2010), Source Code (Jones 2011), and Coherence (Byrkit 2013) are but a few examples of the international surge within the landscape of moving images to develop increasingly demanding and challenging narratives.2 These ‘complex narratives’ (Simons 2008) embrace non-linearity, time loops, and fragmented spatio-temporal realities (cf. Buckland 2009a, 6) to demonstrate a contemporary interest in personal identity, memory, history, trauma, embodied perception, and temporality (cf. Elsaesser & Hagener 2010, 149). Located somewhere in the encounter between film and spectator (cf. Deleuze 2005b; Engell 2005; Pisters 2012; Brown 2013), the complexity of these complex narratives turns out to be a complex phenomenon itself (cf. Simons 2008, 111). Thus, perhaps not surprisingly, there are disputes on how to comprehend ‘complex narratives’, ‘puzzle films’ (Buckland 2009b), ‘mind-game’ movies (Elsaesser 2009), ‘modular’ narratives (Cameron 2008), ‘forking-path’ narratives (Bordwell 2002a), ‘hybrid’ films (Martin-Jones 2006), or ‘neuro-images’

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(Pisters 2012) film-historically. The most detailed definitions of what shall be referred to as the contemporary complex narrative are to be found in this body of research, yet no agreement exists as to whether the films in question constitute a break with, or should rather be perceived as an extension of, the boundaries of Hollywood’s canonical storytelling format. The variety of answers to this question is demonstrated by the lack of both consensus in terminology and a clearly defined body of films. Buckland’s (2009a) term ‘puzzle films’ refers to ‘a popular cycle of films from the 1990s that rejects classical storytelling techniques and replaces them with complex storytelling’ (1; see also Buckland 2014). Following Elsaesser (2009), the ‘mind-game films’ cross ‘the usual boundaries of mainstream Hollywood, independent, auteur film and international art cinema’ (13) and comprise films in which games are being played with a character, as well as films which play with its audience (14). For Cameron (2008) it is central that ‘modular’ narratives offer ‘a series of disarticulated narrative pieces, often arranged in radically achronological ways via flashforwards, overt repetition or a destabilization of the relationship between present and past’ (1). Pisters (2012) argues that with the ‘neuro-image we have quite literally moved into the characters’ brain spaces. We no longer see through characters’ eyes, as in the movement-image and the time-image; we are most often instead in their mental worlds’ (14). Ultimately, Simons (2008) maintains that ‘[i]n spite of all this diversity and the different ways of approaching and assessing this body of films, most theorists would agree to subsume these films under the predicate “complex narratives”’ (111). This book argues that inquiries into the nature of these films have been framed by overarching oppositions (e.g. classical versus modern(ist) cinema, linear versus non-linear temporality) that the films themselves have left behind (cf. Shaviro 2010, 2012).3 In her contribution to Hollywood Puzzle Films (Buckland 2014), Maria Poulaki (2014b) maintains that narratives, as well as the narrative mode of reasoning, prioritize wholes over the parts (36-37). Narrative events, she argues in reference to the narratologist Donald E. Polkinghorne (1988), make sense by forming a meaningful whole, where the events are perceived to cause each other. Meanwhile, the narrative is itself embedded with the expectation that it will eventually make sense according to a causal-linear schema. Given that such a schema defines how we think about narratives, scholars have tended to understand complex narration in terms of its deviation from causal linearity. As Poulaki (2014b) goes on to argue, this approach has lost its ability ‘to provide further insight into the complex and non-linear structure of complex films, particularly at this point in time when the latter seem to have established a new paradigm of cinematic storytelling’ (37).

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When it comes to narrative complexity, Poulaki states: ‘It is no longer enough to show how complex films are not conventional narratives; the need for a positive definition and description of their processes has become apparent’ (37). According to her, the most valuable lesson of complexity is its insistence on ‘processes of resonance between individual components or units, and how the forms they create are never whole or complete, neither in the beginning nor at the end’ (48). Along similar lines, this book argues that in order to better comprehend contemporary complex cinema in its own terms, the formulation of a new mode of spectatorship that enhances cinematic perception by allowing spectators to ‘embody’ the narrative universe is required. In contrast to most prevalent studies, I argue that the complexity of contemporary cinema does not primarily rest in a complex, entangled, or complicated syuzhet or dramaturgy but owes to a ‘will to complexity’ – understood as an insistence on the mutual dependence of cinematic dimensions that have traditionally been kept apart. From this perspective, contemporary cinema not only calls for a renewed appreciation of what shall be referred to as the ‘linear-non-linear’ dichotomy, but also forces us to rethink the interrelation of the cognitive, emotional, and affective circuits that constitute the cinematic experience. Therefore, parallel to studying a variety of modes in which cinema elicits spectators’ affective, emotional, or cognitive responses, I question favoured interpretative strategies with the aim of formulating an alternative approach designed to open up rather than closing down, ‘straightening out’, or ‘decomplexifying’ the narrative continuum. In relation to this, the word ‘affect’ (l’affect or affectus) – as differentiated from cognitive states and describing the bodies’ capacity to move and be moved, to affect and be affected – becomes central. Within Deleuzian affect theory, as Shouse (2005) explains, emotions are object-oriented and social phenomena, whereas affect is prepersonal. Within cognitive theory, as Plantinga (2009a) explains, ‘emotions are intentional in the sense that they are directed toward some “object”’ (86), whereas affect is a broader category that comprises any ‘felt bodily state, including a wide range of phenomena, including emotions, moods, reflex actions, autonomic responses, mirror reflexes, desires, pleasures, etc.’ (87). In brief, whereas the Deleuzian framework tends to separate the ‘affective’ too abruptly from the cognitive and emotional sphere, the cognitive framework tends to reduce the affective to cognitive-emotional components. 4 As Seth Duncan and Lisa Feldman Barrett (2007) point out, since Plato and Aristotle, thoughts and emotions have been viewed as ontologically distinct, yet ‘[a]ny thought or action can be said to be more or less affectively infused, so that there is no ontological

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distinction between, say, affective and non-affective behaviours, or between “hot” and “cold” cognitions’ (1202). Perceived as indicative of a crisis in the spectator-film relation, the complex narrative does not merely demonstrate that the traditional suspension of disbelief or the classical spectator position as voyeur, witness, or observer is no longer deemed compelling or challenging enough (Elsaesser 2008, 16), it also demonstrates that our involvement and construction of a narrative is as affective as it is cognitive. In this fashion, contemporary complex cinema calls for a reconceptualization of the core analytical and narratological concept of the fabula and thus I propose an expanded notion of this term: embodied fabula. In order to develop this concept of embodied fabula, I will turn to embodied cognition, complexity theory, cognitive and affective neuroscience, and Deleuzian film-philosophy. While the contour of this concept, as it is formulated here, is based on an ongoing dialogue with complex narratives, the embodied fabula is not restricted to this particular kind of cinema. Instead, the embodied fabula is here envisioned as a ‘processual’ concept whose lines are dynamic and subject to change (cf. Mullarkey 2009, xiv-xvi).5 In this book, complex narratives are not distinguished by their intrinsic narrative complexity (cinema is by definition a complex phenomenon), but by virtue of their ability to induce a rethinking of elements that have commonly been thought of as separate in the tradition of classical science. In doing so, these films call for a film-philosophical excavation designed to render visible and to distinguish various modes of cinematic complexity – whether classical, modern(ist), or contemporary. In this context, cinema becomes philosophical insofar as the experience it gives rise to can be described as a form of philosophical thinking in action (Mulhall 2008, 4). However, my key concern is to argue that the kind of thinking involved in the cinematic experience is ill-conceived from the monolithic perspective of the analytically, cognitively, and temporally detached spectator, whose thinking consists in organizing the cinematic material into a unified, linear, and coherent story (e.g. Bordwell 1985a; Branigan 1992; Carroll 1996). Instead, it shall be argued that complex cinema facilitates a reconceptualization of the cinematic experience as embodied thinking in action, from which film-philosophical excavations can examine how the cinematic experience challenges the boundaries of our dominant conceptual frameworks and traditional patterns of thought. From a narratological point of view, the use of the word ‘complex’ can be traced back to Aristotle’s differentiations between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ plots. For Aristotle, simple plots are mimetic because they arrange events

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into a single, continuous action with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. From such a perspective, complexity arises from an interweaving of two causal lines into a single, unified plot line.6 Warren Buckland (2009a) has questioned the aptitude of this mode of comprehending cinematic complexity in relation to complex narratives. Against the cognitive-formalist film scholar David Bordwell (2006), Buckland (2009a) argues that the contemporary complex narrative ‘is intricate in the sense that the arrangement of events is not just complex, but complicated and perplexing; the events are not simply interwoven, but entangled’ (3, emphasis in original). For these reasons, complex narration cannot be reduced to the linear trajectory of classical cinema – something Buckland criticizes Bordwell for doing. However, Buckland commits to a widespread Bordwellian notion, when he argues that contemporary complex narration ‘emphasizes the complex telling (plot, narration) of a simple or complex story (narrative)’ (6). Thus, although Buckland is critical of Bordwell’s cautious stance about the novelty of complex narratives (cf. Bordwell 2006), the overall approach of the anthology Puzzle Films is representative of much theoretical work on complex narration, since it reinvigorates Bordwell’s (1985a) cognitive and analytical distinction between syuzhet and fabula (Buckland 2009a, 7). In the following, I set out to challenge this popular analytical tool for examining cinematic complexity. While the distinction of the fabula (~ story) from the syuzhet (~ plot) can be extremely useful, its limitations once confronted with cinematic complexity shall be demonstrated throughout this book. I maintain that the major problem pertaining to this analytical distinction relates to its adherence to a series of classical scientific principles designed for the reduction of complexity. These principles – as traced out by Edgar Morin in his article ‘Restricted Complexity, General Complexity’ (2007) – are 1) the principle of universal determinism associated with Laplace; 2) the principle of reduction, which ‘consists in knowing any composite from only the knowledge of its basic constituting elements’; and finally 3) the principle of disjunction, which ‘consists in isolating and separating cognitive difficulties from one another’ (5).7 The cognitive and classical narratological presumption that complexity can be seen as an intrinsic value of the narrative itself can be traced back to these classical principles for the reduction of complexity. In order to counter this presumption, I aim to demonstrate that complex narratives first and foremost deserve the designation ‘complex’, because they make evident that ‘[c] omplexity is not only a feature of the systems we study, it is also a matter of the way in which we organize our thinking about those systems’ (Tsoukas & Hatch 2001, 986; cf. Simons 2008, 116). That being said, it is important to

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stress that I am not arguing against reduction per se, since complexity and reduction are necessarily intertwined. I rather claim that the dominant and systematic mode of reducing complexity is no longer a viable approach, since it relies on a separation of those elements whose interrelation contemporary complex cinema sets out to (re-)explore. Consequently, it can be argued that the term ‘complex narratives’ is problematic, because it falsely suggests that other types of cinema are not complex – in fact, it may even appear to imply a general prevalence of ‘non-complex narratives’ within cinema. It is possible to avoid this problem by taking the notion of complexity a step further than that usually found in the study of complex systems. This means understanding cinema from the perspective of what Morin (2007) has labelled ‘generalized’ rather than ‘restricted’ complexity. According to the latter, ‘complexity is restricted to systems which can be considered complex because empirically they are presented in a multiplicity of interrelated processes, interdependent and retroactively associated’ (10). Since this perspective never questions the epistemological nature of complexity it ‘still remains within the epistemology of classical science’ (10). Consequently, restricted complexity acknowledges the non-linear, relational nature of complex systems, but seeks to tame it in ways that reintroduce positivism and reductionism, whereby complexity is ultimately acknowledged only by means of ‘decomplexification’.8 A move towards generalized complexity must thus involve an epistemological displacement encouraged by the invention of new conceptual frameworks that do not seek to redeem complexity into the classical scientific ideals of linearity, neutrality, objectivity, isolation, reduction, and disjunction. Yet, this should not encourage a simple reversal of the relation by means of an emphasis on those elements that have traditionally been excluded, such as non-linearity, complex temporal processes, incommensurable spaces, heterogeneity, and logic unruled by the principle of non-contradiction (cf. Rodowick 2001, 49). Ultimately, what is required instead are conceptual tools capable of embracing complexity, such as those which emerge from the interrelation of the elements that have been kept separated far too long (cf. Morin 2007). In Deleuze, Altered States and Film (2007), Anna Powell contends that experimental cinema does not invite the ‘problem solving’ associated with cognitive-formalist approaches (cf. Bordwell 1985a, 2006; Branigan 1992; Carroll 1996; Thompson 1988). Instead, such films ‘aim to derange the senses and the mind’ (Powell 2007, 8). My goal is to make evident why such a conception misconstrues the cinematic experience as an option of either-or. In the 1980s, two very different approaches proposed alternatives to the

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psychoanalytical and semiotic studies that dominated film studies at that time. Despite being united in their dissatisfaction with the manner in which cinema had been used to confirm the theory applied, one could hardly imagine two more opposed conceptions of the cinematic experience than those proposed by cognitive film studies and Deleuzian film-philosophy. Since then the divide between them has been ever expanding and is today defining of film studies. At least until recently, when contemporary complex narratives have begun to encourage scholars to think beyond the linearnon-linear dichotomy underlying this divide (cf. Brown 2013; Engell 2005; Fahle 2005; Mullarkey 2009; Pisters 2012). The ‘linear’ segment of cognitive film science includes scholars such as David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, Joseph Anderson, Murray Smith, Carl Plantinga, Greg M. Smith, Ed Tan, and Torben Grodal. In the introduction to the anthology Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996), Bordwell and Carroll explain that ‘a cognitivist analysis or explanation seeks to understand human thought, emotion, and action by appeal to processes of mental representation, naturalistic processes, and (some sense of) rational agency’ (xvi). Bordwell’s cognitive theory is particularly representative of the linear side of the dichotomy, since he maintains that the classical cinema has become the ‘standard’ film because its conventions of linear causality are ‘cognitively optimal’.9 The popularity of classical cinema thus lies in its natural correspondence with the systematic manner in which human beings make inferences, test hypotheses, and apply interpretative schemata in their everyday lives. In his Henri Bergson-inspired film-philosophy, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2005a, 2005b) provides a framework that accentuates the linear-non-linear dichotomy since it proposes two overarching image regimes that roughly correspond to the opposition of classical and (European) art cinema: the ‘movement-image’ (and, more precisely, the ‘action-image’) and the ‘time-image’.10 In the first, the narrative universe is unified and its events are linked through ‘rational’ cuts and a style of montage that present time in an ‘indirect’ manner according to a logic that accommodates our everyday sensory-motor capacities. In the second image regime, time is freed from its sensory-motor linkages, while the cuts have become ‘irrational’, from which a ‘direct’ image of time appears. Unlike the more classical narratological, film-theoretical, and formalist concerns of cognitive film science, Deleuze’s interest in cinema should be understood in relation to his philosophical undertakings, insofar as cinema grants philosophy a renewed mode of thinking about movement and time. Thus, it is important to keep in mind that Deleuzian film-philosophy and the more

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traditional film-theoretically founded cognitive formalism are interested in cinema for different reasons. Perhaps exactly such lack of sensitivity towards their respective research interests has contributed to the tension between the ‘Continental’ film philosophers and the ‘Anglo-American analytical’ cognitive film science. This tension is detectable in Raymond Bellour’s (2010) telling dismissal of the cognitive stance: There is always the fear that the film and the spectator are all the more average, standardised, attuned to the dominant cinema, that one wants to address a supposed truth of the film and its spectator in a sort of monstrous, targeted freeze-frame. This is why, in their dogmatic application of knowledge of the cognitive sciences, most cognitive theoreticians of the cinema are, for example, inevitably attracted by Steven Spielberg’s films and Hollywood blockbusters. (92)

Despite the reservations between cognitivists and Deleuzian film philosophers, I argue that contemporary complex cinema can be perceived as an encouragement to reconnect the linear, cognitive, and analytical approaches of cognitive formalists with the affective, non-linear, and nonrepresentational attitude that defines Deleuzian film-philosophy. However, this is not a straightforward task due to the discrepancies between the representationalist, realist, and classical scientific presumptions of (Bordwellian) cognitive film science and Deleuze’s anti-Cartesian, anti-representational film-philosophy. My thesis, however, is that the incongruities begin to vanish once the computational assumptions that guide the frameworks of most cognitive theories are replaced with those of embodied cognition. Not only have the computational assumptions started to reveal their philosophical or theoretical limitations (such as embodied cognition maintains), the rise of contemporary complex cinema has rendered visible how these restrict our comprehension of the cinematic experience, too. Cognitive media scholars would immediately object and, rightly, argue that hardly anyone (if anyone at all) in their field has explicitly promoted a computational understanding of mind. When computationalism is debated, cognitive scholars point out that their field has ‘followed cognitive science’s gradual move from a focus on “cold” cognition (information-driven mental processes described in terms of inferential and computational models) to “hot cognition” (affect-driven mental processes)’ (Nannicelli & Taberham 2014, 5). Jovially referring to himself as a part-time cognitivist, Bordwell (2010) declares that ‘you don’t have to be a cognitivist 24/7’ (15).

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Thus, we should not expect the computational assumptions of cognitive film theory to be explicitly stated. Instead, these assumptions, as I will demonstrate, are expressed in analytical devices and interpretative strategies that have their origin in, but are not restricted to, cognitive film theory. Consequently, it is incisive to allow the films themselves to take an active part in the reconfiguration of our analytical devices and interpretative strategies. This inductive approach of allowing the films to shape our understanding of the cinematic experience guides all the examinations of individual films to be found in this book. In an extension of this, I aim to demonstrate that once we move beyond the linear-non-linear dichotomy and start to think of the cinematic experience in terms of the complex interplay between linear and non-linear elements, a field emerges from which complexity theory, cognitive film science, Deleuzian philosophy, and ‘embodied cognition’ can be combined in a joint effort to reconceptualize the cinematic experience as a genuinely cognitive-embodied experience. However, the danger involved in this is to reintroduce an inverse dualism that favours the body over the mind, or, as Brown (2013) asserts in relation to the pioneer embodied-phenomenological work of Sobchack, Marks, and Barker, the challenge of today is to ‘synthesize with the haptic, or affective, elements of the cinematic experience the “higher” “brain” elements that in fact form a continuum with them’ (141). Therefore, to unite Bordwellian and Deleuzian ideas on the same conceptual plane, I draw upon the recent developments within the cognitive neurosciences, where certain scholars are coming up with an increasingly embodied understanding of cognition (cf. Varela, Thompson, & Rosch 1992; Clark 1998; Noë 2004; Wheeler 2005; Shapiro 2011). Given that these scholars understand mind, thinking, and cognition as genuinely embodied mental processes, this appears to be a particularly suited framework for comprehending the reconstitution of the viewer’s affective, emotional, and cognitive bonds in the complex narrative. Ultimately, I argue that complex narratives question the classical narratological understanding of the fabula by 1) embracing a non-representational and non-computational mode of spectatorship 2) whose temporality may contain instances of, yet is not predisposed to, causal linearity. The cinematic capacity to stimulate viewers in a direct, corporal-affective, and sensorial fashion has recently been the subject of growing attention (cf. Barker 2009; Marks 2000, 2002; Shaviro 1993; Sobchack 1992, 2004). Unfortunately, this body of work has been conducted in relative isolation from studies that examine the narrative powers of cinema (cf. Bordwell 1985, 2007; Branigan 1992; Smith 1995). Studies of the experiential and the

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narrative cinematic domains have thus up to now coexisted peacefully as two distinct cinematic dimensions best studied apart from each other. At the back cover of Vivian Sobchack’s influential Carnal Thoughts (2004) the book’s intention is declared to emphasize our corporal rather than our intellection stimulation with cinema. In The Skin of Film (2000), Laura Marks explains that ‘haptic media encourage a relation to the screen itself before the point at which the viewer is pulled into the figures of the image and the exhortation of the narrative’ (187-188). More recently, the concept of ‘affect’ has served a similar function as not only different in kind to cognitive responses but radically isolated from such processes insofar as affects are perceived as immediate and bodily autonomous responses to the images thus detached from their representational and narrative dimensions (cf. Clough & Halley 2007; Gregg & Seigworth 2010). A central argument made by this book, however, is that embodiment does not simply occur beneath or below cinematic narration; it actively demands a new interpretation of cinematic narration. No longer understood as a mental representation, the cinematic narrative must be perceived as an embodied activity that emerges out of the assemblage of spectator and film. The growing popularity of embodiment has rendered evident the limitations of the fabula as a theoretical idealization that focuses exclusively on the cognitive aspects of narrative construction (cf. Bordwell 1990, 108). Yet, this key narratological concept remains to be revised according to the enactive, emotional, affective, and embodied understanding of cinematic spectatorship now prevalent (cf. Tikka 2008). Hence, I propose a conceptual differentiation between the ‘analytical’ and the ‘embodied’ fabula. The cognitive-formalist fabula thus pertains as the analytical fabula according to which our cinematic perception is structured towards the construction of a causal-linear story (cf. Bordwell 1985a). The embodied fabula, on the other hand, is designed to open up for an exploration of the narrative as our surrounding environment. Since the embodied fabula is a complex and recursive concept involving constant feedback loops, it is not diametrically opposed to the analytical fabula, which is rather to be understood as a prominent dimension of the embodied fabula – i.e. the analytical fabula is also an embodiment of the cinematic narration, but in a particular analytical manner. In relation to contemporary cinema, the attention will be focused on four characteristics that in combination have facilitated the mode of comprehending cinematic complexity that I propose here. Contemporary complex cinema allows us to rethink and reconf igure 1) the linear-non-linear dichotomy of film studies that harks back to the opposition of classical

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cinema and the tradition of (European) art cinema. In moving beyond this divide, complex narratives 2) reveal a profound will to complexity, since they force us to think about the interrelation of what has traditionally been kept isolated, such as the linear and non-linear; the affective, emotional, and cognitive investment of the audiences; the contingent from the causally determined; the body from the mind; etc. It will be argued that contemporary complex cinema 3) reconfigures our mode of experiencing narration as the process of organizing events into a causal-linear order, i.e. according to the analytical fabula. More precisely, these films demonstrate 4) that linear cinematic perception (as cognitively structured around the construction of a causal-linear story) coexists with other modes of ‘inhabiting’ the narrative universe. It is in the context of capturing these dimensions of contemporary complex cinema that the differentiation between the analytical and the embodied fabula is suggested.11 I believe that the ability of contemporary complex narratives to ‘enfold’ or ‘embed’ us in their narrative universes has been a decisive factor for the formative role that recent film-philosophical projects trying to rethink the cinematic experience in the age of new media have granted this type of cinema (e.g. Pisters 2012; Shaviro 2010; Bianco 2004; Rodowick 2007; Brown 2013). Yet, throughout this book, I accentuate the importance of refining our conceptual frameworks through a constant dialogue with the challenges that arise from our encounters with various – i.e. not solely contemporary – complex forms of cinema. Rather than primarily asking what the films in question ‘mean’ or are ‘about’, I question the prevalent string of arguments that have traditionally been invoked to make sense of the moving images. In doing so, my focal points are the encouragements, obstacles, resistances, or ruptures that the films in question exhibit towards particular dominant modes of organizing and comprehending experience. Consequently, the analytical material chosen for this study belongs to the sphere of well-known and much-debated examples. The advantages and disadvantages of this choice are obvious. The main disadvantage is, of course, that using established examples remains oblivious to new emerging trends and experimental approaches to filmmaking that indeed deserve more critical attention (I have chosen somewhat lesser known examples from acclaimed directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Alain Resnais). Nevertheless, the selection of frequently studied examples has been a requirement for me to perform a series of meta-analytical readings of the films in question. Such readings help demonstrate how differences in theoretical and philosophical assumptions shape our actual analytical procedures.

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The reader should be aware that the concept of the embodied fabula in its present form reflects the commitment of this book to known cinematic examples and the foregrounding of contemporary complex cinema. Nevertheless, I believe that the embodied fabula could prove useful for comprehending a variety of changes currently occurring within the field of cinema, which are not explicitly related to the complex narrative. The concept could, for instance, be utilized to understand the film-philosophical encounter facilitated by the experimental documentary film Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor & Paravel 2012) or to conceptualize how 3D technology has been implemented in Gravity (Cuarón 2013) to allow for an entirely different embodied experience than traditional 2D cinema is capable of (I explore the idea of expanding the notion of the embodied fabula in relation to this cinematic ‘will to immersion’ in Chapter VIII). With such examples the notion of the embodied fabula could be expanded beyond the scope of the analytical material that I have selected. In this sense, each filmphilosophical encounter bears the promise of uncovering dimensions of the embodied fabula that the encounters of this study have not brought to light. By the same token, I believe that it is possible to use this concept to comprehend aspects of the cinematic experience – the political, sociological, national, economic, technological, etc. – that have not been my focal points.12 That being said, I firmly believe that my examples demonstrate a simultaneously interesting and highly relevant contemporary embrace of cinematic complexity. In this context, the films’ popularity has made it easier to study the recursive nature of complexity that emerges once the films and the prevalent conceptual tools, frameworks, and analytical assumptions of the analyst and/or the spectator are allowed to mutually reflect back on one another. In particular, the films I have chosen to study have been crucial to the development of the concept of the embodied fabula and to the ongoing reformulation of the cinematic experience that this concept entails. In this manner, I have endeavoured to retain the open nature of the films to allow them to inform us about the manner in which we participate in structuring experience according to our prevalent metaphors, conceptual tools, and along the lines of how we ‘normally’ structure perception – and thus to study cinema between the lines. This has required a careful selection of films that enable the examination of different aspects of the conceptual tools and interpretative methods that concern us here. Stage Fright (Hitchcock 1950), which is examined in Chapter III, represents a classical instance of defamiliarization insofar as the film upsets the automatic expectations aroused in the audience by

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the formal device of the flashback. Memento, the subject of Chapter VII, departs from a comparable defamiliarization in order to allow us to sense the habitual processes that usually operate unattended to structure our cinematic perception of the narrative in causal-linear terms. Yet, Memento takes defamiliarization a step further to include the very foundation of what we traditionally think about as constituting the cinematic experience, i.e. it defamiliarizes the stable ‘background’ against which everything has traditionally been defamiliarized, thereby forcing us to reconceptualize the very notion of defamiliarization. Similarly, 21 Grams and Lola rennt – both f ilms are discussed in Chapter VI – enable their audiences to explore the virtual, non-linear dimensions (that, which could have, yet did not happen) of their narratives, but in entirely different manners. The non-linear and fragmented narrative structure of 21 Grams breaks down the smooth operation of spectators’ affective, emotional, and cognitive circuits to establish instead a more direct empathetic bond between characters and spectators. Lola rennt, on the other hand, uses its multimodality and music-video aesthetics to make spectators bond with the narrative rhythm(s) of the film and the kinaesthetic of its main character. In Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais 1959), which is discussed in Chapter IV, a comparable examination of cinema’s virtual dimension can be detected. However, here this is achieved in a manner typical of modern(ist) cinema, which is to say that it involves a criticism of the linear organizational principles associated with classical storytelling. The structure of this book – in which predominantly theoretical chapters (Chapter II and V) are followed by chapters devoted to closer examinations of films, their analytical treatments, and the development and application of the embodied fabula (Chapter III, IV, VI, and VII) – is different from the inductive and film-philosophical research process that lies behind it, where these closely intertwine. I have nonetheless chosen this structure to render it more visible how our philosophical presumptions influence our actual analytical procedures, even in cases where the analyst believes to have left these presumptions behind. Consequently, this book is comprised of two parts. Chapters II, III, and IV form the first part of the book in which the linear-non-linear dichotomy is examined from several perspectives. This part establishes the theoretical foundations for the argument that the ongoing replacement of computational with more embodied approaches within the cognitive sciences may prove an important cornerstone for bridging cognitive and film-philosophical approaches to cinema (cf. Protevi 2010; Pisters 2012; Brown 2013; Chapter V). Thus, the main argument found here is that in disputing the computational

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and representational roots of cognitive film studies, it becomes possible to perceive cognitivism and film-philosophy as complementary, rather than opposing, positions. This would not only open cognitive studies up for the more non-linear and aesthetic dimensions of cinema, but equally encourage Deleuzian film-philosophy to connect with the more rigorous, analytical, and empirical – yet extremely innovative – research, which is currently being conducted within cognitive film science. Hence, chapters V, VI, and VII form the second part of the book, which is dedicated to the exploration of various aspects of the embodied fabula in relation to contemporary complex cinema. In this part I draw upon embodied cognition, Deleuzian film-philosophy, and complexity theory to demonstrate that especially with regard to contemporary complex cinema the analytical fabula must be supplemented with a concept of the fabula that has been designed to capture the cinematic experience as embodied and complex. Therefore, I propose the embodied fabula as an operational tool that guides the viewers in their enactive and embodied engagement with the narrative universes they no longer primarily ‘organize’, ‘linearize’, or ‘straighten out’ but explore. Chapter II argues that despite its constructivist nature, Bordwell’s theory of narrative comprehension comes with the analytical presumption that the narrative – though being the mental construction of the spectator – can be analytically dissected as an intrinsic quality of the narrative itself. The problem with this reasoning is that it harbours a misunderstanding about the complexity of contemporary complex cinema. Following Morin (2007) ‘any system, whatever it might be, is complex by its own nature’ (10), and thus complex narratives cannot be said to differ from other cinematic regimes by virtue of their intrinsic complexity. From this perspective, the narratives in question deserve the adjective ‘complex’ only by virtue of inducing a transformation of our onto-epistemological conception of complexity – in particular by facilitating a highly sophisticated interplay of linear and nonlinear cinematic elements. While all films from a generalized perspective are complex in their own right, not all films call attention to the immanent complexity of cinema. In reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, Chapter III argues that while classical storytelling has often been associated with cinematic linearity, this linearity is as much a product of the linear interpretative methods that have been accepted as standards for dealing with classical cinema. It is examined how the dominance of goal-oriented characters, narrative resolutions, and linear spatio-temporal coherence has justified analytical methods that in their classical scientific cause-effect principles

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have produced an overtly linear understanding of classical cinema. It is especially examined how the cognitive-formalist conceptual framework perceives the linearity of the classical film to correspond to a ‘natural’ kind of filmmaking that can operate as a background to which all other regimes can be understood. It is argued that the cognitive concept of ‘defamiliarization’ actually performs a ‘refamiliarization’ of narrative transgressions. Ultimately, this chapter questions the restricted comprehension of the classical paradigm of both Bordwell and Deleuze, and argues that it stems from a lack of sensitivity for the inherent ambiguities that reside in the cause-effect dramaturgy of classical cinema. Chapter IV examines Hiroshima mon amour to carve out how the film formulates a cinematic logic that arises from the encounter between oppositions. As much as the Deleuzian concept of the time-image is capable of shedding light on this poetic film, so does Hiroshima mon amour also facilitate an understanding of the conceptual powers and limitations of the time-image. It is argued that its main limitation rests upon the methodological choice of separating and contesting cinema’s linear and non-linear dimensions. While it will be demonstrated that this resonates with the modern(ist) cinematic ideals, it is maintained that the opposition of movement-image and time-image is no longer capable of capturing the complex interplay between these dimensions in contemporary complex cinema. Hiroshima mon amour becomes especially interesting because it expresses an at the time entirely new cinematic logic, which can be formulated with reference to Deleuze’s concept of the encounter. This logic is opposed to the long-dominant linear manner of understanding narrative, history, memory, and time, whose desirability is repudiated at the end of Hiroshima mon amour. It is in this context that the film can be taken as an acute expression of the modern(ist) paradox of ‘representing the unrepresentable’, which is still haunting Deleuzian film-philosophy. Therefore, the basis for understanding the narrative experience as embodied and the development of the concept of the embodied fabula in Chapter V is not a mapping of cognitive-formalist and film-philosophical ideas on to each other. The aim is rather to reach a more comprehensive understanding of cinema, and thus not to remain ‘true’ to the theories, but to challenge and enrich their conceptual schemes. Patricia Pisters’s (2012) work on the ‘neuro-image’ is crucial to this chapter, since she connects neuroscience to film-philosophy and modern screen culture. Equally important is John Protevi’s (2010) argument that embodied cognition would benefit from adopting the Deleuzian tripartite ontological differentiation between the virtual, intensive, and actual. Protevi’s text is visionary due to its insistence

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on viewing Deleuzian philosophy as working across – rather than playing a part in – the so-called ‘Analytic-Continental’ divide of philosophy. This is essential for my proposal of an alternative account of the fabula that is not based on the ‘classical sandwich model of perception’ (cf. Hurley 2002). However, this primarily theoretical examination of the embodied fabula must be complemented with a study that takes into account the obstacles stemming from the complex narratives themselves. Chapter VI, therefore, scrutinizes a variety of applications of the classical distinction between fabula and syuzhet. I demonstrate that the distinction carries a series of presumptions to which any uncritical use automatically commits. This is done in relation to two complex narratives: Tom Tykwer’s ‘forking-path’ narrative Lola rennt (Run Lola Run 1998) and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ‘mosaic’ narrative 21 Grams (2003). Ultimately, just as the scientific principles for the reduction of complexity have led to important and brilliant advancements up to a point, ‘where the limits of intelligibility which they constituted became more important than their elucidations’ (Morin 2007, 5), so the rise of complex narratives makes a similar statement about classical narratology possible. I argue that the problem is that narratologists have seen it as their task to explain away or straighten out narrative complexity. As an alternative to this, I draw upon the idea of embodying the fabula to enhance our understanding of the multimodal and complex cinematic experience that these films give rise to. Finally, I examine Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) in Chapter VII and argue that the film has become a site for rethinking the complexity of the cinematic medium. In particular, this chapter is interested in exploring how the film facilitates a renewed conceptualization of two concepts: the fabula and defamiliarization. This requires a re-examination of the complex interplay between the film’s linear and non-linear dimensions, which I maintain is constituted in a reconfiguration of the feedback loops of the cognitive, emotional, and affective registers. It is with reference to Memento’s narrative feedback loops that the logic of the embodied fabula finds its clearest cinematic expression. On a final note, I am aware of the implications of referring to digital cinematic works as ‘films’. However, following Brown (2013), I use the words ‘film’ and ‘cinema’ according to ‘what they can do as opposed to in terms of what each word means’ (11). Thus, it is the terms ‘film’ and ‘cinema’ that evolve to accommodate the products and the manner we use these, rather than the products outstripping the terms (13). Following a similar line of reasoning, my reflections about the cinematic experience depart from ideal viewing circumstances, although I acknowledge that films nowadays are

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often seen on multiple platforms – such as on a laptop or a smartphone – that may reduce their impact and ability to enfold or embed the spectator in their universes. Yet, I am interested in carving out the potential of the cinematic experience, and the fact that not all viewing circumstances are optimal for narrative immersion, does not cause this cinematic potential to disappear altogether (cf. Brown 2013, 9-12; see also Carroll 1996; Rodowick 2007). In answering the Bazinian question of ‘what is cinema?’, Dudley Andrew (2010) maintains that ‘cinema, essentially nothing in itself, is all about adaptation, all about what it has been led to become and may, in the years to come, still become’ (140-141; cf. Brown 2013, 12). This study explores how moving images are constantly expanding the potential of what the cinematic experience might become.

II. Cinema in the Interstices We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known. ‒ McCullers 2012, Chapter ‘Look Homeward, Americans’ Since a paradigm of simplification controls classical science, by imposing a principle of reduction and a principle of disjunction to any knowledge, there should be a paradigm of complexity that would impose a principle of distinction and a principle of conjunction. ‒ Morin 2007, 10

Introduction One dominant approach to complex narratives has been to focus upon how these ‘foreground the relationship between the temporality of the story and the order of its telling’ (Cameron 2008, 1; cf. Buckland 2009b; Feagin 1999; Kinder 2002). Thus, for many scholars the complexity of contemporary cinema consists in the complex telling of a more or less complex story. However, this chapter suggests that the ‘complexity’ of complex narratives is better understood in terms of how the films challenge prevalent conceptual tools and patterns of sense-making. In particular, this chapter addresses the cognitive conception of the fabula conceived as a mental representation. From this conception, the fabula is often perceived to be an intrinsic value of the narrative itself. Against this widespread presumption, I argue that the complexity of complex narratives is rather derived from the ability of these films to challenge established beliefs, conceptions, assumptions, and prevalent methodological frameworks. In this manner, complex narratives make it obvious that the complexity of a system cannot be determined by disengaging it from the observer. This chapter explores how complex narratives, by shattering a series of binaries that have long informed Western rationality, can be seen in relation to an ongoing reconstruction of the notion of complexity currently undertaken in a series of scientific disciplines. In particular, I explore how cinematic complexity in this fashion induces a mode of thinking beyond the cinematic dichotomies of classical and modern(ist), linear and non-linear, cognitive film science and Deleuzian film-philosophy, cognition and affect, etc. In doing so, I combine a film-philosophical approach with the complexity theory of Edgar Morin to understand the interplay and interrelation of

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components that in the tradition of classical narratology are thought to be separate. Therefore, the aim is not to downplay the importance of linearity or cognition for the cinematic experience, but to insist on understanding these in their relation to the more emotional, affective, and non-linear dimensions of cinema.

Cinema and its two Temporal Modes Mary Ann Doane (2002) has argued that early cinema contributed to the production of a distinct mode of temporality, since it fuses the linearity of the medium (the 16-24 frames per second) with a non-linear ability to manipulate temporal order through montage. For these reasons, cinema played a vital role in the ‘sea change in thinking about contingency, indexicality, temporality, and chance [that] deeply marked the epistemologies at the turn of the last century’ (4). Cinema, in other words, ‘participated in a more general cultural imperative, the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity’ (4). The two modes of temporality that Doane believes to be comprised in early cinema match the temporal modes that have often been associated with classical and modern(ist) cinema respectively (and hence also with the Deleuzian opposition of movement/action-image and time-image). On the one hand, the emergence of cinema is inextricably linked to the industrialization, rationalization, and standardization of time in modernity. Doane provides a series of examples for systems designed in the spirit of modernity to manage temporality. These include the systematization of time in the forms of the introduction of punchcards to regulate work time in factories. Furthermore, Doane mentions the attempt to orchestrate and render the physical movements of the workers more efficient (known as ‘Taylorization’), the introduction of railroad timetables that no longer allow for regional time differences, and the 1844 conference in Washington D.C., which established the exact length of a day, divided the world into 24 time zones, and agreed upon Greenwich as the zero meridian (5). All these serve as examples of how modernity constructed a new perception of temporality – symbolized by an explosion in the popularity of watches – that was driven by a desire to externalize time and render it measurable, consultable, and ‘ready at hand’. In this manner, the linear temporal mode is a product of capitalist modernity, according to which time was ‘increasingly reified, standardized, stabilized, and rationalized’ (5). In the words of Doane, the ultimate goal of the linear temporal modality is to ‘eliminate unproductive time from the system’ (6). In cinema the system of continuity editing associated with the

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storytelling of classical Hollywood serves a similar function; insofar as it, too, eliminates, as discretely as possible, those chunks of time that do not contribute to the overall (narrative) progression of the film. However, cinema also incorporates a contrasting mode of perceiving temporality connected to the ability of time to evade rationality, linearity, and systematization. Doane points to the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, and Martin Heidegger, along with writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as prominent and well-known examples of how time was increasingly being conceptualized in terms of chance, indeterminacy, and as a viable and subjective flow. In particular, Doane focuses on the work of Bergson, who at the turn of the 20th century was discontented with the manner in which time had increasingly become ‘uniform, homogenous, irreversible, and divisible into verifiable units’ (6). His philosophy of time, which circles around the concept of durée (duration or ‘lived’ time) can be seen as an ‘adamant reassertion of temporal continuity’ (7). This concept is designed to capture the psychological dimension of temporality as being qualitative, heterogeneous, dynamic, and thus free from the determinism of classical mechanistic science. Bergson’s conception of time, as András Bálint Kovács (2000) observes, has had a huge impact on modern(ist) cinema: ‘A major tendency in modern cinema is to blur the boundary between fact and fancy, dream and reality. Modern cinema conceives of, and realizes (“virtualizes”), time in a totally Bergsonian sense: that is, in absolutely subjective terms’ (161). Doane’s study of early cinema is distinguished from traditional accounts of ‘primitive’ cinema, since it gives equal weight to both the linear and nonlinear dimensions of cinema.1 Early cinema, following Doane, incorporated a temporal anxiety that was later to be domesticated by the predominantly linear system of narrative (Hollywood) cinema. In the age of digital cinema, scholars have been forced to renegotiate the temporality of the cinematic apparatus and its claim for indexicality (cf. Rodowick 2007). However, cinema in its digital form can still transmit the original anxieties ascribed to the medium, which Doane explicitly connects to the camera’s non-human and mechanical mode of capturing whatever is placed in front of it, from which an excess of unpredictable chance events were bound to emerge.2 According to Doane (2002), narrative (Hollywood) cinema plays with the anxieties of the unpredictable and the contingent, too. Narrative cinema is, however, most often directed towards a recuperation of the linear logic, which underlines its desire to simulate natural perception. Classical cinema ‘acknowledges the force of contingency and mobilizes chance, but ultimately it overrides both’ (138). Linearity is, therefore, not primarily to be connected to the relentless forward movement of the cinematic medium,

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but resides as much in the continuity system of editing. ‘In the classical cinema,’ as Doane argues, ‘the cut aborts the problem of an excess of the random, of chance in time’ (137). If continuity editing can rightly be said to ensure a recuperation of linearity, as Doane suggests, what is the role of editing in contemporary complex cinema? In his recent work on ‘post-continuity’ cinema, Steven Shaviro (2010, 2012) has argued that contemporary cinema no longer obeys the dichotomies that followed from the opposition between classical and modern(ist) cinema. The term ‘post-continuity’ is an offshoot of Bordwell’s (2002b) concept of ‘intensified continuity’. Mostly considering Hollywood action films from the late 1990s, Bordwell argues that although certain changes can be seen ‘in representing space, time, and narrative relations (such as causal connections and parallels), today’s films generally adhere to the principles of classical filmmaking’ (16). It is worth noting that ‘continuity’ for Bordwell and Shaviro not only refers to the system of continuity editing, but also more broadly designates cinematic linearity and thus ‘implies the homogeneity of space and time, and the coherent organization of narrative’ (Shaviro 2012, par. 17). This is significant for understanding the underlying claim of Bordwell (2002b), when he states that intensified continuity, ‘far from rejecting traditional continuity in the name of fragmentation and incoherence,’ is rather concerned with an ‘intensification of established techniques’ (16). As such, the Hollywood action films that Bordwell refers to intensify the cinematic principles of linearity rather than dispose of them. While not necessarily disagreeing with Bordwell, Shaviro refers to the work of directors such as Tony Scott and Michael Bay to argue that intensified continuity is gradually being replaced by ‘post-continuity’ in contemporary (action) cinema. In contrast to the cinema of continuity, ‘post-continuity’ cinema – and here I would like to add the complex narrative – contains a dispersed rather than an organized or unified narrative. Other features are a non-Euclidian instead of a Euclidean space-time; that the role of continuity is incidental rather than essential; that the films occur in a ‘space of flows’ rather than a space conceived as a rigid container; that time is no longer primarily linear; that linear causality has been replaced by structural multicausality; that these films denaturalize perception instead of simulating natural perception.3 Although certain of these characteristics reveal the kinship between post-continuity and the artistic experiments of the time-image, the cinema of post-continuity nevertheless differs from modern(ist) cinema because it does not accentuate its transgression of cinematic linearity. Modern(ist) cinema developed its trademark stylistic devices – such as jump cuts and directional mismatches – in order to violate

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the continuity rules and to rupture the sensory-motor linkages that accommodated the cinematic image to human perception (Deleuze 2005a, 2005b). One of the reasons for doing so was to transmit scepticism towards the linear onto-epistemology, whose foundation – the belief in human reason, scientific objectivity, and progression – was crackling after the Second World War. In the cinema of post-continuity the rupture so central to the Deleuzian time-image is no longer granted a decisive role. In fact, ‘post-continuity’ cinema puts the whole opposition of movement-image and time-image into question since ‘neither the use of continuity rules nor their violation is at the center of the audience’s experience any longer’ (Shaviro 2012, par. 20). Instead, ‘continuity has ceased to be important – or at least has ceased to be as important as it used to be’ (par. 19, emphasis in original). In this book, I expand on Shaviro’s thesis to argue that classical narratological concepts have started to reveal their limitations in the dissolution of the linear-non-linear dichotomy in post-continuity cinema. In the following, it will be argued that since it has been increasingly confronted with cinematic complexity the cognitive concept of the fabula has started to expose its limitations.

The Cognitive Fabula and Linear Storytelling In Narration in the Fiction Film (1985a), Bordwell analyses the processes involved in narrative comprehension. Drawing equally on Russian formalism and cognitive psychology, Bordwell articulates a theory of narrative comprehension based on the manner a given film cues its viewers to make particular inferences and construct the story in a predefined manner. Alan Nadel (2005) has argued that the central problem of narrative cinema rests in the task of – by the course of a limited duration of time – transforming a two-dimensional space into a temporally limitless, three-dimensional world. For Nadel this means that the task of narrative cinema, in other words, is to naturalize a counterintuitive experience by creating the illusion that the viewer has acquired a privileged window on reality, a window through which one is supposed to see not objects and actions, but see instead a story (427).

Bordwell uses the terminology of Russian formalism to describe how spectators from the collection of cinematic cues, i.e. the syuzhet, construct the fabula. However, as Nadel observes, the repeated and systematic use of various cinematic devices (characters, framings, camera movements, deadlines,

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flashbacks, etc.) does not only cue the spectator to construct a specific fabula, but also ‘to accept a specific mode of cueing as “natural”’ (430). In relation to this, we may ask what the conceptual role of the fabula is. In the cognitive formalism of Bordwell, the fabula is a subjective perception of the narrative (a cognitive representation) as well as an intersubjective and coherent entity produced by means of logical inferences and computational symbol manipulation. The fabula can only be inferred from the syuzhet, and it thus becomes an entirely abstract entity that nevertheless dominates our perception of the syuzhet. The syuzhet is constantly being (re)interpreted in a manner that accommodates the construction of a coherent and causal-linear fabula. Not only is the fabula in this conception predisposed to linearity, but it also participates in an ongoing ‘linearization’ of the syuzhet. Furthermore, since the causal-linear conception of temporality pervades the widespread classical narrative conventions, the latter have long contributed to an automatization of cinematic linearity. In relation to this, Bordwell (1985a) has argued that the essential principles of classical narration have grown so dominant that they can now be considered ‘normal’. ‘As a narrational mode,’ Bordwell writes, ‘classicism clearly corresponds to the idea of an “ordinary film” in most cinema-consuming countries of the world’ (166). A central concern of cognitive formalism lies in explaining why classical Hollywood style has proven to be the most persistent one. For precognitive film studies these questions would be answered with reference to psychoanalysis, philosophy, ideology, history, cultural, or gender issues. Cognitive formalism, however, turns away from such explanations in favour of more ‘naturalistic’ ones. Bordwell (1997) argues that certain stylistic factors are ‘cross-cultural, trading on the biological or psychological or social factors shared among filmmakers and their audiences’ (269). For Bordwell this is of course not to say that cultural and other factors do not play a significant role in the formation of cinematic conventions, but merely that biological, psychological, and social factors have traditionally been overlooked in favour of ideological and psychoanalytical ‘subject theories’, which he together with Noël Carroll has mockingly termed ‘SLAB-theories’. 4 Well aware of the difficulties in determining absolute cross-cultural universals, Bordwell (1996b) proposes a middle way he calls ‘contingent universals’. These are contingent because they did not, for any metaphysical reasons, have to be the way they are; and they are universals insofar as we can find them to be widely present in human societies. They consist of practices and propensities which arise in and through human activities (91).

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In order to explain the prevalence of classical cinematic norms, Bordwell (1985a) emphasizes the manner in which these grant the spectator a spatiotemporal point of reference. He writes: These three factors [use of informative technique, spatio-temporal coherence, and stylistically stable devices] go some way to explaining why the classical Hollywood style passes relatively unnoticed. Each film will recombine familiar devices within fairly predictable patterns and according to the demands of the syuzhet. The spectator will almost never be at a loss to grasp a stylistic feature because he or she is oriented in time and space and because stylistic figures will be interpretable in the light of a paradigm (164).

What is of interest here is the particular manner in which the classical film cues the spectator to construct spatio-temporal coherence in agreement with a linear onto-epistemology. In their clear separation of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ‘naturalistic’ explanations obscure the feedback loops according to which the ‘naturalness’ of Hollywood continuity and the broader manner in which humans organize their experiences according to a causal-linear onto-epistemology constantly reaffirm each other. As Nadel (2005) explains, [t]he historical conditions that created the conventions of Hollywoodstyle film and the historical conditions under which audiences were instructed in their codes disappear beneath the audience’s transparent acquiescence to them. In this way, the codes of cinematic representation become performative. By reinforcing the norms of cinematic reality, they teach the audience how to read a film as if the process were natural, not just second nature (429).5

Cognitive formalism is founded on a similar linear onto-epistemology that makes the Hollywood style appear not only ‘normal’ but also ‘natural’. Before elaborating on this claim, it is necessary first of all to examine the onto-epistemological roots of classical cognitive science. The claim here is not that all film-theoretical work, which has been designated under the umbrella term of ‘cognitive film science’, adheres to these assumptions. ‘To restrict cognitive film theory to theory rooted in cognitive science,’ as Plantinga (2002) has argued, ‘would clearly be far too narrow, and also plainly inaccurate’ (21). Nevertheless, a series of the core assumptions found in cognitive science still influence the film-theoretical cognitive branches; this is the case even

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in works that understand themselves as operating from within an ecological or embodied – rather than classical – cognitive framework (cf. Chapter V). Furthermore, even if ‘cognitivists have mostly left the computer analogy behind,’ their understanding of narrative comprehension and perception is nonetheless using classical cognitive ‘models of rationality and practical problem-solving’ (21). In this case, Bordwell’s narrative approach owes a lot to the core assumptions of the cognitive sciences, since his writings on schemata, inferences, hypotheses testing, and assumptions that underline narrative comprehension assume ‘a spectator engaging in goal-directed, primarily non-conscious procedures to make sense of film narratives’ (21). In Howard Gardner’s enlightening overview of the history and the future challenges of cognitive science, The Mind’s New Science (1985), the author singles out five features prominent of the field. Whereas the first two belong to the core assumptions of the field, the latter three are methodological or strategic choices. These are: 1) an insistence on mental representations; 2) the computer analogy; 3) de-emphasis on affect, context, culture, and history; 4) an interdisciplinary approach; and finally 5) a rootedness in classical philosophical problems. In the following, these serve as a starting point for a brief examination of the main characteristics of the classical cognitive approach.6 Cognitive science is, as Gardner remarks, ‘predicated on the belief that it is legitimate [...] to posit a level of analysis which can be called “the level of representation”’ (38). Representations are found between the incoming data inputs (e.g. audiovisual sense impressions) and the output (e.g. the audiovisual perception). It is, in other words, the level of the cognitive information processing, which is to be understood in terms of ‘symbols, schemas, images, ideas, and other forms of mental representation’ (39). It is crucial to understand that ‘representation’ here is used in a highly technical manner, whose philosophical roots date back to Plato’s concept of ‘Ideas’ (cf. Wheeler 2005, 6). Thus, a researcher may talk about plans, images, representations, intentions, and beliefs as a manner of describing how people interact with the world, without necessarily being devoted to the philosophical conviction that such representations truly exist inside peoples’ minds. In the technical and philosophical sense, the representational theory of mind is ‘the view according to which mental states are, for the most part, conceived as inner representational states’ (Wheeler 2005, 6). According to this view, there exist entities, structures, ideas (i.e. representations) that stand in for, or act as an inner copy of, the external world. In 1985, the time of the publication of Gardner’s The Mind’s New Science, the connection between cognitive science and a commitment to the

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representational understanding were basically inseparable insofar as ‘all cognitive scientists accept the truism that mental processes are ultimately represented in the central nervous system’ (40). However, as Cummins (1991, 1996) has noted, the question of the circumstances under which it is even appropriate to engage in representational explanations remained underexplored at that time (cf. Wheeler 2005, 6-7). In relation to this, it is worth noting that despite the growing popularity of more embodied stances to cognition and neuroscience (to which we shall return in Chapter V) the majority of empirically working scientists remain devoted to a representational understanding of mind. How, then, do they explain the processes whereby physical data inputs are transformed into nonmaterial representations? In answering this question, the technical invention of the computer suddenly came to be seen as a living proof that a lump of the physical world can build and process representations in systematically and semantically coherent ways (Fodor 1983; Wheeler 2005, 7). The reasoning behind the computer analogy is that if a man-made machine can be said to reason, have goals, revise its behaviour, transform information, and the like, it would seem justified to argue that humans can be characterized in the same way (Gardner 1985, 40). Thus, the framework in which the mind can be seen as the software implemented into the neural ‘hardware’ that operates by manipulating symbolic data processing, is the computational answer to the problem of representations (Marr 2010; Fodor 1983; cf. Cummins 1991, 13). This analogy has proven to be extremely fruitful, however, paradoxically, mostly in providing rich data for why human cognition does not resemble computers. Gardner (1985) identifies this as the ‘computational paradox’, which suggests that the portrait of human cognition emerging from the experiments of cognitive science has turned out to be far removed from ‘the orderly, precise, step-by-step image that dominated the thinking of the founders of the field’ (386). Nevertheless, the invocation of the computer metaphor has led to a focus on cognition as logical problem solving (cf. Newell & Simon 1972), or, alternatively, on universal structural rules (cf. the ‘universal grammar’ of Noam Chomsky [1965]). Yet, cognitive studies have paradoxically triumphed in proving that human thinking is ‘messy, intuitive, subject to subjective representations – not as pure and immaculate calculation’ (Gardner 1985, 386). Cognitive scientists have, consequently, been criticized for their methodological approaches, which rest on bracketing out the role of the affective, cultural, historical, and contextual to focus exclusively on cognition. It is in this context that the embodied alternative to cognition can be seen as an assembly of different approaches united by

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the search for new answers, since they do what Gardner called for back in 1985; namely, ‘put their noses to the grindstone and incorporate [the affective, cultural, historical, and contextual] dimensions fully into their models of thought and behavior’ (42). In his survey of classical cognitive science, Gardner explains that while cognitivists are not hostile towards affective, cultural, contextual, or historical studies per se, they do ‘attempt to factor out these elements to the maximum extent possible’ (41). Considering the mind in computational terms allows the analyst to filter out these ‘disturbing’ elements, so that cognition can be studied entirely in terms of its data processing. From a cultural historical perspective, however, it is noteworthy that it is the computer analogy – as an entirely cultural and historical phenomenon – that justifies such an isolation of cognitive processes from their environment. Critics, as Gardner remarks, have therefore not surprisingly destined the computer to be nothing but the latest example of a long series of technologies, which have been regarded to model human cognition. These critics see no indication why the computer analogy should prove more adequate than predecessors such as clockwork mechanics, the switchboard, the hydraulic pump, or the hologram (40). The cognitive sciences refer to several fields that are connected to one another in terms of research interests. The classical fields of cognitive science are philosophy, psychology, linguistics, artif icial intelligence, anthropology, and neuroscience among which the interdisciplinary ties are stronger between some fields and weaker between others (cf. Fig. 1; Gardner 1985, 37). As mentioned earlier, the computer provided an example of a purely physical machine whose syntax-following properties made it possible to solve any well-specified problem. Alongside the earlier works on logics and formal systems, this amounted to the emergence of ‘a new level of analysis, independent of physics yet mechanistic in spirit [...] a science of structure and function divorced from material substance’ (Pylyshyn 1986, 68; cf. Clark 2000). As Wheeler has argued, the tools of classical AI are potent when the mission is to explain logic-based reasoning or problem solving in highly structured ‘search spaces’. Yet, the problematic fact is that this invokes a kind of processing, which machines are known to perform exceptionally well, while humans in comparison are much more errorprone.7 Contrarily, humans – unlike machines – perform rather well when it comes to generalizing novel cases on the basis of past experiences, and in reasoning successfully, when provided with corruptive or incomplete data (Wheeler 2005, 9). One of the earliest opponents to the computer model of

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Figure 1. Cognitive Science the First Decades (Gardner 1935, 37)

mind was Rodney Brooks, who took an actionist and embodied – rather than computational – approach to robotics. Brooks (1999) argued that ‘[r]epresentation is the wrong unit of abstraction in building the bulkiest parts of intelligent systems’, and famously proclaimed that it is better ‘to use the world as its own model’ (79). It can be argued that the separation of mind and body (and hardwired brain) entailed in the computer metaphor for a long time allowed the cognitive sciences to proceed relatively uninflected by the advances made within the neurosciences. This view was upheld by the assumption that cognitive phenomena can be accounted for locally, in other words, that cognition is what happens between sensory input and behavioural output (cf. Chapter V on the ‘classical sandwich’). In objection to this view, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1995) has critically traced the philosophical roots of the

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computer metaphor back to René Descartes. Damasio has asserted that the Cartesian dictum cogito ergo sum, when taken literally, illustrates precisely the opposite of what I believe to be true about the origins of mind and about the relation between mind and body. It suggests that thinking, and awareness of thinking, are the real substrates of being. And since we know that Descartes imagined thinking as an activity quite separate from the body, it does celebrate the separation of mind, the ‘thinking thing’ (res cogitans), from the nonthinking body, that which has extension and mechanical parts (res extensa) (248).

In extension, others have argued that neuronal networks – and even nonneuronal networks such as the immune system (cf. Varela, Coutinho, Dupire, & Paz 1988) – display cognitive properties, and that symbolic computation, therefore, should be regarded as merely a narrow, highly specialized form of cognition, rather than the privileged model of human cognition (cf. Varela et al. 1992, 103). More generally, a growing body of research within embodied cognition has started a search for new philosophical sources as means for a reorientation of cognitive science in the last decades.8 Following from this, cognitivism as an empirical science has often been criticized for not being aware of its own philosophical presumptions. Directed towards its film-theoretical branch, which has proclaimed the end of ‘Theory’, Gregory Flaxman (2000) has voiced his concerns as follows: Cognitivism may not produce allegories as obvious as those of its theoretical predecessors, but that should not be taken to mean that it has eluded totalization – only that it is deeply and deceptively unaware of its own habitus. What cognitivism calls science and, better yet, common sense are the accumulation of conventions whose schematization we have yet to significantly interrogate (49, n. 37).

That being said, the philosophical habitus of cognitive science is not entirely underexplored. Undertakings of the philosophical roots have been executed with emphasis on the cognitive revitalization of Descartes, who according to Gardner (1985) ‘is perhaps the prototypical philosophical antecedent of cognitive science’ (50). Granted, there still remains a lot of work to be done concerning the cognitive habitus, yet the Cartesian influence on cognitive science has been examined and described in a long series of works.9 That classical cognitive science is Cartesian, does not automatically imply that it also ascribes to the Cartesian substance dualism – a position that,

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according to Wheeler (2005), is in fact dismissed by practically all cognitive scientists (21-55). The Cartesian ties are instead rooted and implemented by the very methodologies of the field insofar as it ‘is buried away in the commitments, concepts, and explanatory principles that constitute the deep assumptions of the field’ (14). This, furthermore, implies that the Cartesian roots are ‘typically invisible to the external observer and the majority of working cognitive scientists’ (14). In order to render these visible, Wheeler carefully outlines eight principles for what he labels the ‘Cartesian psychology’ of cognitive science. These partly overlap, partly extend and enrich Gardner’s five features of cognitive science, and as such provide a rich understanding of the habitus of the field. Furthermore, I believe that these do not only apply to the ‘orthodox cognitive science’, i.e. the computational and connectionist approaches with which Wheeler is concerned, but also – though with certain significant exceptions – to its film theoretical counterpart. The eight principles that constitute the ‘Cartesian-ness’ of the cognitive framework are the following (cf. 21-89): 1. The subject-object dichotomy; 2. The principle of representationalism; 3. Human action is the outcome of general-purpose reasoning processes that i) is context general and ii) works by manipulating and transforming representations; 4. Human perception is inferential in nature; 5. Perception is disassociated from action; 6. The environment is i) a furnisher of problems for the agent to solve, ii) a source of information inputs, iii) a stage on which sequences of preplanned actions (outputs of the faculty of reason) are simply executed; 7. Intelligent action remains conceptually and theoretically independent of the agent’s physical embodiment; 8. Psychological explanations are temporally austere since there is no need to appeal to richly temporal processes. At the same time as Wheeler opposes the embodied approach to the above Cartesian principles of ‘orthodox’ cognition, he also provides four parallel claims that support a more positive understanding of the embodied approach: 1) a primacy of online intelligence; 2) online intelligence is generated through complex causal interactions in an extended brainbody-environment system; 3) cognitive science should increase its level of biological sensitivity; 4) cognitive science should adopt a dynamical systems perspective.10 These are important principles for the reconceptualizing of the fabula proposed in Chapter V. Of central importance is that from the

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embodied perspective the fabula can no longer be seen as a representation of the narrative that can be detached from its spectator. I instead maintain that the fabula should be perceived as an embodied mental tool for structuring the narrative environment. This approach is taken as a measure to 1) counter the classical principles for the reduction of complexity (cf. Morin 2007), and 2) avoid re-enacting what Tim Ingold (2000) has called the ‘double disengagement of the observer from the observed’ (15), which I shall argue are core constituents of the cognitive conception of the fabula. In the cognitive-formalist conception of the fabula, the story of the film is first detached from the spectator that constructs it, and then the spectator’s construction of the fabula is detached from the analyst’s dissection of the film to complete the ‘double disengagement’. First of all, Bordwell’s cognitive theory of narration implies that the fabula is constructed by a method of ‘problem solution’ that involves inferences, hypothesis testing, logical deduction, causal reconstructions, recognition, memory, etc. According to this view, perception and narrative comprehension are governed by an active engagement of the viewers with the cinematic information. Significantly, perception and cognition are activities according to which ‘the sensory input is filtered, transformed, filled in, and compared with other inputs to build, inferentially, a consistent, stable world’ (Bordwell 1989, 22). In this manner, spectators form their coherent and stable comprehension of the fabula from the visual and narrative elements of the syuzhet by applying various culturally, historically, and film-specifically acquired interpretative schemata such as a familiarity with traditional narrative plot structures, historically shaped stylistic conventions, genres, tropes, a knowledge of actors and directors, etc. This ensures culturally diverse interpretations of a given film and, therefore, the degree to which the fabula is inconsistent between viewers depends on those cognitive processes that are culturally variable, while universal cognitive processes (e.g. Chomsky’s universal grammar) and hardwired neurological processes ensure a degree of consistency (cf. Bordwell 1989, 22). Although the differences pertaining to each spectator are thus not absent from Bordwell’s model, his theory of narrative comprehension coheres with classical cognitivism insofar as it filters out ‘disturbing’ elements in order to study cognition in terms of data processing. Therefore, Bordwell isolates the spectator’s cognitive processes from his or her affective and emotional responses to the film in question. In order to justify this procedure, Bordwell (1985a) assumes that a ‘spectator’s comprehension of the films’ narrative is theoretically separable from his or her emotional responses’ (30). This assumption is not only, as Bordwell (2011) himself points out, ‘consistent

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with 1970s’s and 1980s’s cognitive science’ (sec. 2), it also adheres to the second and third principles for the rejection of complexity by classical science as traced out by Morin in his article ‘Restricted Complexity, General Complexity’ (2007; cf. Chapter I). In Chapter VI the extent to which these classical principles govern contemporary film-theoretical attempts to understand narrative complexity is uncovered. For now it suffices to recognize that the cognitive comprehension of narration succeeds by means of a reductive isolation of cognitive difficulties from one another. In particular, the isolation of cognitive reasoning processes from the more ‘filthy’ emotional and affective processes prepares the first detachment, which separates spectators from the fabula that they have constructed. Underlying the cognitive conception of the fabula is the idea that the story exists as a somewhat intrinsic quality of the narrative – even if it is not entirely accessible and not all spectators will construct it in the exact same manner. As Ingold (2000) observes in relation to cognitive anthropology, the claim of perceptual relativism – that people from different cultural backgrounds perceive reality in different ways since they process the same data of experience in terms of alternative frameworks of belief or representational schemata – does not undermine but actually reinforces the claim of natural science to deliver an authoritative account of how nature really works. (15)

In a similar line of reasoning, the cognitive theory of narrative comprehension assumes a series of (partly) culturally variable cogitators, who ‘model’ or construct an independently existing reality (here: the fabula) that is not immediately given, but must be inferred by means of reasoning. From this perspective, narrative complexity becomes merely an expression of ‘the difficulty of giving a definition or explanation’ and as such ‘complexity relates only to appearances that are superficial or illusory’ (Morin 2007, 6). This amounts to the first disengagement, namely that between the organizing spectator and the narrative that must be ordered. In line with this disengagement, cognitive theories assume it to be the mission of the analyst to ‘search, behind those appearances, the hidden order that is the authentic reality of the universe’ (Morin 2007, 6). This leads us to the second disengagement that concerns the detachment of the analyst, who observes the fabula from a point of view that comes after its telling, and the spectator, who in constructing the fabula is prone to commit to ‘stereotypes, faulty inferences, and erroneous conclusions’ that

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‘play a central role in narrative comprehension’ (Bordwell 2002a, 90). This temporal detachment of the analyst introduces Morin’s first principle for the reduction of complexity, since it makes the fabula appear as if it were deterministically constructed (this is a problem that we shall return to in Chapter VI). Insofar as the analyst from a detached temporal point of view knows how the story ended, s/he is likely to interpret all narrative events in terms of their necessity – these events had to be like this otherwise the fabula would be different. The temporally detached perspective partly results from the backward reasoning applied by the analysts, whose disengaged modes of experience allow them to ascend to a realm of universal reason, which is safely distanced from the erroneous conclusions that characterize the spectator’s actual experience of the film. It is crucial to note that the problem addressed here is not to be reduced to the analysts’ application of reasoning, but concerns instead their detachment from the temporality of the actual film experience that they aim to comprehend. This methodological procedure, for instance, implies that the chronological reorganization of the syuzhet has little impact on the level of the fabula. However, if the fabula is conceptualized as a tool used in the direct encounter between film and spectator, the analyst can no longer reason from the a-temporal detached viewpoint of the coherent and causal-linear fabula. Together with the commitment to the classical scientific principles for the reduction of complexity, the cognitive double disengagement of the fabula from the spectator and the spectator from the analyst contributes to the linear onto-epistemology of cognitive film studies that underlines the restricted conception of narration found in cognitive approaches to cinema. An expansion of the cognitivist notion of narration can be found in the work of Jerome Bruner, who perceives narration as a structuring principle that has not just to do with literature, drama, and cinema. What Bruner (2004) suggests is that particular modes ‘of telling and the ways of conceptualizing that go with them become so habitual that they finally become recipes for structuring experience itself’ (708). Narratives, as the quality of structuring experience according to familiar patterns, thus become recipes ‘for laying down routes into memory, for not only guiding the life narrative up to the present but directing it into the future’ (708). A life, according to Bruner, is not just a series of blunt facts, but is something which is constantly being interpreted and reinterpreted. In a similar fashion, cinematic narratives are open for constantly being recontextualized and reinterpreted. This means that the relation between cinematic conventions and spectators operates according to a principle of ‘learning to forget’. According to the narratologist Seymour Chatman (1978), ‘[a]udiences come to recognize and

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interpret conventions by “naturalizing” them’ (49). In the process of ‘naturalizing’ cinematic conventions, spectators must acquire certain reading skills (e.g. a close-up signals that the particular object or person is of special interest) that by means of sheer repetition will be incorporated into the automatic procedures of the cognitive-perceptual system, and thus come to feel innate or natural to us (in the same manner as riding a bicycle or playing the piano). Therefore, ‘[t]o naturalize a narrative convention means not only to understand it, but to “forget” its conventional character’ (49). This double procedure of learning and forgetting is also reflected in the manner cinema alters our relation to – or comprehension of – ‘reality’. As Nadel (2005) explains, ‘the process of rendering [classical cinematic] conventions invisible acclimates us to specific notions of reality’ (428). Cinematic conventions do, therefore, not just rehearse an influence on the manner in which cinema is experienced, but also participate in creating the ‘recipes’ whereby we structure everyday experience. Rather than dismissing the cognitive-formalist conception of narration, Bruner’s view enables us to see this conception as a particular narrative itself: the story of the linear temporality. However, this does not mean that the linear dimension is not central for understanding the cinematic experience as an encounter between film and spectator. On the contrary, cognitive film studies have enriched our understanding of the linear dimension of cinema. What is important now is to insist that this be combined with approaches capable of opening up for the more non-linear dimensions of cinema.

Film-Philosophy and the Challenge of Contemporary Cinema In this book I draw upon film-philosophical insights to challenge the Bordwellian mode of thinking about the cinematic experience as constituted by a spectator (as a self-identical individual), who derives information from the film audiovisually, which is then cognitively constructed and represented in the mind in the shape of a coherent and chronological story, or fabula. In his film-philosophy, Deleuze perceives of cinema in terms of an encounter between the spectator and the film, from which concepts can be derived that are able to reconstruct our conception of the cinematic experience. This is since theory too is something which is made, no less than its object. For many people philosophy is something which is not ‘made’, but is preexisting, ready-made, in a prefabricated sky. However, philosophical theory is

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itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object. It is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in the light of the other practices with which it interferes. A theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others, anymore than one object has over others. (Deleuze 2005b, 262)

The perhaps most important film-philosophical contribution consists in this embrace of alternative ways of thinking about the cinematic medium by allowing the films themselves to refine our approach and re-evaluate our dominant methodologies, concepts, beliefs, and presuppositions. Although Deleuze (2005b) at the end of the second cinema book speculates about a coming (digital) revolution of cinema (255), he is mostly concerned with problems related to the different manners in which time is thought of in the ‘classical-modern divide’ (cf. Kovács 2007, 33-48).11, 12 In contemporary cinema this opposition is no longer instrumental; rather filmmakers appear to celebrate the unrestrictive creative potential that has emerged from its dissolution. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation (2002) is humorously depicting how a filmmaker – Charlie Kaufman’s alter ego (Nicholas Cage) – is forced to choose between the linear requirements of Hollywood and his own personal artistic ambitions owing to cinematic modernism. The answer to this dilemma, it could be argued, is the complex narrative form of the film Adaptation itself.13 Adaptation and other kindred films are discontented with the manner in which films are fitted into binary oppositions, such as artistic/commercial, linear/non-linear, or narrative schematic/self-reflexive, and decide to explore the interstices of these instead. Thus, the challenge of contemporary complex cinema is no longer well accounted for by the overarching Deleuzian cinematic categories of the movement-image and time-image. In the preface to Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (2003), David N. Rodowick asserts that he could have written another book, ‘one that was thoroughly critical of Deleuze’ (xiii). Part of what Rodowick finds problematic is the ‘curious anachronism’ of Deleuzian film-philosophy. The anachronism arises while film-philosophy takes modern(ist) cinema as its vantage point – ‘a period [...] that has already been exhausted’ (211, n. 2) – its true force lies in its ability to shed light on the contemporary cinema and digital culture. Rehearsing a string of similar arguments, Kovács (2000) has asserted that ‘from modern cinema, we must put Deleuze’s philosophy to the task of understanding the future of audiovisual culture’ (169). While

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film-philosophy reaches out to grasp the digital cinema yet-to-come, it is nevertheless methodologically informed by the divide of classical and modern(ist) cinema. The Deleuzian separation of movement-image and the time-image has left the impression that – here exemplified by Raymond Bellour (1998) – ‘the great opposition between classical and modern cinema corresponds to the gap between the two titles: The Movement-Image and The Time-Image’ (58). Yet, the vital difference is that the Deleuzian image categories do not imply rigid demarcations – a given film consists of an interplay of several different types of images – in the same way as the distinction between classical and modern(ist) cinema does. In this context Richard Smith (2001) has warned that it is deceptively simple to read the Cinema volumes along the axes of classical cinema (movement-image) and modern cinema (time-image), which coincides with classical philosophy (time as effect of movement) and modern philosophy (movement as aberrance of time). (par. 26)

Smith supports his argument by referring to a series of directors and films that – like complex narratives – resist any easy categorization into the Deleuzian image categories.14 Furthermore, it can be added that the timeimage can both be seen as an ephemeral moment within a given film and as a broader mode of describing post-war cinema. Deleuze often struggles to find satisfactory examples of cinematic timeimages in their pure form, i.e. as entirely liberated from the sensory-motor restraints of the linear movement-image. In fact, as Jacques Rancière (2006) has argued, examples of such images are often derived from the narrative situation, which inevitably carries a grain of linearity. This is, for instance, the case when Deleuze refers to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Vertigo (1958) to explain the rupture of the sensory-motor system characteristic of the time-image. However, the ‘paralysis’ of each of these characters [Jeff in Rear Window and Scottie in Vertigo] is actually only an aspect of the plot, a feature of the narrative situation. It is hard to see in what ways the character’s motor or psychomotor problems hinder linear arrangement of the images and the action from moving forward. (Rancière 2006, 155)

According to Rancière (2006), Deleuze is unable to ‘find a visible incarnation of a purely ideal rupture’ (116). Similarly, John Mullarkey (2009) argues that

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‘the most powerful embodiment of the time-image through-out [Cinema 2] is not an image at all but the lack of one: the irrational cut’ (96; cf. Rancière 2006, 105-124). In fact, the irrational cut only becomes an image if we accept Deleuze’s anti-Platonic, Bergson-inspired notion of the image, which ‘abolish the opposition between the physical world of movement and the psychological world of the image’ (Rancière 2006, 109). Quoting Bergson, Deleuze (2005a) writes, ‘[e]very image acts on others and reacts to others, on “all their facets at once” and “by all their elements”’ (60; cf. Bergson 1991, 36-37). For Deleuze existence is thus defined by movement in and between various forms of images, or as recapped by Pisters (1998), ‘we live in images and images live in us. Images can affect us and make us think’ (sec. 2). The consequence, however, is that images are not representational but relational, and thus the idea of a ‘pure’ time-image is a philosophical-ontological abstraction rather than an experiential fact. Ultimately, the movement-image and the time-image, albeit distinct forms of images, acquire meaning from their mutual relation. Rodowick explains that the time-image cannot be a simple placeholder for modern(ist) cinema – although it can be a vital concept for understanding this form of cinema – since it only exists in the encounter between cinema and spectator. Rodowick (2003), therefore, considers it to be a heuristic abstraction: The time-image is an image of memory. Or rather, for Deleuze it is pure memory-image in Bergson’s sense [...] Like pure perception, ‘pure’ memory [...] is a heuristic abstraction. Consequently, in many of Deleuze’s examples the border between the movement-image and the time-image is fluid or indistinct. (88-89, emphasis in original)

This, nevertheless, does by no means discredit the ability of the concept of the time-image to designate the non-linear dimension of the image – a dimension that is almost completely absent in the Bordwellian theory of narrative comprehension. Another risk in perceiving movement-image and time-image as placeholders of classical and modern(ist) cinema is that it inscribes a linear history of the cinema into the cinema books. Perhaps in order to avoid such a criticism, Deleuze initiates the preface of the French edition of Cinema 1 (2005a) by emphasising that ‘this study is not a history of the cinema’ (xix). Several critics, nevertheless, have criticized Deleuze for conceiving the history of cinema in linear terms.15 Mullarkey (2009), for instance, argues that ‘there is a teleology towards the time-image that is unavoidable given the evolutionist nature of Deleuze’s story’ (101). This has given rise to a criticism of Deleuzian film-philosophy as ‘essentialist’. Bordwell (1997) claims that Deleuze is

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guilty of what he, following E.H. Gombrich, calls a ‘Hegelianism without metaphysics’ (44). Bordwell elaborates as follows: ‘Treating film history as the exfoliation of the a priori categories of an aesthetic system becomes a scaled down version of Hegel’s idea that artistic change, like other cultural developments, embodies the unfolding of the spirit’ (44). Bordwell warns that the ‘unfolding-essence argument risks turning the result of historically contingent factors into a necessary product somehow incipient from the very start’ (32). According to Bordwell, Deleuze adopts a neo-Hegelian commonplace when he claims that ‘[i]t is never at the beginning that something new, a new art is able to reveal its essence; what it was from the very outset it can reveal only after a detour in its own evolution’ (Deleuze 2005b, 41; cf. Bordwell 1997, 117). Bordwell especially seems to have a case on occasions when Deleuze categorically holds the ‘classical film form to be outmoded, passé, invalid, discredited’ (Kovács 2007, 41), while paying tribute to the manner in which modern(ist) cinema explores spatio-temporality in non-Euclidean and nonlinear terms. However, I find Deleuze’s argument convincing that the potential for non-linearity was not invented by modern(ist) cinema, but formed part of the inherent powers of cinema from its very birth (although I am not convinced that this potential was not also realized before the post-war cinema).16 Still, Bordwell’s criticism seems to be justified to the extent that modern(ist) cinema, according to Deleuze, was a reaction to an assembly of cultural, social, artistic, economic, philosophical conditions (cf. Deleuze 2005a), which gave rise to ‘the evolution of cinema’s inherent power of articulating time’ (Kovács 2007, 41). For these reasons, it is not unusual for Deleuzian film scholars to regard a mode of anti-narrative filmmaking associated with modern(ist) cinema to be the purest form of filmmaking. In relation to this, Bordwell’s criticism of the ‘essentialism’ of film-philosophy is, perhaps, best applied to this kind of Deleuzian modern(ist) valorization. Claire Colebrook (2002), for instance, writes in her introduction to Deleuze that ‘[n]ot all films play with the force of images, but the power or potential to free images from a fixed point of view is what makes cinema cinema’ (37, emphasis in original). The drawback of such a statement is that it restricts the complexity of cinema to one of its components – its non-linear dimension freed from any fixed point of view. Regrettably, what is easily transmitted in such an assumption is that first and foremost the non-linear dimension associated with the time-image and the modern(ist) cinema holds genuine artistic, aesthetic, and liberating value. Such a conception leads not only to a depreciation of classical Hollywood but of the narrative dimension of cinema altogether. In the following chapter, however, it shall be argued that Hitchcock’s film Stage

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Fright (1950) is an example of how cinematic transgression and the rupture of automatic sensory-motor judgements can equally well be achieved within a classical, linear epistemology. This point is easily obscured by the Deleuzian alignment of narration and the sensory-motor system.17 In relation to this, it is telling that Deleuzian film-philosophy has been applied to a wide range of topics such as horror films, feminism, national cinema, third-world cinema, and cinematic affection. Taking this into consideration, the amount of works concerned with the role of narration in Deleuzian filmphilosophy has been startlingly modest.18 The reasons for this are obvious, since it seems impossible to reconcile Deleuzian film-philosophy with classical narratology. Yet, in relation to the task of this study to reconceptualize the fabula, film-philosophy as well as cognitive film science play formative roles. For this to make sense, the film-philosophical interest in narration needs to be revitalized. Once narration is no longer restricted to the linear ontoepistemology of classical narratology, it becomes evident that narration is actually a cornerstone in Deleuze’s film-philosophy. As Kovács (2000) observes: The fact that the image cannot be divorced from time lies at the heart of Deleuze’s understanding of the cinema, as is often pointed out, but my point is that it also lies at the heart of his methodological project. If time is included in the image by definition, Deleuze concludes that the cinema is always in some sense narrative, that it cannot avoid telling a story – though the kind of story it tells will vary radically [...] Indeed, it is the very mutation of storytelling that informs Deleuze’s categories. (154)

I believe that Kovács’ revised appreciation of narration in the cinema books enables a more productive and creative application of film-philosophy in relation to contemporary complex narratives. Such would not only participate in the attempts to formulate a positive understanding of recent narrative innovations, but also provide a conceptual richness able to revise our appreciation of how directors working within the classical paradigm explore the inherent ambiguity of the cinematic medium. According to a claim elaborated in the next chapter, ‘[c]onventional, linear, cause and effect interpretative methods often fail to discern the multiple options for meaning inherent in [classical] works because they lack the vocabulary to express these conditions’ (Gillespie 2006, 123). In order to capture the cinematic level that goes beyond conscious cognitive processes, Deleuzian scholars have turned to the concept of affect. It has been argued that cinematic affect ‘short-circuits’ our perceptual, sensory-motor habits of selecting images that interest us only for potential

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action (Colebrook 2002, 40; Powell 2007, 3). In this sense, the Deleuzian affection-image expresses virtual possibilities waiting to be actualized in particular conditions (cf. Deleuze 2005a, 104; Powell 2007, 3). Affect is, therefore, to be understood as an urge to act, which cannot find its proper release. It is in this sense that Brian Massumi (2002) defines affect as a non-signifying, non-conscious intensity disconnected from the subjective, signifying, functional-meaning axis to which the more familiar categories of emotion belong. What is left is an urge for action, since ‘[a]ffect throws into disarray the system of recognition and naming. At once, the image gives something to feel and takes away my capacity to say “I feel.”’ (del Rio 2011, 19-21). Affect can, therefore, be related to the plethora of virtual – never actualized – pathways of a cinematic narration (cf. Chapter VI). Consider, for instance, the following passage from Massumi’s Parables of the Virtual (2002): Intensity [a word Massumi uses interchangeably with affect] is incipience, incipient action and expression. Intensity is not only incipience. It is also the beginning of a selection: the incipience of mutually exclusive pathways of action and expression, all but one of which will be inhibited, prevented from actualizing themselves completely. The crowd of pretenders to actualization tend toward completion in a new selective context.19 (30)

However, it is vital to understand affect as distinct from, yet nevertheless deeply and intimately connected to, emotion and cognition. Ruth Leys (2011) has argued that when affect is merely understood as a placeholder of that ‘which eludes form, cognition, and meaning’ (450), which it has been argued is most often the case within the recent ‘turn to affect’ in cultural studies, we are left with nothing but a renewed expression of the linear-non-linear dichotomy. This insofar as to the system of intensity belong all the attributes so prized by today’s selfprofessed Deleuzean affect theorists – the attributes of the nonsemantic, the non-linear, the autonomous, the vital, the singular, the new, the anomalous, the indeterminate, the unpredictable, and the disruption of fixed or ‘conventional’ meanings. (449)

Consequently, Leys contends that scholars working with affect tend to succumb to a ‘false dichotomy between mind and matter’ (457), which is accompanied by a ‘false opposition between the mind and the body’ (458).

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She demonstrates how affect theorists, such as Brian Massumi and Eric Shouse, display a ‘commitment to the idea that there is a disjunction or gap between the subject’s affective processes and his or her cognition’ (450). According to Leys, the main problem with this view is expressed in a somewhat paradoxical tendency to ‘idealize the mind by defining it as a purely disembodied consciousness’ (456). Shouse (2005) has, for instance, argued that ‘the power of many forms of media lies [...] in their ability to create affective resonances independent of content or meaning’ (par. 14, emphasis added). For Shouse music is among the clearest examples of how the ‘intensity of the impingement of sensations on the body can “mean” more to people than meaning itself’ (par. 13). Shouse finds support for his claim in the work of Jeremy Gilbert (2004), who has observed that music has physical effects, which can be identified, described and discussed but which are not the same thing as it having meanings, and any attempt to understand how music works in culture must [...] be able to say something about those effects without trying to collapse them into meanings. (Gilbert in Shouse 2005, par. 13, emphases in original)

As Leys observes, Shouse opposes the bodily affects to a rather limited – i.e. a rationalist, computational – understanding of meaning. What is wrong or confused about this, according to Leys (2011), is ‘the sharpness of the dichotomy, which operates at once with a highly intellectualist or rationalist concept of meaning and an unexamined assumption that everything that is not “meaning” in this limited sense belongs to the body’ (458). Leys traces the problem back to the double agency of the word ‘representation’ within affect theory. First, the term representation identifies a certain mode of thinking, i.e. the ‘computational model of mind’, which as we have seen assumes the relation between the organism and the world to be constituted by a ‘sharp separation between the cognizing, representing mind and its objects’ (458, n. 43). However, as the recent developments within the cognitive sciences reveal ‘[t]here is nothing inherently noncognitive or nonintentionalist about [..] an embodied theory’ (458, n. 43). In Chapter V we return to the possible advantages of adopting an embodied approach to cognition, however, for now it is important to stress that the problem concerning affect theory lies in the second sense of the word ‘representation’. Following Leys, the word is used by the new affect theorists to refer to signification or meaning or belief, and so on, as if what is at stake in eschewing a representationalist

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theory of mind-world relations is not just a matter of rejecting a false picture of how mind and body interact but involves rejecting the role of signification, or cognition, or belief altogether. On this second usage, the claim becomes that, since we do not represent the world to ourselves according to the wrong, disembodied model of the mind, our relations to the world are, in large measure, visceral, embodied, and affective and hence not a matter of meaning or belief at all... (458. n. 43)

It is decisive to avoid this false dichotomy by understanding affect as distinguishable, yet not entirely autonomous or independent, from the spectator’s emotional and cognitive responses to the cinematic event. A special interest in the following chapters will, therefore, be devoted to how different films exploit feedback loops in the cognition-emotion-affect circuitry. For the reasons mentioned above, it is crucial to remember that, as Anna Powell (2009) observes, the viewer’s affective encounter with images (even affection-images) is ‘inevitably shaped by plot mechanics and characterization, which themselves build up the affective landscape of the film’s narrative context’ (par. 7). Complex narratives do not privilege affect over emotion and cognition, but rather engage the viewers in a reconfiguration of their relation. This could, for instance, be achieved by a fragmented non-linear narrative structure which stimulates the spectator’s desire for meaning, coherence, order, and chronology, which in turn can only find satisfaction via an active exploration of the virtual pathways of the films. According to Powell, Deleuze sees the exact same potential in the affection-images to ‘open ourselves up to the film’s potential to stimulate thought beyond what the images show in terms of their obvious content or what the film is “about” in common-sense terms’ (par. 7). Affect can be perceived as ‘autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is’ (Massumi 2002, 35). However, this should not lead us to exclude the role that cognition plays in affect. In relation to contemporary cinema, Jamie Skye Bianco (2004) asserts that the complex narrative – or, what she terms the ‘techno-cinematic event’ – ‘registers affectively’ (402, n. 19). While not disputing this claim (it could be argued that not only ‘technocinematic’ events, but cinema more generally registers affectively, but also cognitively and emotionally), an exclusive focus on affect merely reverses, rather than overcomes, the linear-non-linear dichotomy – favouring the latter on behalf of the former. The danger of this approach is to downplay the intricate relations between the non-linear, ‘pre- and postcontextual, pre- and postpersonal’ (Massumi 2002, 217) dimension of affect and the

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more fixed, linguistic, semiotic, analytical, rational, and linear dimension of cognition. Focusing on the opposition of the movement-image and time-image, enabled Deleuze to study a non-linear dimension of cinema that had been ignored, excluded, or diminished in most of the preceding studies on cinema. Deleuze has consequently been a great source of inspirations for film theoreticians who have attempted to overthrow the dominance of linear thinking in film studies. Rodowick (2001), for instance, draws heavily on Deleuze to understand what he terms the ‘figural’: In short, the figural cannot adequately be described by the logic of identity characteristic of most extant aesthetics theories and philosophies of the sign and of language. To comprehend the figural, it is necessary to transform completely how the term ‘discourse’ is understood by tracing out what Modern philosophy has systematically excluded or exiled: incommensurable spaces, non-linear dynamics, temporal complexity and heterogeneity, logic unruled by the principle of noncontradiction. (49)

Therefore, uncritical rehearsals of f ilm-philosophical arguments to explain the innovations of contemporary complex narratives risk reducing these to avatars of either classical cinema or modernism, or to the f ilms’ underlying linear or non-linear components. In relation to this, I agree with David Martin-Jones (2006), who describes a series of contemporary films as ‘hybrid’ images and explains: ‘As Deleuze posited the time-image as an alternative to the movement-image, these “hybrid” (movement-/time-image) f ilms enable both a rethinking of Deleuze’s categories, and provide a range of new contexts within which to apply his terms’ (4). Martin-Jones argues that contemporary cinema can be perceived as ‘time-images “caught in the act” of becoming movementimages’ (5, emphasis omitted). However, uneasy with the unresolved double temporal ontology of contemporary cinema (as both linear and non-linear) Martin-Jones makes it his task to analytically dissect a series of these f ilms with the purpose of determining their proper temporal logic. In this fashion, ‘each hybrid f ilm will be examined to see how far, or to what degree, it can be seen to exist as a movement- or a timeimage’ (4). I believe this methodological choice to be counterproductive since complex narratives no longer obey such a strict division (cf. Shaviro 2010, 2012). Consequently, my approach can best be explained as doing the exact opposite – namely to explore how contemporary cinema by not resolving the temporal ontological anxiety allows us to reconceptualize

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the cinematic experience by insisting on exploring cinema between the movement-image and time-image. Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002) is an example of why the temporality of complex narratives cannot be reduced to either their supposed linear or non-linear elements. The film consists of a series of linear narrative segments that are presented in a reverse-chronological order, thereby encouraging the viewers to ‘restructure’ them into a causal-linear storyline. From the perspective of the analytically constructed fabula, the narrative situation of the characters moves from happy to sad, yet viewers are unlikely to share the ‘joy’ of the characters, because the experience of their personal tragedies – that the viewers have witnessed, but inevitably awaits the characters – still resonate within them. Interestingly, this structure serves as a constant reminder of the irreversible nature of temporality. Thus, it would be tempting to argue that the film adheres to an underlying linear logic. The problem with this argument is that it does not sufficiently take into account the complex temporal experience that the film induces in its spectator, whose causal-linear rearrangement of the narrative ensures that the peaceful existence of the couple at the end of the film cannot be seen without being accompanied (virtually, in the spectator’s imagination) with the horrors that are not to come, but which already have been. What is at stake here is something other than the movement-image or time-image although the complex narrative recalls both. In this fashion, films like Irréversible help us rethink the complex interrelations of the movementimage and time-image. Thus, it is incisive to remember that Deleuze (2005b) contrasts his two overarching image-categories in order to understand their individual qualities. As he writes: ‘[w]e can choose between emphasizing the continuity of cinema as a whole, or emphasizing the difference between the classical and the modern’ (39). Where Deleuze chooses the latter option, the ‘will to complexity’ found in contemporary cinema, on the other hand, invites us to explore these dimensions according to their interconnections. In relation to this, Morin (2007) proposes that complexity calls for an onto-epistemological transition based upon a study of mutual relations. He argues: In opposition to reduction, complexity requires that one tries to comprehend the relations between the whole and the parts. The knowledge of the parts is not enough, the knowledge of the whole as a whole is not enough, if one ignores its parts; one is thus brought to make a come and go in loop to gather the knowledge of the whole and its parts. Thus, the principle of reduction is substituted by a principle that conceives the

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relation of whole-part mutual implication. The principle of disjunction, of separation (between objects, between disciplines, between notions, between subject and object of knowledge), should be substituted by a principle that maintains the distinction, but that tries to establish the relation. (10)

What follows from this is that complex problems cannot be sufficiently tackled from the limited perspective of a single discipline. Indeed, the reliance upon segregation of knowledge into smaller units or academic fields is an idea that defies complexity. Morin, therefore, calls for an approach across scientific disciplines: It is necessary to amplify [Vico’s] idea of scienza nuova by introducing the interaction between the simple and the complex, by conceiving a science that does not suppress disciplines but connects them, and consequently makes them fertile, a science which can at the same time distinguish and connect and where the transdisciplinarity is inseparable from complexity. I repeat it, as much as the compartmentalization of disciplines disintegrates the natural fabric of complexity, as much a transdisciplinary vision is capable of restoring it. (23)

Film studies have always valued transdisciplinarity in the spirit of Morin as art studies, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and narrative studies are connected to understand the complex processes that constitute the cinematic experience. I aim to profit further from the transdisciplinary nature of film studies by turning to embodied cognition, cognitive formalism, affective neuroscience, constructivism, Deleuzian film-philosophy, and complexity theory in an attempt to think beyond the dichotomies that constitute contemporary film studies (cf. Chapter V and Chapter VI). Focusing on the interplay of affect, emotion, and cognition does, therefore, not only pose an alternative to the cognitive-formalist assumption that the viewer’s comprehension of the narrative can be isolated from his or her affective response to it (cf. Bordwell 1985a, 2011). It also avoids the reversal of this argument within the affect theory of Massumi, Shouse, Bianco, and others. Insisting on the interplay of linear and non-linear elements counters the linear onto-epistemology of cognitive film science, in a move that simultaneously takes the study of complex narratives beyond the Deleuzian opposition of movement-image (or, more precisely, action-image) and time-image.

III. Narrative Ambiguity in the Classical Cinema Just as the Hollywood mode of production continues, the classical style remains the dominant model for feature filmmaking. ‒ Bordwell & Staiger 1985, 370 Certainly, people continue to make [classical narrative] films: the greatest commercial successes always take that route, but the soul of the cinema no longer does […] We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is capable of modifying it – no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially. The most ‘healthy’ illusions fall. The first things to be compromised everywhere are the linkages of the situation-action, action-reaction, excitation-response, in short the sensorymotor links, which produced the action image. ‒ Deleuze 2005a, 210-211

Introduction The ‘classical Hollywood film’ has traditionally been associated with a linear, cause-effect mode of sense-making. This is particular the case because the classical film, due to its focus on narrative progression and resolution, can be said to adhere to a linear onto-epistemology (cf. Chapter II). This onto-epistemology has been perceived as a justification for scholars to utilize a methodology that itself adheres to classical scientific cause-effect principles that produce a monolithic linear understanding of the classical cinematic regime. This chapter questions such restricted comprehension of the classical paradigm, and argues that it stems from a lack of sensitivity for the inherent ambiguities that reside in the cause-effect dramaturgy of classical cinema. The linear conception of Hollywood has been elaborated at length in Bordwell, Thompson, & Staiger’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985). In this volume, Bordwell (1985b) sums up the main characteristics of the classical film as follows: ‘Here in brief is the premise of Hollywood story construction: causality, consequence, psychological motivations, the drive towards overcoming obstacles and achieving goals. Character-centered – i.e., personal or psychological – causality is the armature of the classical

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story’ (16). In Deleuze’s (2005a) depiction of the action-image as the model, which ‘produced the universal triumph of the American cinema’ (145), the linearity of the Hollywood film is equally emphasized. Consequently, in spite of usual reservations, Deleuzian scholars have shown a surprising acceptance of the cognitive-formalist description of the classical film. In Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (2003), Rodowick, for instance, holds that ‘[t] he relation between time and reading in the movement-image is quite well accounted for in the formalist model’ (230, n. 8). Indeed, the classical f ilm does appear to be one of the most linear, prescriptive methods of discourse, since it centres the action on its main protagonist’s attempts to solve a single and dominant problem (cf. Gillespie 2006, 123). While this conception has been affirmed by most academic studies on the classical film, the aim here is not to contribute to the common (mis)representation of Hollywood as a rigid system, strictly bound by a series of linear rules and conventions. Although the linear description of classical cinema is not entirely unjustified, this chapter discusses Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright (1950) as a borderline example that helps to elucidate how our interpretative methods contribute to the monolithic linear perception of this type of cinema.1 While classical cinema may not challenge linear, interpretative methods in the manner modern(ist) cinema or complex narratives do, it cannot be concluded from this that the spectator’s mental experience is entirely dominated by causal reasoning. In fact, filmmakers (directors, screenwriters, actors, cinematographers, etc.) working within the parameters of the classical Hollywood film must ‘construct stories and performances that avoid the predictable and stimulate a range of possible interpretive responses’ (Gillespie 2006, 124). The problem pertaining to overt linear interpretative methods concerns the danger of diminishing the non-linear aspects of the classical paradigm, i.e. the ambiguities, the multiple analytical options, the breaks with the progressive forward flow of the narrative, and the transgressions of established conventions. Since linear interpretative methods cannot accommodate the ‘complexity of human behavior and the diversity of viewer expectations’ (Gillespie 2006, 127), our analytical cause-effect concepts produce a disproportionately linear image of classical Hollywood. Hitchcock’s Stage Fright at first appears to confirm most of the linear traits of the classical film. Yet, due to its (in)famous ‘lying flashback’, the film actually challenges unreflective and automatic linear reasoning. In doing so, it enables an examination of the processes whereby the classical film traditionally facilitates a ‘naturalization’ of specific classical conventions that over time come to appear as the standard and natural mode of

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organizing experience (cf. Chapter II). Insofar as the deceptive ‘flashback’ of Stage Fright can be seen as a reflection upon the inherent ambiguity of the cinematic medium (capable of reproducing ‘reality’ in a deceptive manner), it demonstrates that the classical film is not as clear-cut as it is often presumed to be. Furthermore, in obstructing the manner in which cinematic conventions become ‘natural’, the ‘flashback’ potentially renders visible the degree to which our conceptual frameworks reaffirm the supposed ‘naturalness’ of the linear mode of experiencing and interpreting our surroundings. Given the strong association between the linear mode of experience (as described in cognitive [f ilm] science) and the causal manner in which (classical) cinema encourages us to organize its events, it is possible to designate a particular manner of structuring cinematic experience, which henceforth will be referred to as linear cinematic perception . Through this reasoning, Stage Fright can be seen as an example of a film that challenges the automatisms of linear cinematic perception .2 Perceiving the film in this fashion resonates with the growing body of research that challenges the predominant linear conception of classical cinema. In contrast to cognitive-formalist studies, I maintain that the classical film does not subordinate everything to the linear progression of the narrative. Instead, the ‘linear components alternate with non-linear moments of spectacle’ (Keating 2006, 5). A revisionist study of classical cinema thus complements ‘[c]onventional, linear, cause and effect interpretative methods [that] often fail to discern the multiple options for meaning inherent in [classical] works because they lack the vocabulary to express these conditions’ (Gillespie 2006, 123). Nowhere is the domination of linearity on our conceptual tools as evident as in cognitive-formalist film narratology. According to Edward Branigan (1992), ‘narrative is a way of organizing spatial and temporal data into a cause-effect chain of events with a beginning, middle and end’ (3). Bordwell (1985a) also emphasizes the linear relation of events as essential for narrative comprehension. Since the central goal of the spectator is the construction of a fabula, ‘the spectators seek to grasp the filmic continuum as a set of events occurring in defined settings and unified by principles of temporality and causation’ (34). More precisely, the spectator comprehends the narrative in terms of the inevitable linear rearrangement of the narrative continuum. This conception connects with the underlying assumption that the widespread popularity of the Hollywood format pertains to its easy facilitation of a unif ied narrative continuum. In this fashion, the cognitive theory of narrative comprehension and the classical Hollywood format reaffirm each other.

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Bordwell states that ‘[a]s a template for organizing causality and time, the canonic story accords well with a Constructivist theory of narrative comprehension’ (35). According to Bordwell’s constructivist theory, ‘perceiving and thinking are active goal-oriented processes’ (31), and cognitive film science consequently understands narrative comprehension according to a revisionist cycle of perceptual-cognitive activity (31). Here the pleasure of narrative comprehension is largely dependent on the spectator’s realization of narrative closure. In order to achieve this closure, the spectator must be active, since the ‘artwork is necessarily incomplete needing to be unified and fleshed out by the active participation of the perceiver’ (32). When Bordwell writes that the ‘spectator thinks’ (32, emphasis in original), he really means that the spectator employs linear reasoning. This is exactly the kind of thinking that Deleuze has criticized the movement-image for inducing. For him, the task of cinema is not, as Bordwell assumes, to tell stories that can be organized along the lines of habitual perception. For him, thought in cinema is not primarily concerned with linear rationalizations, but should instead be seen as realizing the capacity of the medium for inducing a shock to thought. As Deleuze (2005b) writes, ‘[i]t is only when movement becomes automatic that the artistic essence of the image is realized: producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly’ (151). Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener (2010) have observed that Deleuze connects cinema’s ability to produce automatic movement to modern philosophy, since it ‘philosophizes’ about movement and time with its own means (158-159). Filmmakers thus become philosophers, distinct in their ability to think of technology, body, and brain within a single lifeworld (159). Although their views on what cinematic thinking more generally entails differ, Bordwell and Deleuze appear to agree that the classical film primarily induces a linear mode of thinking. For Deleuze, the movement-image – and in particular the action-image of classical Hollywood up until the 1950s – is emblematic of the linear mode of thinking, because it restricts the image to the constraints of habitual sensory-motor perception. Deleuze (1995) explains that ‘the cinema of action depicts sensory-motor situations: there are characters, in a certain situation, who act, perhaps very violently, according to how they perceive the situation. Actions are linked to perceptions and perceptions develop into actions’ (51). The classical cinema, following Deleuze, is deeply connected to the sensory-motor system and thus comes

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with a commitment to the linear onto-epistemology. The action-image subordinates its constituents to a causal-linear logic and to rational linkages according to which clearly defined causes prompt actions that generate new situations, etc. In this fashion, the action-image produces a narrative trajectory that steadily moves towards the establishment of the good and healthy moral sense. Therefore, Gregory Flaxman (2000) has argued that with the ‘sensory-motor schema we entrusted ourselves to the system of Truth’ (5). Consequently, Deleuzian film scholars often refer to the classical film to perform a critique of its inherent linearity, which is deemed philosophically less valuable. As Raymond Bellour (2010) acutely sums it up while reflecting upon how to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ cinema: How does one evaluate a good film, the good films in the cinema? One might answer, as Deleuze does in his books, that it is by the capacity that these films give him to think of them philosophically, to produce concepts from them. (par. 42)

Implied is the idea that the linear format of the classical film generally lacks the ability to induce ‘true’ philosophical thinking from which new concepts can be produced. Hence, many Deleuzians would probably tend to agree with Nitzan Ben Shaul (2012), who has contended that ‘most films encourage a closed state of mind, biasing our cognitive processes towards a reductive and selective attention to incoming data’ (1). For Deleuze, true original thinking in cinema cannot primarily be the reconstruction of a coherent fabula, since (linear) narrative explanation is retroactive (cf. Polkinghorne 1988, 21). As a result of this, he is particularly interested in a kind of cinema that takes the spectator beyond the sensory-motor restrictions of classical narration (i.e. the time-image). Contrarily, as we have seen, Bordwell (1985a) def ines narrative comprehension according to the spectator’s ability to reconstruct a causal-linear continuum (34). As a result, linear reasoning constitutes the primary mental activity of the viewer, who ‘must take as a central cognitive goal the construction of a more or less intelligible story’ (33). However, since the linear continuum is already implied by the f ilm itself, the mental activity of the spectator is seriously restricted in the cognitive model. In relation to this, Ben Shaul (2012) has argued that the canonical story format actively discourages spectators from comprehending the narratives in terms of ‘optional thinking’. Ben Shaul uses this term

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to describe the cognitive ability to ‘generate, perceive, or compare and assess alternative hypotheses that offer explanations for lifelike events’ (2). The opposite of ‘optional thinking’ is ‘closed-mindedness’ which among other factors ‘implies that in thinking about others we may often stick to prior impressions or preconceived notions rather than flexibly altering our opinions whenever relevant new information turns up’ (Kruglanski 2004, 2). According to Ben Shaul, classical cinema encourages closed-mindedness because it restrains the activity of the spectator, insofar as ‘the viewers’ potential sense of freedom of choice at narrative turning points [...] does not usually trigger a fruitful or enjoyable consideration of options’ (26). What is problematic is that Ben Shaul assumes the lack of spectatorial freedom to be an inherent feature of the films in question (in the same fashion that cognitivism perceives narrative complexity to be an inherent feature of the plot). The underlying assumption at work here is that the story material can be organized in terms of causality and chronology without a qualitative change of the overall narrative experience occurring from this, i.e. that the narrative continuum is inherently linear. However, if cinematic complexity is not an inherent feature of the films themselves, as I have argued, the same should be said about cinematic linearity. The linearity of classical cinema must at least be partly produced in the manner we have traditionally comprehended these films. Stage Fright is an example of a classical film that embodies a linear narrative structure, but which in doing so enables us to reflect upon the automatisms that govern habitual narrative comprehension. The f ilm demonstrates that in order to enhance our appreciation of classical cinema, as Gillespie (2006) has demonstrated, the analyst must not reaffirm its linearity, but instead devote the attention to the underexamined manners in which ‘the classic Hollywood cinema narrative format underscores uncertainty’ (126). This requires a reconfiguration of linear conceptual frameworks ‘with the metaphors derived from new ways of perceiving and systems of argument that no longer rely upon linear connections to give them validity’ (129).

Narrative Transgression in Stage Fright In an interview with François Truffaut initially published in 1967, Hitchcock reflects on the controversies surrounding his 1950 film Stage Fright. Central for the debates was the film’s so-called ‘lying flashback’ in which a character’s lie is presented by use of the classical conventions

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for the flashback. Reportedly this caused parts of the audience to take the ‘flashback’ as a truthful visualization of earlier fabula events. The reception and comprehension of the film’s deceptive technique seems to have undergone an interesting development from the time of its initial release, where reports tell of an outburst among audiences and critics alike, who allegedly felt deeply disappointed with the ‘unfair’ way they were tricked by the ‘lying flashback’ (Thompson 1988, 141). Even François Truffaut (1984), who is a known admirer of the work of Hitchcock, appears to side with the French critics, who were ‘particular critical of [the “lying flashback”]’ (189). In the same interview, Hitchcock (1984) defends the ‘flashback’ by reminding us that lies and deceptions are agreed upon as vital ingredients of cinema. He then goes on to ask why it should be assumed to be innately against the rules of cinema to present a lie in the form of a flashback: Strangely enough, in movies, people never object if a man is shown telling a lie. And it’s also acceptable, when a character tells a story about the past, for the flashback to show as if it were taking place in the present, so why is it we can’t tell a lie through a flashback? (189)

It is in particular its readiness to ‘denaturalize’ cinematic conventions that makes it possible to regard Stage Fright as a precursor to contemporary complex cinema (cf. Bordwell 2006, 72-73). Today experiments with narrative transgressions, such as ‘lying flashbacks’, are more commonplace. As cinematic conventions engage in dynamic relations with viewers and their expectations, the latter are changing as well. Consider, for instance, the positive reception of The Usual Suspects (Singer 1995) – a film that much later used the device of ‘lying flashbacks’.3 The different receptions of the two films suggest that such narrative experiments are more welcomed by a ‘post-classical’ audience than a ‘classical’ one. For Stage Fright’s narrative twist to work, it is decisive that viewers comprehend the film in a manner resembling that described by Bordwell (1985a). In narrative comprehension, most of our cognitive processes go unattained. However, the ‘lying flashback’ of Stage Fright is liable to make us aware of the ordinary processes that govern narrative comprehensions. Once it becomes clear that Stage Fright is deceptive rather than communicative, the film is thus potentially capable of laying bare the otherwise ‘hidden’ conventions of the classical flashback.

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Stage Fright opens with a safety curtain going up to reveal the busy street life of London from a bird’s-eye view. From the opening shot the film cuts to a car in which Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) and Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) – the two main characters of the film – are driving. Jonathan is explaining Eve the trouble he has gotten himself into while trying to help cover for his mistress Charlotte Inwood (Marlene Dietrich) after she has murdered her husband. Jonathan tells Eve that he believes Charlotte, a high-society actress, framed him so that the police now takes him as their prime suspect. Eve, who has long had romantic feelings for Jonathan, agrees to help her friend by hiding him in her father’s boathouse. Eve, herself an aspiring actress, welcomes the drama and excitement that has suddenly entered into her dull existence, and she decides to take matters into her own hands and to prove Jonathan’s innocence. At this point, the film introduces a series of role plays that accompany its theatrical themes of lies, illusions, and deceptions. Eve, for instance, attempts to get closer to Charlotte by pretending to be the temporary replacement for her maid. In her struggles to help Jonathan, Eve encounters the police officer Ordinary Smith (Michael Wilding) with whom she gradually falls in love. Together they blackmail Charlotte for information by letting her believe that they are in possession of a bloodstained dress she wore on the day of the murder. Their plan works and Charlotte confesses, but much to their surprise, she insists that she is merely the accomplice, and that Jonathan is the actual murderer. Despite this, Eve remains devoted to Jonathan’s version of the events and helps him escape from the police. She realizes Jonathan’s true character too late, but manages to trick him and thus avoids becoming his next victim. In the end, Jonathan is decapitated by the safety curtain and the film thus finishes with a theatrical metaphor that matches its opening scene. The plot briefly sketched out above illustrates the prevalence of classical storytelling strategies throughout the film. The narrative is driven by Eve and her desire to prove Jonathan’s innocence. As such, the plot is pushed forward by a goal-oriented main character, who demonstrates the individual’s ability to change circumstances for the better. The plot is structured causal-logically so each scene logically extends into the next, etc. Furthermore, the film contains a double plot structure according to which Eve’s attempts to unravel the murder puzzle is the main narrative thread, while the second plotline concerns her romantic affiliation with Jonathan/Ordinary. Although the classical film does not usually invite spectators to reflect upon its narrative construction (Bordwell et al. 1985), the attentive viewer

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well acquainted with classical conventions may be alerted, when Eve falls in love with Ordinary. As the classical film often ends with a successful outcome for its heterosexual romance (Bordwell et al. 1985), Eve at one point must be forced to choose between Jonathan and Ordinary. This change of affiliation could be held as significant if the audience recognizes that in the cinema of Hitchcock, as Deleuze (2005a) has observed, ‘actions, affections, perceptions, all is interpretation from the beginning to the end’ (204). One of Hitchcock’s major contributions to cinema is exactly his keenness to play with the expectations of his audience. For Deleuze, Hitchcock was the first to perceive the constitution of cinema as a function that not only involves director and film, but also the spectator (206). In incorporating the spectator into the corpus of cinema, Hitchcock’s cinematography has contributed to a raised awareness of the spectator’s active part in producing the meaning of the film. 4 In Stage Fright, Hitchcock makes his viewers aware of their active participation in constructing the story in a manner that simultaneously breaks with the expectation of having their efforts rewarded with a gradual increase in knowledge (cf. Bordwell 1985a, 159). It is not that Stage Fright does not provide a coherent fabula, but the film’s twist is revealed almost at the end of the story and viewers will thus lack the feeling of having anticipated the story outcome. Traditionally, the only permissible manipulation of story order in the classical film is the flashback, which together with the system of continuity editing stresses the continuous nature of temporality in the classical paradigm (cf. Bordwell 1985a, 42-49). By allowing viewers to reflect on their own participation in the construction of the narrative, Stage Fright challenges the invisible, linear flow of the classical film. In the classical film, ‘[t]he viewer concentrates on constructing the fabula, not on asking why the narration is representing the fabula in a particular way – a question more typical of art-cinema narration’ (Bordwell 2006, 162). A recurring element in the cinema of Hitchcock is that things are rarely what they appear to be at first glance. This is also the case in Stage Fright, which is underlined by the film’s constant play on the themes of lies and deceptions, and by its abundance of theatrical metaphors. Once scrutinized the film opens up a perpetual, yet subtle, play with the classical conventions. To appreciate this fully, the viewers must become aware of the automatic operations that temporally organize the narrative continuum into a linear storyline. Without such awareness the linearity may appear as inherent to the film and thus independent of its spectator. In this view, the nonlinearity of Stage Fright results from its exposure of classical conventions as conventions. That is, the linear cinematic experience is ruptured once

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spectators are made aware that the linear mode of organization so pervasive in narrative cinema is not natural but conventional. One of the fascinating things about contemporary complex cinema is the manner in which viewer expectations have increasingly been incorporated into the structure of the narratives. The result, as will be argued in subsequent chapters, is that the linear nature of the cinematic experience is being increasingly ‘denaturalized’. The frequency with which spectators are incorporated into the narrative structures of contemporary cinema has contributed to an increased scholarly awareness of the resemblance between contemporary cinema and (narrative) games (e.g. Bianco 2004; Elsaesser 2009; Kallay 2013; Simons 2007, 2008). The ‘lying flashback’ can be seen as an early case of a cinematic device employed to ‘play games’ with the audience. Most of the writings on Stage Fright are concerned, in one way or another, with its so-called ‘lying flashback’. The present treatment will be no exception. Yet, while most treatments of Stage Fright are concerned with questions of narrator/narration (e.g. Thompson 1988; Casetti & Bohne 1986; Currie 1995; Richter 2005), the present differs by focusing on how this device can be seen as both a destabilization and an affirmation of linear interpretative methods. How can we understand the interpretative strategies utilized by spectators who felt cheated by the ‘lying flashback’? Does Hitchcock fail to induce this scene with enough ambiguity or are our interpretative methods too time-dependent and not sensitive enough to note such ambiguities? Our comprehension of the ‘lying flashback’ reveals a lot about the processes whereby narrative information is induced with meaning. Actually the ‘lying flashback’ is strictly speaking not a flashback although it is carried out in agreement with the conventions for this classical device. In the (in)famous scene, Eve encourages Jonathan to tell her about the events that caused him to become the prime suspect of the murder of Charlotte’s husband. As Jonathan starts narrating (‘I was in the kitchen. It was about 5:00’), the scene takes place in his car, but with the next sentence (‘the doorbell rang and I went down to see who it was’) the image slowly dissolves and provides us with a visual accompaniment of the events Jonathan narrates and ultimately the film completely takes over his narrative. What factors justify taking Jonathan’s story as an objective version of fabula events? According to the conventions of the flashback, the narrative information can exceed the restricted viewpoints of the subject having the flashback. As Bordwell (1985a) explains, ‘the range of knowledge in the flashback portion is often not identical with that of the character doing the remembering’

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(162, emphasis in original). In this fashion, the film appears to fill in the blank spots of Jonathan’s story. From this it can be inferred that the film contributes to Jonathan’s lie. This seems to be Bordwell’s interpretation of the ‘lying flashback’, when he argues that since the film does not mark the falseness of the ‘flashback’, it can be perceived as an indirect validation of the information conveyed in it. According to this view, the narration, and not just Jonathan, is unreliable: It is not just the character’s yarn that is unreliable. The film’s narration shows itself to be duplicitous by neglecting to suggest any inadequacies in Johnnie’s account and by appearing to be highly communicative – not just reporting what the liar said but showing it as if it were indeed objectively true. (61, emphasis added)

The problem with this statement, as Sarah Kozloff (1988) reminds us, is that ‘the image’s reliability is not essential; it is just a convention, and conventions are made to be broken’ (115). It would, therefore, be more precise to maintain that Hitchcock does not show the events as ‘objective truths’, but in a manner that consciously plays with the viewers’ automatic application of classical narrative schemata. Bordwell’s treatment of Stage Fright is representative of a more general lack of sensitivity towards the inherent ambiguity of the scene. One reviewer has, for instance, argued that Stage Fright ‘falters because it betrays the viewing audience’ and holds that ‘one of the fundamental rules in moviemaking is that flashbacks should not deceive the audience’ (Brady 1998). Although not critical of the ‘flashback’ in the same manner, Kristin Thompson (1988) holds the film to be a ‘duplicitous text’. For all, then, Hitchcock does more than deliberately tricking his viewers into making a series of false assumptions, he ‘betrays’ or ‘cheats’ the audience. However, it is important to remain sensitive to the range of opportunities, differences, and options that mark each cinematic experience as unique. Viewers may interpret the ‘lying flashback’ differently, and some may even operate with several mutually exclusive hypotheses for how to interpret this narrative device. Thus, while acknowledging the deceptive nature of the ‘lying flashback’, it is simultaneously important to insist on its ambiguity. With this in mind, it can be argued that Hitchcock has carefully constructed the ‘flashback’ to allow (at least) the two following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: Charlotte killed her husband and made it look like Jonathan did it alone. Eve will prove Jonathan’s innocence and win his heart at the same time.

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Hypothesis 2: Jonathan did commit the murder, but failed to win Charlotte’s heart. He now plans to take advantage of Eve’s affection for him to get away with it. This will somehow put Eve in danger. In relation to this, it is interesting that Thompson (1988) assumes that the ‘lying flashback’ of Stage Fright automatically hinders spectators from generating hypothesis 2. According to her, the text’s duplicity and delaying devices ‘distort and reshape the true question that would have been posed in the beginning – something like: Is Jonathan guilty?’ (144, emphasis in original) Thompson appears to suppose a too homogenous notion of the audience when she assumes that ‘without the reassuring “evidence” of the apparent flashback, the spectator would not necessarily accept his account and might still suspect that he had been involved in the murder’ (Thompson 1988, 144). Thompson forcefully straightens out the carefully constructed ambiguities of the film when she blankly states, ‘the possibility of Johnny’s guilt is raised only when that guilt is confirmed’ (144). She supports this thesis by drawing attention to viewers, who upon the original theatrical release reportedly expressed extreme disappointment with the ‘lying flashback’ (141), yet several factors render the supposed unambiguity of hypothesis 1 problematic. First, the ‘lying flashback’ is initially presented as Jonathan’s story, insofar as the flashback starts with him telling Eve about the events. Thus, it is Jonathan’s story before the classical conventions of the flashback permit another assumption – namely that the use of flashback conventions automatically assures that this is a truthful rendering of fabula events. Even if the ‘flashback’ is interpreted in this manner, the initial impression that the ‘lying flashback’ is Jonathan’s story does not vanish completely. Instead, it can be assumed to have a lasting impact, even if this only amounts to a slight doubt of the nobility of his character. Such lingering doubts are nurtured by the film’s unflattering portrayal of Jonathan, who is largely depicted as an anti-hero unwilling to take action himself. While Eve must do all the hard work to prove that Charlotte committed the murder, Jonathan is cowardly hiding in the boathouse. In this sense, Jonathan is everything the typical classical hero is not: passive, dependent, and craven. It only adds to the spectator’s possible suspicions that Jonathan burns his only piece of evidence: the bloodstained dress. Yet, even this act is full of ambiguity and open to alternative interpretations, as Jonathan could also have done this in a naive hope to protect Charlotte, who we have gradually come to know as a manipulative diva.

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Once we become sensitive to the manner in which the f ilm plays with our expectations, it becomes fascinating to explore how it opens up various venues for alternative interpretations. For instance, Eve’s change in affection from Jonathan to Ordinary Smith can suddenly be comprehended as a sign of Jonathan’s dishonesty. Such interpretation, however, requires of the audience not only to apply classical narrative schemata, but also to reflect upon how the f ilm diverts from certain classical conventions only to affirm others. Thus, the spectator is not only required to have learned the classical conventions, but must also be able to denaturalize them, i.e. to become (re)aware of them as conventions.5 If spectators are able to do so, hypothesis 1 may remain the most likely, but it will no longer be possible to rule out other, competing hypotheses. Consequently, Stage Fright will be experienced as an ambiguous dramaturgical construct able to keep (at least) two hypotheses open until the moment where Ordinary Smith provides the vital information that Jonathan has murdered before. In this reading, Stage Fright amplif ies an encouragement of optional thinking in a similar fashion as Ben-Shaul (2012) has observed in contemporary cinema. For him the popular Hollywood cinema is usually ‘closed-minded’: Most movies use those aspects that make them popular in a way that encourages the reduction and even blocking of the viewers’ optional thinking processes. Through cognitive affects stemming from the ways in which movies deploy narrative suspense, surprise, or the arousal of empathy for protagonists, narrative uncertainty is felt as distressing, thereby heightening the need to avoid it by seeking resolution and closure. (13)

However, to what extent is it the ‘films’ themselves or our interaction with them that can rightly be deemed closed-minded? Thompson’s interpretation of the ‘lying flashback’ as leaving only one hypothesis open fails to discern the inherent ambiguities of (classical) cinema. Thus, Thompson does not merely assume a ‘closed-minded’ spectator, her reading of the film is ‘closed-minded’. As the relation between spectator and film is always bidirectional, our conceptual and interpretative tools could equally be held responsible for inducing a closed state of mind. Therefore, it is not sufficient to criticize Hollywood films for inducing linear thinking (as Deleuze and Ben Shaul do). At the very least such assessments should be combined with a self-critical examination of our own cause-effect reasoning, our desire to eliminate

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ambiguities, and our analytical narrowing down of available interpretations. In relation to this, Gillespie (2006) has contended that as long as moviegoers follow a cause and effect method of tracing hierarchical connections as the basis for explaining the significance of the film, important elements will inevitably be ignored. This process of linear reasoning identifies key features and narrows options for interpreting them until arriving at an unambiguous response. (125)

Thompson’s treatment of Stage Fright perfectly exemplifies how ‘closedmindedness’ need not be an inherent feature of the films examined, but could as much be perceived as the byproduct of the linear interpretative methods utilized to comprehend them. In her treatment of Stage Fright, Thompson assumes a seriously limited range of cognitive responses for the viewers, whose task it becomes to assemble a linear trajectory already implied by the narrative. In Stage Fright, our cognitive-affective bond to Jonathan is abruptly destabilized, forcing us to reinterpret the narrative continuum. Ben Shaul assumes the lack of closure – or the openness of the text – as inciting a ‘distressing’ and ‘unpleasant’ state of mind for the viewers. However, the lack of closure could also induce a productive and pleasurable opportunity for the audience to explore the narrative continuum more freely, i.e. beyond its linear restrictions. Since Ben Shaul considers ‘optional thinking’ to be a mere function of the formal qualities of the film, his theory fails to accommodate the non-linear aspects of the cinematic experience and itself remains ‘closed-minded’. The non-linear element that I argue to be present in Stage Fright is ignored by interpretative models that assume the formal aspects of a film to be determining for the spectator’s mental processes. Obviously, the relation between the formal qualities of a film and the thought processes of the viewers is not arbitrary. However, it can also not be reduced to simplified cause-effect patterns. Therefore, non-linearity arises once the classical movement ‘steadily toward a growing awareness of absolute truth’ (Bordwell 1985a, 159) is ruptured, abandoned, or subordinated to other temporal layers of the narrative (cf. Deleuze 2005a, 2005b). Furthermore, non-linearity serves a more general role as decisive for opening the interpretative paths of the viewers, and for allowing them to explore the narrative beyond the linear trajectory implied by the film. Since striving for closure, the filtering out of irrelevant data, the application of stereotypes, and a bias towards premature acceptance of given information, are all

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aspects that encourage ‘closed-mindedness’, it is possible to argue that the ‘lying flashback’ of Stage Fright is designed to discourage such linear cognitive-affective biases. Non-linearity always coexists with linearity, even if only to induce insecurity about the predetermined linear path of a narrative. In Stage Fright, non-linearity works to counter automatic linear reasoning. This is supported thematically insofar as ‘virtually every scene [...] relates to deception, to theatrical performance, or to both’ (Thompson 1988, 151).6 Stage Fright tellingly opens with a theatrical metaphor that introduces the themes of role play, fabrication, deception, and illusion that permeate the film. The first image presented to the spectator is that of a safety curtain onto which the Warner Brothers logo is transposed. Shortly thereafter the curtain opens, and we enter the narrative world of the characters. The metaphor of the theatre also permeates the narrative world, especially because both main female characters – Eve and Charlotte – are actresses. Added to this is the constant play of characters switching from playing roles to directing other characters’ role play, or being the (unknowing) audience of such role play.7 Hitchcock carefully creates a universe where things are not what they claim or appear to be. Eve’s first line, ‘Looks like we’re getting away with it,’ suggests that she is an accomplice of an as-yet unknown crime. Although this hypothesis must quickly be replaced, it can be seen as an early warning that viewers should prepare to discard their initial assumptions (cf. Thompson 1988, 145). Stage Fright deals with the topic of truths and falsities in a manner that is characteristic of the classical paradigm, because these can be clearly separated at the end. The aim of Stage Fright is not to question the possibility of absolute knowledge, such as, it can be argued, Rashômon (Kurosawa 1950) – famous for narrating a single event from several, contradictive viewpoints – does. Although Stage Fright shatters the ‘little-by-little’ movement towards narrative clarity, it does allow spectators to construct a coherent and unambiguous account of its fabula at the end. The importance of narrative clarity is underlined by the richness in detail of Jonathan’s confession to Eve at the end of the film: Eve, I hated to tell you that phoney story in your car that time, but there was no other way. Charlotte did go on to my flat after I’d killed her husband. Her dress was stained a bit, so I brought her a clean one. Then, when she went to the theatre, I made a big stain on it, to make you believe me. I’m telling you the truth.

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This scene clearly demonstrates that the function of the ‘lying flashback’ is not to question the concept of narrative truth. Instead, the character Eve, who is actively engaged in figuring out the true nature of events, but simultaneously sticks to Jonathan’s version for far too long, might provide us with an interesting take on the possible purpose of the ‘flashback’. This is the case since Eve resembles the naive ‘closed-minded’ spectator, who is unable to revise her conception of the events, because she is cognitive-affectively biased by Jonathan’s deceptive skills. Rather than being interested in questioning the possibility of acquiring true, ‘objective’ knowledge about the external world, Hitchcock seems interested in demonstrating how easily we can be manipulated, deceived or distorted on our path to such truths. Eve thus in many ways represents the Thompsonian spectator, who is unable/unwilling to readjust the initial conviction that Jonathan’s story is true. Eve decides to figure out what really happened based on the false assumption that Jonathan is innocent. In this fashion, she enacts the important dramaturgical function of putting forth and exploring different theories and hypotheses. Thereby, Eve’s interrogating efforts mirror those of the spectator trying to make sense of the information by constructing a ‘true’ story/fabula. Eve, assumedly like many spectators, fails to recognize how she is manipulated into taking a false account for granted. Hitchcock thereby appears to suggest that not much differentiates how Eve becomes cognitive-affectively biased by Jonathan, and the manner in which spectators blindly accept the conventions of the moving image. In this view, the ‘lying flashback’ urges the deceived spectator retrospectively to pose the question: How did the narrative cheat me? This question cannot be answered only by reference to the information provided in the narrative. Thus, if viewers pose such a question they may become aware of how the film utilized their automatic acceptance of classical conventions to deceive them. The ‘lying flashback’ thus serves to make us aware of the automatism of perception and cognition in relation to cinematic comprehension within the classical paradigm, i.e. of linear cinematic perception . Therefore, the fundamental ambiguity introduced by the unreliable narration of Stage Fright does not just concern our ability to apply certain interpretative schemata, but also our ability to replace or ‘forget’ these (Chatman 1978). In this sense, the f ilm challenges our narrative drive towards linear coherence, which constitutes our comprehension of cinema in addition to much of our everyday sense-making (cf. Bruner 1991, 2004). From this perspective, the unreliability of Stage Fright can be seen as inducing a reflection upon – rather than simply an application of – the quotidian beliefs and incorporated schemata that induce ‘closed-minded’

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readings, and cause us to jump to premature conclusions, interpretations, and evaluations (cf. Ferenz 2009, 281). Unreliable narratives, such as Stage Fright, are not just a window onto the narrative world, but also a mirror reminding us of the constructive nature of perception. Cognitivism explains the processes whereby cinema transgresses certain conventions and denaturalizes automatic perceptions by the concept of ‘defamiliarization’. According to cognitive formalism, the ‘lying flashback’ defamiliarizes the naturalness with which purely contingent cinematic conventions have been internalized. This account provides an explanatory framework for the culturally dynamic nature of cinematic conventions. Yet, it assumes that the monolithic linear conception of cognition can operate as a constant ‘background’ against which the culturally variable conventions can be evaluated.

Defamiliarization and Beyond In order to explain the historical poetics of cinema, and the processes whereby it transgresses its own norms and the viewers’ expectations, cognitive formalism employs Viktor Shklovsky’s (1965) concept ostranenie (‘making strange’), which translates as ‘defamiliarization’.8 In short, ostranenie is an artistic technique by which spectators are forced to experience familiar things in an unfamiliar or strange way, which enhances everyday perception. Frank Kessler (2010) has pointed out that the concept of defamiliarization thus necessarily presupposes familiarization, insofar as things in the course of time grow familiar to us, and thus, become ‘invisible’ to us (62). Laurent Jullier (2010) distinguishes between two forms of cinematic defamiliarization. Cinema can show us a world, not immediately detectable due to the limitations of quotidian perception. However, cinema can also defamiliarize by means of an alteration of its techniques, devices, or conventions whereby a film presents a cinematic world. As Jullier points out, the first, which he terms the ‘platonico-phenomenological’ option, has been favoured by authors such as Siegfried Kracauer, Sergei Eisenstein, André Bazin, Christian Metz, and Gilles Deleuze in their search for cinema’s capability to reveal an ‘unnegotiated presence’, ‘virginal purity’ or ‘pure state’ (124; cf. Szaloky 2005, 44). From this perspective, Jullier situates the concept of defamiliarization at the heart of a quarrel between ‘culturalistsconstructivists’ (who believe perceptive habits to be structured by social habitus or language) and ‘universalist-ecologists’ (who believe perceptive habits to be products of much longer evolution to which the modern era is of relative little importance) (139).

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Similarly, László Tarnay (2010) holds the concept of defamiliarization to illustrate the conflicting views of ‘ecologically committed theorist like Joseph D. Anderson’ (who argues for a biological-evolutionary basis of film viewing) and ‘philosophers of the new media’ (who highlight the cultural determinants of vision and the role of prosthetic devices in shaping human perception) (142). Comparable to Jullier, Laszlo concludes that the ‘ecological and cultural conceptions of vision do not necessarily exclude each other’ (142). Although I would argue that neither Bordwellian cognitive formalism nor Deleuzian film-philosophy hold viewpoints as radical as those sketched out by Jullier and Tarnay, the similarities and differences in their respective approaches to the concept of defamiliarization reveal a lot about their understanding of cinema more generally. Defamiliarization is the central analytical device for Thompson’s (1998) understanding of the aesthetic functions of the ‘lying flashback’ of Stage Fright. She argues that the film motivates its ‘lying flashback’ by way of ‘a play with the hermeneutic line and a great deal of conventional “poetic” imagery related to lying and theatrical deception’ (45). She examines how the film ‘uses a series of classic techniques [...] to justify the unconventional device of the lying flashback’ (158). In this process, the ‘narration’s refusal to use conventional types of motivation to cover over the deception’ means that it ‘acknowledges its own workings and [...] defamiliarizes them’ (161). Cognitivism thus understands defamiliarization as the process of ‘making strange’ those conventions that through repetition have become automatic or naturalized. Consequently, for the ‘lying flashback’ to have the effect of estrangement the classical conventions of the flashback must have been internalized by the spectator to some degree. Defamiliarization can, therefore, be related to the processes whereby audiences naturalize cinematic conventions, which involve an element of forgetting (cf. Chatman 1978, 49). Narrative conventions in this conception have the potential to be experienced as innate and ‘natural’. In relation to Stage Fright, the question of whether viewers accept Jonathan’s story as true fabula information or not depends on the individual spectator’s ability to both internalize and denaturalize (classical) cinematic conventions. With this in mind, it will be argued that cognitivism restricts defamiliarization to culturally variable conventions, while it maintains that the linear, cause-effect mode of organizing experience is natural and innate. Thereby, cognitive formalists ‘forget’ the conventional nature of the linear mode of experience, which we have termed ‘linear cinematic perception’. When Bordwell argues that certain conventions are ‘cross-cultural’, the universality of causal-linear

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rationalizations is often implied. The aim of the following is to take the concept of defamiliarization beyond its cognitive limitations to include the linear cinematic perception and cognition that informs the cognitive formalism of Bordwell, Thompson, et al. ‘Neoformalism’, as Kristin Thompson (1988) declares, ‘does offer a series of broad assumptions about how artworks are constructed and how they operate in cueing audience response’ (6).9 Where the previous chapter explored the philosophical assumptions of cognitive science (cf. Chapter II), this part will examine the role these play in the cognitive-formalist concept of defamiliarization. First, Thompson insists on a clear distinction between the realm of art and that of everyday perception. Artworks can defamiliarize perception exactly because they do not belong to the realm of everyday perception, which is governed by practical purposes: For neoformalists, then, art is a realm separate from all other types of artifacts because it presents a unique set of perceptual requirements. Art is set apart from the everyday world, in which we use our perception for practical ends. We perceive the world so as to filter from it those elements that are relevant to our immediate actions. […] Our brains have become well adapted to concentrating on only those aspects of our environment that affect us practically; other items are kept peripheral. Film and other artworks, on the contrary, plunge us into a nonpractical, playful type of interaction. They renew our perceptions and other mental processes because they hold no immediate practical implications for us (8).

Thompson’s contention that perception operates as a filtering mechanism resonates with Deleuze’s Bergson-inspired film-philosophy. Bergson (1991) famously proposed that perception adds nothing new to the image, rather ‘it results from the discarding of what has no interest for our needs, or more generally, for our functions’ (38). Therefore, he saw perception as a ‘necessary poverty’ (38) and in this sense consciousness arises from a suppression of what is of no interest – and a conservation of what does interest – our bodily functions (cf. Lawlor & Leonard 2013). James Curtis (1976) has remarked upon the intimate relation between Bergson and the Russian formalists, and considers ‘Shklovsky the foremost, and certainly the most energetic, proponent of the Bergsonian paradigm in Russia’ (115). In particular, Curtis points out Shklovsky’s Bergsonian idea that the goal of art is to give a feeling of the thing as seeing, not recognition. From this it follows that art is a device for ‘estrangement’ (ostranenie) that increases the difficulty of duration and perception (115).

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Therefore, the basic idea of defamiliarization is not foreign to Deleuzian film-philosophy. When Deleuze criticizes the movement-image for imitating habitual perception, he actually criticizes it for not defamiliarizing natural perception. Deleuze (2005b) argues: On the one hand, the image constantly sinks to the state of cliché: because it is introduced into sensory-motor linkages, because it itself organizes or induces these linkages, because we never perceive everything that is in the image, because it is made for that purpose [...]. Civilization of the image? In fact, it is a civilization of the cliché where all the powers have an interest in hiding images from us, not necessarily hiding the same thing from us, but in hiding something in the image. On the other hand, at the same time, the image constantly attempts to break through the cliché, to get out of the cliché. There is no knowing how far a real image may lead: the importance of becoming visionary or seer. (20)

Like Thompson, Deleuze understands perception in Bergsonian terms as a kind of filtering mechanism of that which does not interest our quotidian purposes. In this manner, everyday perception becomes habitual, familiar, and ‘automatized’ (cf.  Bergson 1991; Deleuze 2005a, 2005b). Therefore, Thompson sounds almost Bergsonian, and hence Deleuzian, when she quotes Shklovsky: The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms diff icult, to increase the diff iculty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. (Shklovsky in Thompson 1988, 11)

A similar desire to go beyond the limits of everyday human perception is at the heart of Deleuze’s philosophy and is a key to understanding the time-image. Both have the ability to open us up to the inhuman and the superhuman (durations which are superior or inferior to our own), to go beyond the human condition: This is the meaning of philosophy in so far as our condition condemns us to live among badly analyzed composites, and to be badly analyzed composites ourselves. (Deleuze 1991, 28)

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The polarized positions of Deleuzian film-philosophy and cognitive formalism rarely seem so intimately akin, as they do in relation to the concept of defamiliarization. Nevertheless, the important difference is that Thompson (1988) insists on a strict line separating art from ‘real life’. This is the case when she argues, ‘our nonpractical perception allows us to see everything in the artwork differently from the way we would see it in reality, because it seems strange in its new context’ (10). According to this logic, defamiliarization only exists because art occupies a different realm to everyday perception. This conflicts with Bergson’s concept of multiplicity according to which the immediate data of consciousness are a multiplicity, and therefore cannot be ‘represented’ by a unified consciousness (cf. Lawlor & Leonard 2013, sec. 2). From this, Deleuze (2000) advances the idea that we must ‘understand cinema not as language, but as signaletic material’ (361). From this perspective, ‘reality’ cannot be separated from the ‘brain’ that perceives it. Furthermore, since cognitive formalism believes our comprehension of art to be guided by representations, it takes little interest in the way cinematic material affects us directly. Thompson understands perception broadly as a simplif ied formula according to which the primary function of emotions is cognitive. Thus, permeating the cognitive-formalist version of defamiliarization is that a higher level of awareness of everyday ‘automatized’ cognition and perception should be obtained before defamiliarization can claim a meaningful effect. Consequently, higher-level cognitive processes are essential to the cognitiveformalist conception of defamiliarization. Thompson (1988) explains: For the neoformalist critic, conscious processes are usually the most important ones, since it is here that the artwork can challenge most strongly our habitual ways of perceiving and thinking and can make us aware of our habitual ways of coping with the world. (27)

Therefore, Thompson utilises the concept of defamiliarization to understand Stage Fright at a purely formal level, in a manner that pays little interest to the viewer’s cognitive, emotional, or affective experience. However, defamiliarization has the power to bring to consciousness otherwise non-conscious or unattended processes. Because perception and cognition in relation to cinema are applied for non-practical ends, Bordwell (1985a) argues that in cinema what is nonconscious in everyday mental life becomes consciously attended to. Our schemata get shaped, stretched, and transgressed: a delay

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in hypothesis-confirmation can be prolonged for its own sake. And like all psychological activities, aesthetic activity has long range effects. Art may reinforce, or modify, or even assault our normal perceptual-cognitive repertoire. (32)

In short, cognitive formalism believes that art challenges our cognitive and perceptual apparatus by transgressing certain established norms. In particular, art has the ability to challenge psychological capabilities such as recognition, comprehension, inference making, and the application of schemata. In this fashion, the cognitive tasks that artworks encourage us to perform can potentially extend into everyday perception. Since cognitive formalists understand narrative comprehension in terms of a ‘problem-solution’ model of cognition (cf. Bordwell 1985a), a central question concerns the true nature of fabula events. For Thompson (1988), the defamiliarization of Stage Fright works mainly because it eventually settles on an unambiguous version of the fabula. This enables the audience to reconstruct their mental engagement with the film and to localize their erroneous inferences retrospectively. She believes the process whereby viewers evaluate and reflect upon their cognitive construction of the story to be comparable to mental exercise: The nature of practical perception means that our faculties become dulled by the repetitive and habitual activities inherent in much of daily life. Thus art, by renewing our perceptions and thoughts, may be said to act as a sort of mental exercise, parallel to the way sport is an exercise for the body. Indeed, individuals’ use of artworks is often comparable to their use of non-exercise games – chess, for example – and to the aesthetic contemplation of nature for its own sake. Art fits into the class of things that people do for re-creation – to ‘re-create’ a sense of freshness or play eroded by habitual tasks and the strains of practical existence. Often the renewed or expanded perception we gain from artworks can carry over to and affect our perception of everyday objects and ideas. As with physical exercise, the experience of artworks can, over a period of time, have considerable impact on our lives in general (9).

Nowhere is the core difference of cognitive formalism and Deleuzian film-philosophy as pronounced as with the above-cited chess metaphor. Whereas Deleuze conceptualizes the cinematic experience in terms of a direct encounter, cognitive formalism perceives the spectator in terms of a disengaged ‘information-processing system’.

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Computational cognitivism is here expressed with reference to an abstract logical game that requires its player to perform highly complex cognitive tasks according to a ‘problem/solution’ – or ‘question/answer’ (cf. Carroll 2008, 138-139) model. Following this view, spectators continuously test different hypotheses based on a cluster of knowledge about the rules of cinema until they find the key for solving or answering the questions proposed by the film. In doing so, spectators will note the rules of the game and take notice when deviations from the rules occur. Once exposed to a particular deviation from the rule a sufficient amount of times, the spectator will integrate this as a new rule. The advantages of the computer metaphor in accounting for our hypotheses testing and schemata applications are evident. However, Sinnerbrink (2011) has argued that this model encounters problems when accounting for the pleasures that spectators experience once confronted with narratives that upsets our expectations. He argues: Cognitivist theories assume that it is our intellectual satisfaction in reconstructing meaning and solving narrative puzzles that accounts for our pleasure in a film. On this view, however, it becomes difficult to explain our aesthetic delight in being misled or deceived by a work of art. Why do we enjoy narrative deception? If our engagement with narrative film were primarily about processing and resolving narrative puzzles, one would expect to experience displeasure at having one’s desire for cognitive closure thwarted. (52)

In her analysis of Stage Fright, Thompson does not account for the seeming paradox that some viewers experience pleasure once deceived, but instead focuses on the reports about the outbursts upon the film’s original theatrical release. The reason, I believe, is that cognitive formalism has constructed its theory of narrative comprehension upon a linear conception of the classical film and the classical spectator. As we have seen, one of the guiding assumptions of cognitivism is that the central cognitive goal of viewers is the construction of a more or less unified and coherent fabula (cf. Bordwell 1985a, 33). This provides an acute framework for theorizing how spectators are active in structuring the narrative according to a causal-linear string of events that retrospectively form the fabula. However, it has proven less apt for examining the openness, unpredictability, and insecurity about the direction the narrative will take, which equally shapes the cinematic experience. This is partly because cognitivism presupposes a restricted understanding of the spectator as

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being deeply rooted in the conventions of classical storytelling. For cognitive formalism, classical cinema forms the ‘background’ against which all other cinematic modes can be understood and weighted. Thompson (1988) explains that ‘neoformalism calls norms of prior experience backgrounds, since we see individual films within the larger context of such prior experience’ (21, emphasis in original). Thompson accounts for three basic types of ‘background’. First, there is the ‘real world’, without a knowledge of which we would not be able to recognize referential meaning (e.g. character traits or analogies to society). This introduces the basic assumption of the cognitive-formalist use of the concept of the background, namely that there is a strict division between object and subject and between the external world and the perceiver. From this follows the second, which is our knowledge of artworks’ functions, and the third, which is a differentiation between art and other types of information (e.g. commercials). Thompson acknowledges the implication of using the classical cinema as the all-encompassing background. However, she justifies doing so since it would be impossible to fully reconstruct the original viewing circumstances of most films and since the original background of a set of spectators upon release can never be restored (21-22). In relation to the study of early cinema, Thompson concludes that ‘critics and historians must analyze these early films against the background of later, classical filmmaking’ (22, emphasis added). In this manner, the analysts risk confusing the classical film with that of films more generally. Consider, for instance, when Thompson writes: Much of our reaction to stylistic devices may be preconscious in that we learn cutting, camera movement, and other techniques from classical films, and we learn them so well that we usually no longer need to think about them, even after only a few visits to the cinema. (27, emphasis added)

From the perspective of early cinema, Tom Gunning (1986) has famously addressed the problems that arise from taking classical narration as the background for understanding other narrational modes. He writes: The history of early cinema, like the history of cinema generally, has been written and theorized under the hegemony of narrative films. Early filmmakers like Smith, Méliès, and Porter have been studied primarily from the viewpoint of their contribution to film as a storytelling medium, particularly the evolution of narrative editing. (63)

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However, as Gunning elaborates, ‘every change in film history implies a change in its address to the spectator, and each period constructs its spectator in a new way’ (68). In elaboration of Gunning’s critique, it can be argued that the device of defamiliarization not only reveals the historical nature of cinematic conventions, it also carries the potential to reveal something about the analyst as a perceiver situated in a specific historical and cultural context. Defamiliarization, as Frank Kessler (2010) has argued, is always ‘in the eye of the beholder,’ and by this very token it reveals itself as an inherently historical phenomenon. Any defamiliarizing device is bound to turn into a habitualized one as time goes by, so to the readers or viewers of later generations, it may indeed appear as an utterly conventional feature. (78)

That cognitive formalism settles on the classical cinema as background is certainly no arbitrary choice, because this background is perceived to have a naturalistic justification. As such, classical conventions comply with the quotidian manner in which perception and cognition work. Following Kessler, ‘[t]here is a risk, however, that a background/foreground constructed in that way becomes “automatized”’ (65). That is, even though the cognitive choice of using Hollywood as background is both an obvious and convincing one, it ‘might also block an understanding of other logics at work in the construction of a given film, or group of films’ (65). Therefore, it is important to recognize the concept of defamiliarization beyond its cognitive-formalist restriction to linearity. In doing so, defamiliarization can prove a valuable concept for examining the process whereby not only narrative conventions are internalized, but also how classical cinema can naturalize and denaturalize particular modes of perception. In order to do so, we must ‘never cease to defamiliarize defamiliarization’ (79), and thus the concept should be made to include those linear processes that cognitivism perceives as natural and innate. A first step is to challenge the cognitive claim that classical cinematic conventions have a privileged relation to natural perception. Cognitive formalism proposes that f ilm studies should take a more positivistic or scientific approach that is founded on neither metaphysics nor epistemology: Contrary to what many believe, a study of United Artists’ business practices or the standardization of continuity editing [...] need carry no

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determining philosophical assumptions about subjectivity or culture, no univocal metaphysical or epistemological or political presumptions – in short, no commitment to Grand Theory. (Bordwell 1996a, 29, emphases in original)

As we have seen, cognitive formalism perceives cinematic spectatorship in terms of a form of mental exercise in which our senses are sharpened. This emphasizes the cinematic experience as a puzzle where spectators are encouraged to gather the pieces and put them into a coherent and chronological order. This modus operandi works best if a logical order can be deduced from the pieces of the film. Therefore, a manner in which to test Bordwell’s epistemological commitments is against a type of cinema that does not comply with the rules of linear storytelling. Bordwell’s (2006) brief treatment of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) – a film about a man’s psychological breakdown in which the linear logic dissolves – may help to shed light on this question. Because Bordwell assumes the linear epistemology of classical cinema to be normal and natural, his depiction of Lost Highway appears to miss the point of the film: If complex storytelling demands high redundancy, Lynch has been derelict in his duty. [Lost Highway’s] phantasmagoric body-switches occur without explanation in a milieu soaked in dread and threatened violence. The eerie mix of horror-film atmospherics and radiant naïveté may urge us to construct each as presenting the fantasies of a possessed protagonist, but the cues are not nearly as firm as they are in A Beautiful Mind [Howard 2001]. Instead, the absence of definite reference points allows Lynch to rehearse a few obsessive scenarios of lust and blood without settling on which are real and which are imagined. (89, emphases added)

Lost Highway does not provide the viewers with a puzzle to be solved; nor is it interested in the kind of defamiliarization found in Stage Fright. Yet, Bordwell seems mistakenly to assume that Lost Highway is trying, but failing, to be a conventional Hollywood film. Instead, it could be argued that what is explored in the film is the question of what happens to our concept of logic when linearity dissolves (cf. Hven 2010). Although defamiliarization is the cognitivists’ best analytical tool for understanding cinematic transgressions, its ultimate task is the reintegration or reorganization of cinematic elements that do not apply to the linear norm. In his criticism of the inferential model of narrative reconstruction developed by Bordwell (1985) and modified by Buckland (2003), Miklós

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Kiss  (2010) revisits an often-discussed scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965). In the words of Buckland (2003), the director in this particular scene ‘dismantles a well-formed sequence and then rearranges the shots into a new order, to express the characters’ sense of panic and haste’ (126). Kiss (2010) convincingly argues that ordering the non-linearity of the syuzhet into a linear chain does not guarantee the facilitation of the episode’s comprehensibility (170). Not least because Godard’s intention with the disjunctive narrative of the scene is not the creation of a puzzle or a mystery to solve. Instead, Godard manages to enhance the scene with a ‘realistic effect’ that ‘works on a physiological rather than an inferential level’ (171). Even if we accept the somewhat dubious claim that physical reality is linear and chronological, Kiss reminds us that this still does not alter the fact that ‘our perceptual experience of this reality is non-linear, achronological’ (170). From the inferential perspective of Bordwell and Buckland, defamiliarization thus turns into a ‘refamiliarization’ of the non-linear qualities of the film, which must be reverted back into its presupposed original and natural linear state. For Kiss, however, ‘[t]he heart of the matter is not to solve some riddle, to understand what is represented, but what matters is the alteration of sensation’ (171). Similarly, Daniel Frampton (2006) argues that in order to comply with the cognitive framework transgressive cinematic elements must be rationalized. In Bordwell’s cognitive film science, he writes, ‘radical cinema is reduced to principles, systems, all towards trying to bring artistic cinema into the rational fold of classical cinema’ (104, emphasis in original). In a similar manner, defamiliarization for cognitivism is a concept capable of making us aware of the conventional nature of cinematic conventions such as the flashback. The problem is that the various modes of cinematic transgression are always evaluated against the stable background of linear cinematic perception. Therefore, it can be argued that the function of defamiliarization within the cognitive framework is paradoxically to refamiliarize the elements that have been defamiliarized. That is, the concept is used to evaluate variable cinematic conventions against a stable, culturally, and historically non-transforming, naturalistic background, which is informed by the linear onto-epistemological roots of cognitive science. Unlike Stage Fright, Lost Highway and Pierrot le fou do not invite viewers to ‘refamiliarize’ the transgressed cinematic elements to make them conform to the linear onto-epistemology. Stage Fright constructs its spectator in a classical manner that simultaneously reflects upon the double procedure of learning and forgetting

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involved in the comprehension of cinematic narratives. However, rather than simply confirming the classical viewpoint the film holds the potential to allow us to reflect upon how cinema cues us to construct a particular ‘reality’. As such, it renders visible how cinematic conventions acclimatize us to specific notions of reality (cf. Nadel 2005, 428; cf. Chapter II). Therefore, cinematic conventions do not just rehearse an influence on the manner in which cinema is experienced, but also participate in creating the ‘recipes’ whereby we structure everyday experience. In reference to the work of Bruner (1991, 2004), it can be argued that the linear mode of experience is not more or less natural than the non-linear leaps associated with memory, dreaming, or the stream of consciousness. However, the invention of the cinematic apparatus has contributed to enforcing and establishing the linear mode of perception as the most natural mode of experience. From this perspective, the cognitive theory of spectatorship is a further affirmation and upheaval of this particular mode of experience. This should nevertheless not cause us to devalue cinematic linearity (as it can be argued Deleuze does), rather it should allow us to become more aware of how the various dimensions of the image interact to form a complex cinematic experience. While cognitive film studies have enriched our understanding of the linear dimension of cinema, it is important to insist that this be combined with approaches capable of disclosing the non-linear dimensions of the cinematic experience. This brings us back to the cognitive-formalist uneasiness with ambiguities. Although the modern(ist) cinema is explored in the following chapter, I would already here like to refer to Bordwell’s understanding of this cinematic regime, since it demonstrates some of the risks involved in posing the classical cinema as the background against which all other narrational modes can be understood. In short, Bordwell (1985a) argues that ‘art films’ (and ‘parametric narration’) do not mainly rely on a direct relationship to reality or psychological processes. Instead, this paradigm breaks with ‘contingent universals’ to introduce ambiguity. For Bordwell, narrative ambiguity serves only one purpose: ambiguity. In a deliberately crude passage he states that ‘the procedural slogan of art-cinema narration might be: “interpret this film, and interpret it so as to maximize ambiguity”’ (212). According to John Mullarkey (2009), Bordwell’s conception of ambiguities in art cinema reveals his limited, linear conception of reality: For a science of film such as Bordwell’s […] ambiguity in film cannot be realistic because reality really is clear cut. If there is any ambiguity in the film, it must be because the movie is saying something about itself. (35)

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The concept of defamiliarization demonstrates how cognitive-formalism relies on a systematic exclusion of non-linear elements (ambiguities, nonchronological temporal flows, the cinematic experience, etc.) that threaten to challenge the core assumptions of cognitive science (cf. Chapter II). However, the concept of defamiliarization once opened up onto the non-linear dimension of cinema, may prove useful for understanding how contemporary complex cinema takes us beyond the restrictions of a Cartesian-Newtonian space-time, given that continuity in these films no longer plays the central role for organizing cinematic experience (cf. Shaviro 2010, 2012). Due to its ambiguities and willingness to challenge automatic cognition, Stage Fright challenges the core mechanisms of linear cinematic perception. Therefore, the film can be seen as an important precursor of how contemporary cinema increasingly denaturalizes linear cinematic perception, for instance by demonstrating the conventional nature of causal-linear reasoning. Cinema is always involved in a dual process of constituting and denaturalizing particular modes of organizing experience. It is in relation to this that not only narrative but also cinema is a contributing factor to how we organize experience. Therefore, it shall later be argued that our experience of films is not based on backgrounds or mental representations, but instead form an ‘assemblage’, or a direct encounter, of ‘world-spectator-film’ (cf. Brown 2013; cf. Chapter V & Chapter VII). As such, cinema cannot claim to depict or ‘represent’ an objective reality. Instead, it can provide us with perceptions that open new pathways for sensing, experiencing, and thinking. Modern(ist) cinema can be seen as a revolt against the linear and representative foundations of cinema, and as an opening up for new ways of conceptualizing the relation between cinema and spectator.

IV. Modern(ist) Cinema: Logic of the Encounter Once there is no longer a fabula to interpret, once we have no stable point of constructing character or causality, ambiguity becomes so pervasive as to be of no consequence. ‒ Bordwell 1985a, 233 We run in fact into a principle of indeterminability, of indiscernibility; we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confusing but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask. ‒ Deleuze 2005b, 7

Introduction One of the main claims of Deleuzian film-philosophy is that ‘[t]he movementimage of the so-called classical cinema gave way, in the post-war period, to a direct time-image’ (Deleuze 2005b, xi). The present chapter examines the time-image of the modern(ist) cinema through a study of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima My Love 1959), which is emblematic of this Deleuzian image-regime. In relation to this, Patricia Pisters (2011a) has observed that the film ‘is a crystal of time, which gives us the key to the time-image in general’ (102; cf. Deleuze 2005b, 67). This is particular evident in the film’s exploration of the temporality that occurs ‘in-between’ events, which opens up a ‘Borgesian labyrinth of time’ full of virtual pathways.1 For Deleuze, the bifurcation of causal linearity in the time-image is intimately connected with the rupture of the sensory-motor linkages that constituted the movement-image. The cinema of Resnais contains prime examples of how non-linearity becomes the ‘soul’ of the medium in post-war cinema for Deleuze (2005b), for whom the time-image emerges from cinema’s own Kantian revolution in which ‘the subordination of time to movement was reversed’ (xi). Questions of temporality are for Deleuze by nature philosophical questions, because ‘time has always put the notion of truth into crisis’ (126). In this manner, the opposition between the sensory-motor movement-image (chronological, causal, action-response, representational, physical, etc.) and its breakdown in the time-image (sensory-motor ruptures,

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Bergsonian durée, encounters, anti-representationalism, mental landscapes, etc.) is deeply philosophical. For Bordwell, on the other hand, as Oliver Speck (2010) observes, ‘art cinema appears to be a genre whose primary characteristic is the creation of ambiguity’ (50). According to Bordwell, the modern(ist) formal ‘ambiguities’ are justified by a new vraisemblance. Since all narrational paradigms use different strategies to represent the ‘real’, Bordwell is unwilling to grant any of these strategies precedence. In this manner, he eschews the onto-epistemological scepticisms raised in the modern(ist) cinema against the linear paradigm of thought. Bordwell instead aims to demonstrate the usefulness of his cognitive theory of narrative comprehension to understand the ‘game of form’ that modern(ist) films play with the spectator. It will be argued that this theory may go some way to explain modern(ist) spectatorship, but ultimately fails to incorporate the non-linear cinematic dimensions of these films. It could seem that the major difference between cognitive film science and film-philosophy is that the former focuses on questions of narration and the latter on temporality. However, temporal questions are always also questions of narration, even when they take the form of narrative scepticism. Addressing the influence of Hiroshima mon amour, Kovács (2007) remarks: Three years had passed since the release of Hiroshima, My Love and it became common practice, almost compulsory, for a modern filmmaker of the time to merge past and present and make reality and fantasy indiscernible. Hiroshima’s novelty of course was not the flashback technique, but that the memories evoked in the film were not associated with a well-defined story line with a beginning and an end (320-321).

As Hiroshima mon amour brings questions of temporality, philosophy, narration, memory, and history together it not only lends itself especially well to film-philosophical treatments, it also becomes central for understanding the film-historical position of contemporary complex cinema. This is the case, since modern(ist) cinema changed the linear foundations of cinematic spectatorship.

Cinema and the Modern It appears to be commonplace to initiate any treatment of Hiroshima mon amour with the anecdote of how Alain Resnais was first commissioned to do a documentary on Hiroshima as it looked in the aftermath of the

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atomic bomb in 1959; an idea he allegedly spent months considering before finally abandoning. According to the anecdote Resnais already had realized with Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog 1955) – a documentary about the horrors rehearsed in the Nazi concentration camps – ‘that one cannot document a memory’ (Kreidl 1978, 54). The director discussed his struggles with friend Marguerite Duras – one of the leading figures of the nouveau roman movement – who eventually agreed to write a screenplay for the film about Hiroshima. However, the screenplay was not going to be ‘about’ Hiroshima in any traditional sense. As Duras (1961) poetically expresses her thoughts on writing the script for the film: ‘Impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima’ (9). One may ask why this anecdote continuously appears when Resnais’s and Duras’s modern(ist) landmark is discussed. The reason, it seems to me, is that this anecdote in a single and very concise paradox – ‘representing the unrepresentable’ – captures the crisis of representation that characterizes not only Hiroshima mon amour, but the movement of modern(ist) cinema by and large. Why did Resnais not feel able to tell the ‘story’ about Hiroshima in the genre of the traditional documentary?2 In an interview that appeared in the television programme Cinepanorama from 1961 about L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad 1961), Resnais explains that he does not think it is the role of the director to present stories that can be understood as explanations or solutions. He clarifies this position as follows: It’s not my role to give explanations. For that matter I don’t think [Last Year at Marienbad] is a real enigma. By that I mean that each spectator can find his own solution, and it will in all likelihood be a good one. But what’s certain is that the solution won’t be the same for everyone, meaning that my solution is of no more interest than that of any other viewer. (Resnais 2008, par. 3)

If Resnais’s notion of the relations of film, director, and spectator is contrasted with how these have generally been conceived in classical cinema, three interconnected differences can be deduced. Resnais is pointing to 1) a crisis of representation or of not allowing spectators to construct an intersubjective fabula (‘the solution won’t be the same for everyone’). From this 2) a renewed kind of spectatorship (‘each spectator can find his own solution’) is induced, which in turn relies on 3) a renewed concept of ‘truth’ (‘my solution is of no more interest than that of any other viewer’). In this manner, Resnais’s

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comments acutely sum up how modern(ist) cinema revises questions of history, memory, temporality, cinematic representation, and epistemology. After the release of Hiroshima mon amour in 1959 a series of critics and filmmakers – including Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer – held a round-table discussion at the Cahiers du cinéma. This discussion took place at a time when Godard was preparing À bout de souffle (Breathless 1960), and Michelangelo Antonio L’avventura (1960); both films are today considered landmarks within modern(ist) cinema. It is interesting to note the state of simultaneous excitement and uncertainty about the future direction of cinema among these cineastes, who could not know that new waves were soon to spread throughout (European) cinema. One thing, however, was certain: Hiroshima mon amour had nurtured a hope that cinema was about to enter a modern period. Rohmer addresses this as he entertains a thought experiment concerning the future impact of the film: There is no doubt that the cinema also could just as soon leave behind its classical period to enter a modern period. I think that in a few years, in ten, twenty or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima [mon amour] was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema, or whether it was possibly less important than we thought. (Rohmer in Domarchi et al. 1985, 61)

Whether Hiroshima mon amour from a contemporary perspective can rightly be regarded as ‘the first modern film of sound cinema’ or not is a problematic question, since no broad consensus about the boundaries of modern(ist) art cinema exists (cf. Chapter I). Nevertheless, the Cahiers critics place Hiroshima mon amour firmly within a modern(ist) context when they claim the film to be a cinematic companion to Stravinsky’s serial music, to the ‘descriptive’ style of the nouveau roman, and to the fragmentary style of Cubist painters like Pablo Picasso (cf. Domarchi et al. 1985). This is partly due to Resnais’s disjunctive style of editing that breaks with the ‘transparent’ continuity editing of classical cinema. The director Jacques Rivette declares that ‘montage, for Eisenstein as for Resnais, consists in rediscovering unity from a basis of fragmentation, but without concealing the fragmentation in doing so’ (Rivette in Domarchi et al. 1985, 60). The fact that Duras wrote the screenplay together with the film’s exploration of the themes of history, memory, and temporality further connect the film to modernist art. As Kovács (2007) asserts, understanding modernist cinema ‘historically means understanding how it differs from its counterpart, nonmodern or

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classical narrative (art) cinema’ (37). In the history of film theory the dichotomy of classical and modern(ist) has functioned as an effective tool for letting these two narrative paradigms shed mutual light on each other. Such an approach has its advantages, but a cinematic paradigm cannot mainly be understood in terms of its oppositions to another paradigm. Bordwell & Staiger (1985) have complained that ‘theorists usually discuss alternatives to the classical cinema in general and largely negative terms’ (379). It can nevertheless be argued that Bordwell (1985a) applies exactly such a strategy, when he argues that modern ‘art cinema’ has become a coherent style or ‘genre’ due to its deviation from the ‘standard’ classical narrative schema. According to Bordwell, the decline of the Hollywood dominance after the Second World War allowed ‘art cinema’ to develop into a coherent alternative narrational paradigm. Consequently, ‘art cinema’ is intimately connected to the national movements that spread all over Europe in the late 1950s and the 1960s (such as the French nouvelle vague), and it is associated with the works of auteurs such as Resnais, Fellini, Antonioni, and Bergman, among others (cf. Bordwell 1985a, 230). While Bordwell’s cognitivist theory of ‘art cinema’ is capable of shedding light on certain aspects of ‘art cinema’, it can be argued that it comes with an unfortunate tendency to downplay the more non-linear aspects of the films. Consequently, it risks conflating this narrational paradigm to the core principles of classical cinema. This conflation is attained by means of two methodological choices employed by Bordwell (1985a) in his classical scientific endeavour to determine the ‘underlying principles that enable the viewer to comprehend the film’ (205). First, Bordwell draws on the cognitive-formalist theory of the background to propose an understanding of modern(ist) cinema as a series of deviations from the standard mode of film practice (cf. Chapter III). Second, Bordwell turns to a close examination of Resnais’s La guerre est finie (The War is Over 1966) to demonstrate that despite the film’s ontoepistemological divergences from classical cinema, ‘art-cinema narration’ can be subsumed under the linear framework of cognitive film theory. In his characterization of modern(ist) cinema, Bordwell (1985a) states that ‘art-cinema narration has become a coherent mode partly by defining itself as a deviation from classical narrative’ (228). For Bordwell this becomes a justification for his methodological use of classical narration as a background against which ‘art-cinema narration’ stands out as a coherent narrational paradigm. As has been argued earlier, the drawback of this method is that it risks becoming automatic and thereby blocking for our understanding of other logics at work in the construction of a selection of films (cf. Kessler 2010, 65; cf. Chapter III). In any case, Bordwell conceives of ‘art-cinema’ in

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terms of a series of systematized deviations from classical cinema of which the most important are: a less redundant syuzhet; less generic motivation; a lack of deadlines; a focus on character rather than plot; a concern with reaction rather than action; flexible means of expression rather than fixed conventions; a tenuous linking of events rather than tight causality; more permanent causal gaps; distortions motivated by ‘psychological’ time of the sort discussed by Bergson rather than by ‘Newtonian’ time; unreliable rather than reliable narration; ‘subjective’ rather than ‘objective’; it is ‘non-classical’ in creating permanent narrative gaps and in calling attention to processes of fabula construction; a far more frequent undermining of norms than is common in a classical film (cf. Bordwell 1985a, 205-235). According to Bordwell, these various deviations connect to form a new vraisemblance distinguishable from that of classical cinema. Bordwell (1985a) sums up the classical vraisemblance as follows: For the classical cinema, rooted in the popular novel, short story and well made drama of the late nineteenth century, ‘reality’ is assumed to be a tacit coherence among events, a consistency and clarity of individual identity. Realistic motivation corroborates the compositional motivation achieved through cause and effect. (206)

This is contrasted with ‘art-cinema narration’, which Bordwell argues takes its cue from ‘literary modernism’ [and] questions [the classical] definition of the real: the world’s laws may not be knowable, personal psychology may be indeterminate. Here new aesthetic conventions claim to seize other ‘realities’: the aleatoric world of ‘objective’ reality and the fleeting states that characterize ‘subjective’ reality. (206)

Thus, one way of understanding the differences between classical cinema and ‘art cinema’ appears to be through an examination of their respective vraisemblance. Yet, Bordwell emphasizes that the epistemological and aesthetic differences of classical cinema and ‘art cinema’ amount to nothing more than two divergent strategies for fictional representation. Bordwell argues that modern(ist) cinema has too often, and unjustifiably, been perceived as the more sophisticated depiction of ‘reality’. Against this Bordwell states: Of course the realism of art cinema is no more ‘real’ than that of the classical film; it is simply a different canon of realistic motivation, a new vraisemblance, justifying particular options and effects. Specific sorts of

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realism motivate a loosening of cause and effect, an episodic construction of the syuzhet, and an enhancement of the film’s symbolic dimension through an emphasis on the fluctuations of character psychology. (206)

Bordwell goes on to argue that many of the stylistics of ‘art cinema’ are used strategically to communicate the idea that this kind of cinema is superior to its classical counterpart. He argues that within some aesthetic positions, ambiguity is what philosophers call a ‘good-making property,’ because they are denotatively unequivocal, while art films become good because they ask to be puzzled over. Within the framework of this book, however, ambiguity is only one aesthetic strategy among many, all of potentially equal interest. (212)

In this manner, Bordwell attempts to disengage himself as an analyst from the culturally divergent modes whereby classical and modern(ist) cinema understand their relation to a deeper objective notion of reality. However, in attempting to take upon him an ‘objective’ and value-free scientific position in the name of universal rationalism, Bordwell fails to acknowledge the degree to which his methodological choice of using classical cinema as a background is already ‘a choice made by a scholar when deciding how to approach an object’ (Kessler 2010, 78). Modern(ist) cinema may not propose a more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ representation of reality, but opens up another way of experiencing reality. However, to understand how this is achieved, the analyst must explore aspects of the cinematic experience that are not immediately apparent once modern(ist) cinema is perceived against the background of Hollywood cinema. Bordwell’s methodological choices bring him to the conclusion that ‘ambiguity’ is the defining narrative device of ‘art cinema’. As has been argued earlier, the cognitive model is uneasy with cinematic ambiguities (cf. Chapter III). In relation to modern(ist) cinema, Bordwell (1985a) interprets the focus on narrative ambiguity as an expression of the ‘relativistic notion of truth’ (212) that governs this narrational paradigm. When this notion is taken to its extremes, ‘ambiguity becomes so pervasive as to be of no consequence’ (233). Ultimately, Bordwell uses the concept of ‘ambiguity’ as a grand unifier supposedly capable of determining the underlying principle that connects the otherwise disparate narrational practices of ‘art cinema’. Thanouli (2009) formulates Bordwell’s use of ambiguity as follows: The concept of ambiguity becomes thus a handy tool that, on the one hand, relieves us of the obligation to f ind determinate answers and

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explanations regarding the function of the formal devices, while, on the other, it helps us unite under the same umbrella term, the art cinema, a very wide range of narrational possibilities that would otherwise seem endless and chaotic. (4)

Furthermore, the concept of ‘ambiguity’ serves to encapsulate the relativist epistemology that Bordwell perceives to be at the heart of ‘art cinema’. This brings us to the second methodological choice taken by Bordwell in his study of art cinema narration. In his treatment of La guerre est finie, Bordwell studies how the film engages the viewer in a cognitive ‘game of form’. Although these formal games do shed light on a particular aspect of the modern(ist) film, my interest lies primarily in Bordwell’s methodological shift. In the f irst part of his treatment, ‘art cinema’ is defined by a catalogue of deviations from classical cinema. However, in the second part Bordwell appears to be more interested in determining the similarities of the two paradigms, since these can be perceived as an affirmation of the ‘cross-cultural’ and linear principles that are constitutive of all narrative cinema. The ‘game of form’ that Bordwell (1985a) argues La guerre est finie is playing with its spectators requires that these must ‘draw on tacit conventions of comprehension characteristic of the art film [...] in order to construct the fabula and identify the rules unique to this film’s narrational work’ (213). Bordwell thus presumes the construction of a coherent narrative to be as central for the modern(ist) film as it is for the classical film. However, the problems spectators experience in constructing a coherent fabula cannot be reduced to mere puzzles that can be solved according to a ‘problem-solution’ model, since these films have been designed to explore the shortcomings of the very linear sense-making that constitute this ‘problem-solving’ type of spectatorship. Nevertheless, Bordwell is neither interested in an examination of what happens when ‘art cinema’ continuously disrupts our cognitive efforts to render the narrative continuum linear, nor in what arises from the dissolution of classical narrative principles. The reason, I believe, relates to the fact that cognitivism, as Bordwell (1989) has explained, is ‘in general more concerned [than the Freudian framework] with normal and successful action’ (12). This indicates that cognitive film science primarily focuses on those aspects that can be directly linked to the linear dimension of cinema. As such, ‘cognitive theory wants to understand such human mental activities as recognition, comprehension, inference-making, interpretation, judgement, memory and imagination’ (13). It is, however, worth noting that cognitive film science

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does not share its exclusive focus on ‘successful actions’ with cognitive neuroscience more generally. Much of the scientific progress in these fields results from studies of brains that – for various reasons – do not behave according to the ‘normal’ or standard brain assumed by cognitive film scientists.3 Furthermore, when Bordwell regards the ‘relativistic notion of truth’ found in ‘art cinema’ to be merely an aesthetic strategy, he is simultaneously attempting subtly to disarm the philosophical claim behind this strategy. Unfortunately, Bordwell in this manner avoids a genuine confrontation with the epistemological concerns of ‘art cinema’. That would be interesting since modern(ist) cinema challenges some of the core principles of cognitive (film) science – one of which is the philosophical concept of representation (cf. Chapter II). In the beginning of Narration in the Fiction Film (1985a), Bordwell states that ‘we can treat narrative as a representation, considering the story’s world, its portrayal of some reality, or its broader meanings’ (xi, emphasis in original). Yet, from the perspective of embodied cognition explored in Chapter V, a treatment of narrative must also include the sensory-motor contingencies, bodily affects, posture, and movements that ‘enter into cognition in a non-representational way’ (Gallagher 2015, 97). Another Bordwellian assumption that has been challenged by the embodied approaches is the idea that the brain mainly functions in terms of rational, linear computation. In an interview cited by Bordwell, Resnais explains that the editing style of La guerre est finie was meant to underline ‘the mind’s tendency to leap’ (Resnais in Bordwell 1985a, 219). Resnais is thus challenging the computational metaphor, suggesting instead that the mind is an intricate network of connections according to which the subject leaps. However, this should not be taken as a bold statement about the functioning of the brain, but rather as a metaphor for the processes according to which thinking is constituted. As such, Resnais’s statement is critical towards the causal-linear mode of sense-making that has been associated with the classical cinema, but which could be equally connected to the linear interpretative strategies discussed in Chapter III. In relation to this, it is interesting that Bordwell (1985a) quickly disarms Resnais’s appeal to link his editing style to the non-linear functioning of the brain. He blankly remarks: ‘[o]ne could just as easily argue that it is more plausible for the mind to plan its moves in chronological order’ (219). Luckily we do not need to settle on either, since it can be argued that the brain is perfectly capable of both. Therefore, both – although in different manners – are central for understanding the cinematic experience.

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The problem addressed here is that Bordwell adheres to a methodology that is only capable of capturing the linear aspects of modern(ist) cinema. This means that he ignores, rejects, neutralizes, or downplays those aspects of modern(ist) cinema that do not affirm his monolithic linear understanding of the cinematic experience. In this manner, Bordwell can convincingly argue that La guerre est finie ‘plays a game of gaps with the viewer’ (219), and engages the spectator in finding the ‘key to the film’s narrational method’ (221). However, in his insistence on the primacy of a ‘problem-solution’ mode of spectatorship in ‘art cinema’, Bordwell fails to provide a convincing treatment of what he believes to be the key narrational device: ambiguity. Ultimately, Bordwell’s answer is that ambiguities exist in ‘art cinema’ for the sake of ambiguity. Eventually, the linear focus taken by Bordwell means that the classical and modern(ist) paradigms become conflated. As such, the ‘ambiguity’ Bordwell initially determined as unique to ‘art cinema’ is all of a sudden no longer fundamentally different from the classical film, because ‘the ambiguity of the art cinema is of a highly controlled and limited sort, standing out against a background of narrational coherence not fundamentally different from that of the classical cinema’ (222). Drawing upon the challenges stemming from the dissolution of the linear onto-epistemology in Hiroshima mon amour, it will be argued that f ilms that do not primarily facilitate meaning through the construction of a strict line of causality, demand a revised understanding of cinematic narration. The problem with the cognitive comprehension does not relate to its constructivist aspect according to which ‘[t]he fabula is [...] a pattern which perceivers of narratives create through assumptions or inferences’ (49). Rather the idea that is challenged here pertains to the conception of the fabula as ‘the developing result of picking up narrative cues [...]’ (49). In the following, it will be demonstrated how this conception goes against the narrative logic of Hiroshima mon amour, insofar as it assumes the film to contain pre-existing and observer-independent ‘cues’ for the spectator to ‘pick up’. As Nick Redfern (2005) observes, Bordwell’s model of cognitive spectatorship assumes ‘that a narrative exists, albeit only partially, prior to the active processes of construction that the spectator brings to a film’ (sec. 6). In this manner, Bordwell’s model intends to uncover, interpret, or represent the inherent meanings that a given film is ‘really’ communicating (cf. Redfern 2004, 42). As we shall see, Hiroshima mon amour complicates the assumption that cinema can communicate inherent meanings in any such straightforward or linear manner.

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Hiroshima mon amour – A Cinematic Love Affair Hiroshima mon amour revolves around a love affair between a French actress (Emanuelle Riva), who is in Hiroshima to shoot a film about peace, and a local Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). These two main characters remain nameless in the script and are simply referred to as Elle and Lui (or Her and Him). Their love affair is initiated shortly before the French woman has to return home to France, where she plans to continue her marital life as if nothing had happened. This affair, we learn, is one of several (‘I’m very fond of men’). The Japanese man, too, will return to his wife, and continue his life as it was before. The French woman experiences the affair as both intense and impossible, and it therefore brings back memories of a long forgotten, equally intense and impossible love affair she had with a German soldier during the occupation in Nevers, France. The two impossible love affairs, which form the two narrative threads of the film, gradually merge as present-day Hiroshima and wartime Nevers interweave. Towards the end of the film, Resnais cuts between images of Hiroshima and Nevers in a way that emphasizes the gradual convergence of the two places in the film. Simultaneously the couple re-enacts the events of Nevers, as the Japanese man embodies the German solder. Consequently, the script – as Duras envisioned it – does not amount to the story of Hiroshima told from the perspective of eyewitnesses or expert observers (a strategy associated with the documentary genre), but rather from the perspective of the emotions of a woman of thirty-four who, because the brutal war evidence at Hiroshima evokes her first love affair fourteen years previously, confesses the secret tragedy of her youth to a Japanese architect. Love grows between her and the architect, but she refuses to sacrifice herself to it. She claims that forgetfulness is a stronger force and that she will forget him just as she has forgotten her first love – a German soldier shot on liberation day – and as the people of Hiroshima have subdued their memory of the atomic explosion. (Duras in Kreidl 1978, 54)

Hiroshima mon amour thus explores the temporality of memory in which the past is subject to both a collective preserving (through historical facts, museums, memorial days, sites, documentary f ilms, historic footages, etc.) and an unforgettable personal trauma. In the beginning of the film, the actress seeks to ‘understand’ Hiroshima by reducing it to mere facts (‘200,000 dead and 80,000 wounded in 9 seconds. Those are the official

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figures’) and by appealing to its preservation in our collective past (‘four times at the museum in Hiroshima’). However, already in the film’s opening act the authenticity of such a perspective is rendered problematic at the very same time as it is announced. The 13-minute poetic opening act of Hiroshima mon amour consists of three separate ontological realms. Rather than inviting spectators to construct a fabula (or story) out of these disentangled realms, Resnais’s style of editing is simultaneously seeking an effect of opposition and unity. As Rivette acutely observes: It’s a double movement – emphasizing the autonomy of the shot and simultaneously seeking within that shot a strength that will enable it to enter into a relationship with another or several other shots, and in this way eventually form a unity [...] this unity is no longer that of classic continuity. (Rivette in Domarchi et al. 1985, 61)

The first image of the film (after the opening titles) is that of two lovers – the Japanese man and the French woman – in the act of lovemaking. This image of unity in its purest form is disrupted as the bodies are alternately covered with ashes, dust, and sweat. Therefore, instead of being a sheer depiction of two bodies in perfect harmony, Resnais presents the viewers with an image that comprises the oppositions of love/desire and death/destruction. The image in this sense becomes an encounter between oppositions, like the combination of the words ‘Hiroshima’ and ‘amour/love’ that resonates from the film’s title. The couple in the act of lovemaking constitutes the first of three realms of the opening ‘montrage’. 4 The second realm commemorates the type of documentary footages for which Resnais was initially commissioned. This realm consists of ‘representations’ of the horror of Hiroshima, whose role is to depict the ‘collective’ past of the atomic trauma. The French woman is seen as a tourist visiting the different sites – the hospital, the museum, the tour bus, etc. – of Hiroshima and strolling around the city, while trying to absorb the immense history of the place. This realm of the actress, who is in Hiroshima to shoot a movie about peace, is encumbered with representations, reconstructions, and reenactments. Hiroshima is portrayed as a museum piece, and the film’s first image of the city is a miniature model of how it looked after the bombings on 6 August 1945. The third realm exists purely as the off-screen voices of the Japanese man and the French woman. The language in the dialogue is poetic, and is initiated by the Japanese man’s negation (‘you saw nothing at Hiroshima,

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nothing’) followed by the French woman’s affirmation (‘I saw everything’). This pattern continues throughout the dialogue. Although the voices are detached from the other realms, they appear – although in no straightforward manner – to comment on the images they accompany. The images of the hospital, for example, are accompanied by the voice of the woman, who claims: ‘I saw everything. I saw the hospital I’m sure of it.’ The actress insists in the representations’ ability to transmit something genuine about Hiroshima, although she acknowledges their shortcomings (‘the reconstructions, for lack of everything’ and ‘the films were as authentic as possible’). In spite of the inability of the artefacts to replace reality, they are capable of arousing affects that convey the sensation of ‘experiencing’ the horrors of Hiroshima (‘the illusion, quite simply, is so perfect that tourists weep’). These, however, exist as pure and naked affects deprived of any deeper sense. This is made clear by the Japanese man’s continuous rejection of the documentary images’ claim of depicting a ‘reality’. Thereby, the film constructs a conflicting space between the affective engagement and the reflective disengagement with the images. In so doing, the film accentuates vision as both a historical and social construct. In Hiroshima mon amour the ancient problem of representation finds a unique cinematic expression. Interestingly, Doane (2002) connects the paradoxes of cinema’s archival desire to the image of a body no longer capable of ‘seeing’ the present: [I]t is finally in the new representational technologies of vision – photography, the cinema – that one witnesses the insistency of the impossible desire to represent – to archive – the present. And if a perception of radical finitude is a condition for archival desire, the longing to grasp the present in representation finds its basis in an image of a body whose visual powers are defective, lacking, riven by delay – a body which cannot ‘see’ that present which is so crucial to modernity. (102)

In extension of this, the opening act of Hiroshima mon amour perfectly illustrates the epistemological shift in spectatorship undertaken by modern(ist) cinema. The spectator is no longer perceived to be a fixed and stable subject, but is instead schizophrenic and centrifugal. As such, the gaze of the spectator ‘is not based in simple perspectivalism but in a synaesthetic virtuality that constantly negotiates between all the senses and their respective memories’ (Elliott 2010, 4). The opening act of Hiroshima mon amour beautifully demonstrates how this is achieved by rupturing the classical cinematic flow that ties the affective to the cognitive responses of viewers (cf. Deleuze 2005a).

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The poetic opening act of Hiroshima mon amour is an acute cinematic expression of the crisis and scepticism that surrounded the linear representational scheme in post-war Europe. In the opening act, Duras’s dictum concerning ‘the impossibility to talk about Hiroshima’ is given a voice as her scepticism towards representation is embodied in the Japanese man’s repetition of the dictum: ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima’. The disconnection of affect from cognition exposes the manner in which the collective memory of Hiroshima is formed through an ensemble of representations that work on spectators emotionally (e.g. news footages, museums, memorials, miniatures, photographs, eyewitnesses, etc.). Yet, in the context of the opening act, these representations appear standardized, lifeless, schematic, and habitual. What is rendered problematic is not the inability of these images to affect its audience, but rather the presumption that ‘Hiroshima’ is represented in these; an idea that is symbolically conveyed by the miniature form Hiroshima takes at the museum. Furthermore, Resnais’s disjunctive style of editing in the opening act no longer works on a principle of assimilation (linking a chain of actions and reactions), but instead on a non-linear principle of disparity that connects the images in a plethora of ways. In this sense, the spectator’s main cognitive goal is no longer that of constructing a coherent and causal-linear logic. Thus, the scene expresses a non-representational concept of thought that resonates well with Deleuzian film-philosophy. In relation to Hiroshima mon amour, Resnais has stated: ‘Any suffering is beyond measure. We have brought together these two dramas, these two traumas, to apprehend them better’ (Resnais in Wilson 2009, 54). In the film, cinema’s ability to communicate and transmit objective information is denied. Human knowledge is confined to language and other means of representation and the ‘true’ world is beyond reach and incommunicable. Related to this is the argument that classical cinema can be perceived as a preinterpreted world in which everything is organized to facilitate a particular meaning, whereas modern(ist) cinema is obsessed with the loss of classical meanings in a world that no longer lends itself to representational sense. Along these lines, modern(ist) cinema can be perceived as being ‘obsessed with the loss of the world of classic cinema and [it] constantly tries to express this loss, either by deconstructing the forms of classicism or by formally emphasising the loss of meaning’ (Kretzschmar 2002, par. 7; cf. d’Allonnes 1994). Since Hiroshima mon amour works on a narrative logic that is not classical (but could be expressed as a logic of the encounter), it makes little sense to talk about how it cues its spectators. Its opening act is a

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perfect example of the manner in which modern(ist) film challenges the linear onto-epistemology that still governs prevailing conceptions of narration, history, representation, and memory. It is due to this epistemological displacement, which separates the classical and modern(ist) film, that Oliver Fahle (2005) has argued that it would be meaningless to attempt to understand the work of directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders, Alexander Kluge, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Federico Fellini exclusively from the perspective of classical narratology (11). As a manner of capturing this dimension of modern(ist) cinema, Deleuze invokes a concept of ‘thought’ that is not identical with its use within the linear onto-epistemology of cognitivism. Since classical film facilitates the possibility of narrative coherence as a causal-linear story, narrative comprehension within this aesthetic regime is associated with the ability to assimilate new information into schemata, which are pre-existing ‘organized clusters of knowledge’ (Bordwell 1985a, 31) that ensures the integration of non-linear elements into the linear order of the fabula. Yet, such a cognitive ‘problem-solution’ process is not what constitutes thought for Deleuze, who, as Paul Patton (1996) rightly observes, ‘has always maintained a rigorous distinction between knowledge, understood as the recognition of truths or the solution of problems, and thinking understood as the creation of concepts or the determination of problems’ (6). For Deleuze, thought instead occurs in the ‘hesitant gestures which accompany our encounters with the unknown’ (8-9). However, this logic is not completely detached from the linear logic, because it feeds on a criticism of it. Deleuze (2004a) writes: The conditions of a true critic and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. (176, emphasis in original)

In a similar vein, the modern(ist) cinema can be said to confront spectators with a fundamental ‘encounter’ with classical cinema and how it facilitates thought. To be more precise, modern(ist) cinema comprises a challenge to everyday quotidian cognition, and thereby forces spectators to explore unknown territories of thought. However, the conditions of these territories vary from viewer to viewer, and thus a linear, narrative trajectory cannot be predicted in advance. This does not mean that the modern(ist) f ilm disposes completely of linear causality, although the linear reorganization of the narrative

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continuum is no longer a guarantee for ‘understanding’ the story. Following from this is a significant difference in the manner that classical and modern(ist) cinema facilitate meaning. The movement of thought in the first is defined by a linear trajectory progressing towards a predefined goal, and consequently narrative comprehension becomes organized around (the obstacles towards) constructing a fabula. As has been argued, this does not justify a restrictive use of linear interpretative methods that are insensitive to the inherent ambiguities of the classical film (cf. Chapter III). In the modern(ist) f ilm, linear rationalizations are ultimately deemed inadequate or insufficient for providing a meaningful appreciation of the films. Therefore, Deleuze (1995) argues that modern(ist) time-images stimulate brain circuits based on ‘more creative tracing, less “probable” links’ (61). The power of cinema, according to Deleuze, lies in its ability to produce a shock to thought by communicating vibrations to the cortex whereby the nervous and cerebral system are touched directly.5 Both cognitive film science and Deleuzian film-philosophy are interested in the workings of the brain. However, with respect to modern(ist) cinema it becomes evident that their theories rely on very different conceptions of the human brain. In short, cognitivists study the psychology of the brain to derive principles of unity and to establish ‘cross-cultural’ universals (cf. Bordwell & Carroll 1996). In general, they look to the study of the brain to establish a scientific, standardized, and generalized concept of the viewer, who is assumed to utilize alternative frameworks of belief or representational schemata to arrive at culturally divergent conceptions of the narrative reality (cf. Chapter II). This assumption becomes explicit when Joseph Anderson in his pivotal contribution to cognitive film science, The Reality of Illusion (1998), argues: The viewer can be thought of as a standard biological audio/video processor. The central processing unit, the brain along with its sensory modules, is standard. The same model with only minor variations is issued to everyone. The basic operating system is also standard and universal, for both the brain and its functions were created over 150 million years of mammalian evolution (12).

Contrarily, Deleuze conceptualizes the brain in terms of an undifferentiated mass of singularity, for which, as Bellour (2010) has argued, ‘there is no science of the viewer; there is only the spectator’s thoughts and experiences’ (92).

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According to Deleuze, cinema is not based on representations such as cognitivists assume. Instead, the cinema provides a fusion of film and spectator that immediately produces brain circuits that open up for new ways of experiencing the world. Cinematic spectatorship for him is, therefore, not a matter of a cognitive reorganization of images into a rational and chronological representation. Rather cinematic spectatorship, as Richard Rushton (2009) explains, requires that we are willing to ‘lose control of ourselves, undo ourselves, and forget ourselves while in front of the cinema screen’ (53). Deleuze perceives the self-identical Cartesian subject of cognitivism, who remains unaffected by the cinematic material, while mentally constructing a story by means of temporal integration and schemata application, to be an abstract illusion. Instead, the Deleuzian conception of spectatorship is intimately connected to processes of ‘desubjectivization’ – this goes some way in explaining why Deleuzian scholars tend to valorize affect over cognition. As Rushton explains, it is only when the cinema no longer primarily addresses us as individual subjects – as it does with the movement-image – that we are ‘able to loosen the shackles of our existing subjectivities and open ourselves up to other experiences and knowing’ (53). In short, whereas the Bordwellian spectator is cognitively mastering the images through rational organizations, the Deleuzian spectator is constituted in the affective encounter between mind and screen. According to Pisters (2012), ‘spectatorship, in terms of Deleuzian film-philosophy, can best be seen in terms of being “affected” by “signaletic material” that changes and forms our subjectivities in an ongoing process’ (31). Furthermore, it can be argued that when the modern(ist) film disconnects spectators’ affective from their cognitive responses, the linear, habitual mode of existence where ‘human beings function through sense-stimulus and motor-response, definable action and dependable reaction’ (Ashton 2008, par. 5) is destabilized. This occurs through the rupture of the sensory-motor linkages that constitute movement-images, as related to a particular mode of thought ‘motivated by intention, selection, need for use value, action, and relation’ (Ashton 2008, par. 5; cf. Deleuze 2005b, 38). Resnais is the modern(ist) filmmaker per se to cinematically explore the non-linear, pre-subjective, and precognitive venues of spectatorship. In the cinema of Resnais, says Deleuze (2005b), [t]he world has become memory, brain, superimposition of ages or lobes, but the brain itself has become consciousness, continuation of ages, creation or growth of ever new lobes, re-creation of matter as with styrene.

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The screen itself is the cerebral membrane where immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future, the inside and the outside, at a distance impossible to determine, independent of any fixpoint [...] The image no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristics but topology and time. (121)

From this passage it becomes obvious that for Deleuze, the brain is as much a model of thought as its progenitor (cf. Elliott 2010, 1). As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have famously proclaimed, [t]hought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter [...]. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system (‘the uncertain nervous system’). Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. (15)

Thus, Deleuze perceives the brain as a non-linear and complex network of possible connections, capable of bringing the past into the present, and the present into the future. From this it follows that in the rupture of the sensory-motor linkages of the images, modern(ist) cinema opens up new ways of experiencing temporality as constituted in ‘the immediate and direct encounter between spectator and screen’. In Hiroshima mon amour the past occasionally manifests itself in the present as a sudden force that breaks the succession of past, present, and future. After the couple have slept together, the French woman watches the Japanese man as he is sleeping. Suddenly an image disturbs the woman’s (and consequently the film’s) perception, as the arm of the Japanese man for a brief moment becomes that of her dead German lover. It is significant that this memory-image is not represented through a classical flashback, since it is not immediately integrated into the narrative flow. At this point, there has been no mentioning of her German love affair, and spectators can therefore only retrospectively organize this information into the ongoing fabula. Thus, initially the hand of the German lover is experienced as a ‘naked’ image deprived of its temporal anchorage. Consequently, this image is closer to a flashback in the psychoanalytical sense, where, as Cathy Caruth (1995) reminds us, a ‘flashback [...] provides a form of recall that survives at the cost of willed memory or of the very continuity of conscious thought’ (152; cf. Wilson 2009, 52).

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From this perspective, the ‘flashback’ is not a device that serves the linear narrative flow; instead, it opens up a non-linear realm attached to the woman’s subjectivity. Here the memory of Nevers is omnipresent, even if it is not necessarily ‘recollected’ or ‘recalled’. As such, it reveals how memory can be present and absent at once. As the French woman explains: ‘Nevers, you see, is the town I dream about most in all the world, is the very thing I dream about most. At the same time it is the thing I think about least in all the world.’ Memory here should not be understood in terms of recollections, but rather as what Deleuze – with reference to the philosophy of Bergson – calls ‘sheets of the past’. Following Bergson, memories are continuously integrated into perception, which causes the impression of time as a linear unfolding. Memories, in other words, fold into perception before they are experienced as explicit recollections. The act of reading proves an illustrative example of this constant enfolding of memories and perception, since we do not read a word letter by letter.6 For Bergson (1991), ‘[p]erception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other, are always exchanging something of their substance as by process of endosmosis’  (67). Elsewhere Bergson concludes: ‘There is no perception which is not full of memories’ (33). In action-oriented (or, problem-solution oriented) perception such as described in cognitive film science, memory aids the sensory-motor schemata and functions to organize and filter our perception in accordance with our immediate interests. The classical flashback conceives of memory in a similar fashion, since a recollection here (e.g. in the form of a subjective recollection) disrupts the linear flow of the narrative to reveal new information that must be cognitively reorganized and integrated into the fabula.7 On the other hand, a sheet of past is a part of memory, which we do not have access to in the same way as to a recollection. It is nevertheless a ‘region of time’ from which recollections arise. In Hiroshima mon amour the image of the German soldier initially takes the form of a sheet of past. However, as the narrative progresses and the woman starts to recall her past, the memory transforms into a proper recollection, and in cinematic terms her memories thus become more aligned with the (classical) flashback. In the Bergsonian conception of time, memories – unlike recollections – do not exist as successive temporal layers. The Bergsonian model of the cone (cf. Fig. 2) illustrates how perception and memory always coexist – although in various degrees of contraction.8 The memories that are close to point S in Bergson’s inverted cone are intimately connected to perception (P), where recollection-images are

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formed. In the least contracted part of the cone, memory is closer connected to ‘pure’ memory.9 In broad terms, classical cinema is interested in those memories that occupy the most contracted part of the cone. Thus, the classical film is interested mainly in memories as recollection-images that can be depicted as flashbacks. The time-image, on the other hand, explores the least contracted areas of Bergson’s cone, and it can thus be said to explore another dimension of memory. According to Deleuze (2005b), this endows the images with a more complex and multilayered mode of temporality: Memory is clearly no longer the faculty of having recollections: it is the membrane which, in the most varied ways (continuity, but also discontinuity, envelopment, etc.), makes sheets of the past and layers of reality correspond, the first emanating from an inside which is always there, the second arriving from an outside always to come, the two gnawing at the present which is now only their encounter. (199-200)

Moreover, not only subjective memories are able to form sheets of the past. The traumatic past of Hiroshima forms collective, rather than subjective, sheets of the past. In this manner, memory relates to history in a dynamic sense insofar as the past event is continuously being reconstituted in the present. Therefore, the lovers’ historical memories of Hiroshima are incommensurable and it is not until the French woman shares her own personal trauma with her Japanese lover that a common ground can be established between them.10 Deleuze (2005b) writes: There are two characters, but each has his or her own memory which is foreign to the other. There is no longer anything at all in common. It is like two incommensurable regions of past, Hiroshima and Nevers. And while the Japanese refuses the woman entry into his own region [....], the woman draws the Japanese into hers, willingly and with his consent, up to a certain point. Is this not a way for each of them to forget his or her own memory, and make a memory for two, as if memory was now becoming world, detaching itself from their persons? (113-114)

As John Rajchman (2010) has pointed out, Resnais’s aim is no longer to recollect the past in a consciousness, individual, or collective, ‘but on the contrary, to prevent any such closure within private memory or public commemoration, showing, rather, the sense in which it is still at work in the present’ (290). In this manner, the dynamic conception of the past in

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Figure 2. Bergson’s Cone of Memory (Bergson 1991, 152)

Hiroshima mon amour amounts to something more than a mere deviation from the classical reliance on recollection-images. In a similar vein, the portrayal of temporality found in Hiroshima mon amour is not that of a series of events tied together causal-linearly. Such logic is abandoned in favour of an exploration of the temporality that occurs in the interstice of events. In relation to this, Marie-Claire Ropars (2007) has observed that time in Hiroshima mon amour is one of ‘in-betweens’: Weak times, dead times; the important thing is ‘between acts’, what is drawn out right across time and remains incomplete – like this interminable parting in Hiroshima, these sixteen hours of time to kill, during which the man and woman wander through the city – waiting room, tea room, river’s edge – leaving and refinding each other without us ever knowing the why or wherefore of these moments. (par. 4).

In the time in-between, perception opens up vast temporal layers of the past, i.e. to the least contracted part of the Bergsonian cone. It can, therefore, be

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argued that temporality is central to modern(ist) cinema in a conspicuous Bergsonian form. Bergson’s cone offers a way of conceptualizing the different functions of memory and temporality at play in the classical and modern(ist) cinema. In the first, recollections or flashbacks can be used as a narrative strategy to withhold or introduce information at moments carefully orchestrated to elicit emotional response. In the latter, narration is not a causal-linear unfolding of events but rather a non-linear assembly of such events. Consequently, the spectator’s emotional responses become less orchestrated, schematic, or predictable. Deleuze (2005b) explains that what brings the classical cinema into question after the war is the very breakup of the sensory-motor schema, which means that ‘the viewer’s problem becomes “What is there to see in the image?” (and not “What are we going to see in the next image?”)’ (261). However, it is not only affectively but also in terms of thought that the modern(ist) cinema incites its viewer beyond schematic sensory-motor assimilation. Against André Bazin, Deleuze argues that the real innovation of Italian neorealism was not a more authentic or ‘true’ representation of the real, but instead a new relation to the sensory-motor system and consequently to thought: However, we are not sure that the problem [of neorealism] arises on the level of the real, whether in relation to form or content. Is it not rather at the level of the ‘mental’, in terms of thought? If all the movement-images […] underwent such an upheaval, was this not first of all because a new element burst on to the scene which was to prevent perception being extended into action in order to put it in contact with thought and gradually, was to subordinate the image to the demands of new signs that would take it beyond movement? (1)

In the movement-image, images are linked according to laws of ‘association, of continuity, resemblance, contrast, or opposition’ (265). The sensory-motor system works on a double movement of integration and differentiation to form ‘a regime of localizable relations, actual linkages, legal causal and logical connections’ (123). This narrative mode of organizing thought is opposed to that of the time-image, which is constituted by ‘gaps, “irrational cuts”, discontinuity, and differentiation’ (123). For Deleuze, narration is consequently intimately attached to the sensory-motor system. With the modern(ist) cinema having often been associated with the formal device of ambiguity – i.e. in denying spectators a possibility of

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constructing a coherent fabula – it has also been associated with nonnarrative cinema, and Deleuzian film-philosophy appears to reaffirm this impression. However, when closely read it becomes clear that Deleuze (2005b) rather tries to deduce another type of narration based on the time-image that gives ‘narration a new value because it abstracts it from all successive action’ (98). According to this view, the basis of narration in the time-image has changed from its classical form. In fact, narration, like representation, becomes the ultimate paradox of the time-image. Resnais demonstrates an uneasiness with interpretations of Hiroshima mon amour based upon the construction of a coherent fabula, when he states ‘the past shouldn’t be a flashback [...] You might even imagine that everything the Emmanuelle Riva character narrated was false; there’s no proof that the story she recites really happened. On a formal level, I find that ambiguity interesting’ (Resnais in Jones 2015, par. 7). In any case, whether or not the French woman is lying is no longer the fundamental issue of the narrative. For Deleuze (2005b), this is a significant characteristic of the time-image, since the indeterminability of the imaginary and the real, the physical and the mental, etc., is no longer a central concern here (7). To determine the kind of narration that arises in this blurring of Cartesian dualisms (imaginary-real; physical-mental), it may be helpful to differentiate this kind of narration from the unreliable narration of Stage Fright. First of all, the term ‘unreliable’ implies that the film contains an objective and stable narrative truth. This despite the fact that the narration systematically obstructs, misleads, and deceives spectators on their path towards a coherent fabula. Contrarily, Deleuze argues that narration in the time-image becomes ‘falsifying’. However, this should not be understood in relativistic terms, as Deleuze (2005b) makes it clear that it is ‘not at all a case of “each has its own truth”’ (127). Governing falsifying narration is instead an effort to replace the sensory-motor system along with the philosophical principle of representation as the core constituents of narration. Deleuze explains that in the time-image ‘description stops presupposing a reality and narration stops referring to a form of the true at one and the same time’ (130). As narration has traditionally been viewed as inseparably bound to chronology and causality (e.g. in the fabula-syuzhet distinction), Deleuze, following Alain Robbe-Grillet, regards modern(ist) narration to be ‘dysnarrative’. This concept has been explained according to three decisive tactics (Neupert 1995, 137-138; cf. Vanoye 2005). First of all, the narrative purpose becomes the revelation of the arbitrary nature of narration. Secondly, it aims to show that narration is always a reduction of a reality which is far

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more complex. Finally, it overthrows the logic of everyday mental processes involved in traditional fabula-construction. Hiroshima mon amour employs these three tactics via a mediation on questions of memory and our relationship to history and the past. Thereby, the film can be aligned to the Deleuzian concept of ‘becoming’. As Francis Vanoye (2005) has contended, ‘dysnarration replaces a finished product with elements of a product in the process of becoming’ (Vanoye in Neupert 1995, 138). Characteristic of the dysnarratives of modern(ist) cinema is thus a reversal of the hierarchical relation of linear and non-linear elements. This reversal can also be related to the two cinematic modes of depicting memory in Hiroshima mon amour. The first is classical linear, which means that memory takes the form of recollections that are organized and integrated chronologically to form the story of Nevers. The second is a non-linear memory that becomes associated with the trauma: too immense to grasp, too disturbing to recollect, and too intimate to share. Thus, a memory only remains non-linear if it escapes actualization, i.e. recollection, schematization, representation, or narrative integration. The film, therefore, establishes a dichotomy between a narrative and representational discourse of recollection and an anti-narrative, anti-representational discourse of non-linear sheets of the past. As mentioned earlier, the first memory-image of the German soldiers is neither framed nor integrated into the ongoing narrative. It is only later, when the woman tells her lover about her love affair, that her memory transforms into a proper recollection-image that can be integrated into the story of Nevers. The film narrates the story of Nevers in harmony with the classical conventions for the flashback, since the woman is granted the role of narrator as she tells the story of how she secretly met with the German soldier in abandoned places. As the woman starts narrating (‘It was in Nevers’), her off-screen voice accompanies the images. In contrast to the voice-over in the opening sequence, the voice of the woman is this time firmly located in time and space (in bed with her Japanese lover), and spectators are not led to doubt about the relation between images and off-screen voice. The function that this classical part is assigned in the overall framework of the film is particularly fascinating. While it may be tempting to perceive (the events of) Nevers as a key to understanding the psychology of the woman, and maybe even a key to understanding post-war ‘Hiroshima’, the story of Nevers is presented as merely one of many possible stories and entrance points. Asked about his insistence on hearing the woman’s story of Nevers, the Japanese man provides not a single but four answers.11 On a metalevel the film thereby

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reminds its audience that it could have been told differently, and that a myriad of other sheets of the past could have been actualized instead of that of Nevers. The contingency of the film’s narrative is further emphasized as the Japanese man states: ‘I’m only just beginning to know you, and from the many thousands of things in your life, I chose Nevers’. Due to such moments, Pierre Kast has contended that with Hiroshima mon amour ‘[w]e are at the very core of a reflection on the narrative form itself’ (Kast in Domarchi et al. 1985, 64). Yet, the film’s essential moment of narrative reflection comes at a later point. After telling the Japanese man her story, the French woman looks at her mirror image full of self-loathing, and addresses her German lover: You were not quite dead. I have told our story. I have betrayed you this evening with this stranger. I have told our story. You see, it could be told. For fourteen years I have not refound… desire for an impossible love. Since Nevers. Look how I’ve forgotten you. Look at me.

The woman conceives of narration – having made her memory into a story to be recounted – as a form of betrayal. Her fear is that recollecting her past as a narrative to be retold, relived, and re-enacted will eventually lead to an indifference towards that memory (what in psychoanalysis would lead to a treatment of the trauma). Reni Celeste (2005) acutely observes that ‘[t] o have made the lost German lover into a story is to have betrayed him, to have made him into discourse and turned intimacy into mere narrative’ (sec. 5). Thereby, the film invites a comparison of the myriad collective representations of Hiroshima with the re-enactment of the woman’s trauma. In this fashion, the film questions the desirability of a narrative (and thus linear) forming of our understanding of memory, knowledge, temporality, and history. Hayden White (1980) has famously argued that the problem with narration is exactly that it appears to be a natural, objective, and value-free discourse. Narration is as ‘universal as language itself’, and a ‘verbal representation so seemingly natural to human consciousness that to suggest it is a problem might well appear pedantic’ (1). Nevertheless, White contends that any science must be sceptical of not only the structure and patterns it unravels, but also the discourse with which this is accomplished. White explains: ‘For whatever else a science may be, it is also a practice which must be as critical about the way it describes its objects of study as it is about the way it explains their structures and processes’ (1).

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The historical event of Hiroshima is perhaps one of the most narrated in modern history. In the film, the French actress is reminded of the indifference towards Hiroshima that gradually developed in the French collective consciousness.12 In commemorating the past, narrative recounting of traumatic events can provide a possibility to relate to something to which it is otherwise impossible to relate. However, as Hiroshima mon amour spells out, the likely price of this is that our cognitive, emotional, and affective responses to the historical event gradually become schematic and habitual. According to Deleuze (2005b), this is particularly the case when narrative recounting is subsumed under the classical narrative logic of the sensory-motor system: We see, and we more or less experience, a powerful organization of poverty and oppression. And we are precisely not without sensory-motor schemata for recognizing such things, for putting up with and approving of them and for behaving ourselves subsequently, taking into account our situation, our capabilities and our tastes. We have schemata for turning away when it is terrible and for assimilating when it is too beautiful. (19)

In the beginning of the film, the woman both experiences and tries to understand Hiroshima according to the narrative, schematic, and representational mode of recounting historical events. In this fashion, she perceives Hiroshima in terms of what Michael S. Roth (1995) calls ‘narrative memory’, which ‘integrates specific events into existing mental schemes’ (98). Here ‘the specific events are decharged, rendered less potent as they assume a place in relation to other parts of the past’ (98, emphasis in original; cf. French 2008, 7). In the same way as it has been argued about cinematic conventions, narrative memory requires a double procedure that involves forgetting (cf. Chapter II). The question, then, becomes to avoid the indifference that follows from narrative recounting. The woman in Hiroshima mon amour is caught in a catatonic memory, which neither allows her to remember nor to forget. Not unlike the people of Hiroshima, she is thus caught in a state of involuntary repetition of the traumatic past. Ultimately, the film identifies the lovers with the geographical place of their trauma. In the final scene of the film, the woman says to the man: ‘HI-RO-SHI-MA. That’s your name,’ and he replies: ‘That’s my name. Yes. Your name is Nevers. Ne-vers in France’. In this manner, Hiroshima mon amour is critical of the ability of history, narration, epistemology, and (affective and reflective) spectatorship to represent reality. Sarah French (2008) perceives the film as an

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early example of a text that pre-empted the crisis of history through its suggestion that certain historical events are fundamentally unrepresentable. History is thereby displaced from the discursive realm and memory is imbued with a privileged status as the primary means by which to recapture the past, as well as the most ethical and truthful method through which to re-examine historical trauma. The film largely rejects historical discourses for a more fluid and less hegemonic depiction of memory that emphasises subjective and intersubjective experience. (11)

According to French, the drawback of this is that the woman remains trapped in a ‘compulsive repetition of the past,’ and is thus granted ‘limited subjectivity and agency with which to recover from her traumatic past’ (11). Her insistence on an anti-narrative discourse propels her into an ‘obsession with her traumatic past [that] results in madness, the loss of identity and the detachment of the self from the social world’ (10). Hiroshima mon amour is conspicuously modern(ist) in its obsession with the loss of innocent (classical) meanings, and in this quality, I would argue that the film simultaneously evidences both the potentials and the limitations of Deleuzian film-philosophy in relation to complex narratives. These concern the rupture of the sensory-motor linkages, which introduce a radical disjunction between situation and action. Herein lies for Deleuze the potential of time-images to open up for the non-linear dimension of cinema. However, Rancière  (2006) has questioned the Deleuzian idea that movement-images and time-images are different by virtue of their cinematic nature. He argues that ‘movement-image and time-image are by no means two types of images ranged in opposition, but two different points of views on the image’ (112-113), and consequently ‘Deleuze’s division between a movement-image and a time-image doesn’t escape the general circularity of modernist theory’ (108). In my contention, a strict opposition of movement-image and time-image comes with the risk of introducing an unproductive reversal of the hierarchy of the linear and non-linear dimensions of cinema that favours the non-semantic, autonomous, virtual, singular, unpredictable, and indeterminate becoming of the cinematic process above a hermeneutic search of conventional and established meaning or sense (cf. Leys 2011, 449; cf. Chapter II). The problem with such a valorization of ‘non-linearity’ is that it leads to an ‘embrace [of] a highly abstract and disembodied picture of mind or reason in order to repudiate it’ (Leys 2011, 458, n. 43). Furthermore, Deleuzian scholars often adopt a series of cognitive-formalist assumptions about narrative comprehension insofar as a film-philosophical narratological framework remains to be developed. In

order to cut across the linear-non-linear divide, Chapter V draws on a plethora of embodied insights drawn from cognitive (neuroscience), film-philosophy, and phenomenology to formulate the concept of the embodied fabula.

V. Towards the Embodied Fabula In fact, an important and pervasive shift is beginning to take place in cognitive science under the very influence of its own research. This shift requires that we move away from the idea of the world as independent and extrinsic to the idea of a world as inseparable from the structure of these processes of self-modification [...] The key point is that such systems do not operate by representation. Instead of representing an independent world, they enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system. ‒ Varela et al. 1992, 139-140 What is Mind? No Matter. What is Body? Never Mind.1

Introduction In the opening scene of David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) spectators are literally taken on a ride through the brain of the film’s protagonist. The film can thus be taken as emblematic of a tendency within complex narratives to move inside the characters’ brain spaces. Observing this, Patricia Pisters (2012) labels such films ‘neuro-images’ (a category of films largely corresponding to complex narratives) since ‘[w]e no longer see through characters’ eyes, as in the movement-image and time-image; we are most often instead in their mental space’ (14). Another example is to be found in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000) in which the effects of the main protagonists’ drug use are not merely ‘represented’ but cinematically ‘enacted’ so as to make spectators embody the drug experience. In his trademark ‘hip-hop montages’, Aronofsky uses short close-ups to intensify particular actions that demonstrate the effects of the drugs such as the widening of pupils, the preparation of cocaine, a fast-motion illustration of a sudden explosion of energy (e.g. dancing, talking, cleaning), or microscopic images demonstrating changes in brain chemistry.2 Jamie Skye Bianco (2004) has described the cinematic experience of such montages as follows: We sense and feel drugged in this explosion of intensive powers and control that normally bind the apparatus to the organic clock. The game that Requiem [for a Dream] plays out is the relentless organization of non-organic rhythms, temporalities, diffractions, and affects decentering the capacities of the observer. (388, emphases in original)

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According to Bianco, the film confronts its audience with ‘an unbalancing sensation of forces’ (392) that calls for a rethinking of the relatively stable and affectively detached spectator equally associated with classical cinema and cognitive film science. In a similar vein, this chapter maintains that examples such as those above cannot be adequately captured from the perspective of a cognitive appraisal theory (e.g. Lazarus 1984) based on the assumption that all ‘mental phenomena whether conscious or unconscious, visual or auditory, pains, tickles, itches, thoughts, indeed all our mental life, are caused by processes going on in the brain’ (Searle 1984, 18). However, in refuting approaches to narrative and emotion that regard cognition as the main key for understanding cinematic spectatorship (e.g. Carroll 2003; Plantinga 2009b; Plantinga & Smith 1999; Smith 1995), it is vital not to ascribe everything that does not fit into the rationalist categories of ‘knowledge’ or ‘cognition’ to the autonomous, anti-cognitive, and affected ‘body’ (cf. Leys 2011, 458). In approaching an embodied conception of the fabula, it becomes possible to avoid an inverted version of the cognition (mind) versus affect (body) dichotomy, without reducing the aesthetic and beauty of cinema to a rationalist-intellectualist instrumentalism. The embodied reconceptualization of the fabula contests three assumptions automatically implied in the cognitive-formalist fabula. The first assumption is that 1) dominating spectators’ narrative experience is a search for an unambiguous and chronological storyline. Framing the narrative continuum according to this search, the cognitive-formalist fabula favours a particular cognitive, analytical, and detached mode of experiencing the narrative, which, however, is merely one of several interrelated modes of narrative experience. The second assumption is 2) that the narrative experiences of the spectator can be deduced from an analysis of how the film ‘cues’ them to perform a series of mental operations (e.g. inferences, evaluations, and hypotheses) that allow for the construction of a chronological and (more or less) coherent storyline. In this fashion, the fabula not only renders the narrative continuum causal-linear, it also implies that this is the default mode of narrative comprehension. In this fashion, narrative comprehension becomes an exclusively rational, linear, and analytically detached activity, which can be secluded from the immediate, bodily, and affective dimensions of the cinematic experience. From this, the third assumption arises, namely that 3) our affective, sensuous, visceral, emotional, and haptic experiences of the film have no impact on our cognitive construction of the narrative. The concept of the embodied fabula can thus be seen in the context of an ongoing reinterpretation of the spectator’s bodily, intellectual, mental,

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and cognitive activities. In recent years, scholars have drawn upon such seemingly diverse frameworks as phenomenology, cognitive and affective neuroscience, and Deleuzian film-philosophy to propose an appreciation of the cinematic experience as embodied, non-mediated, and direct. Authors such as Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, Steven Shaviro, Vittorio Gallese & Michele Guerra, Torben Grodal, and Patricia Pisters have successfully dismantled one of the most prominent metaphors in the study of cinema, namely that of the ‘disembodied eye’ (cf.  Branco 2012). In The NeuroImage (2012), Patricia Pisters connects the notion of embodiment with a new image-regime: the neuro-image. Insofar as it describes ‘a new type of cinema belonging to twenty-first-century globalized screen culture’ (6), the neuro-image is akin to complex narratives. Among Pisters’s main arguments is that contemporary screen culture no longer considers images to be ‘illusions of reality’ but ‘realities of illusions’. Images in contemporary cinema, in other words, ‘operate directly on our brains and therefore as real agents in the world’ (6).3 Despite of the pioneering work of Pisters and others, there remains a lot to be done in carving out how disembodied assumptions remain buried in the conceptual and narratological tools we apply to analyse cinematic works and to understand the cinematic experience. This chapter makes a case for utilizing the embodied insights to revise the analytical tools that form our basic understanding of the cinematic experience. In taking up this task, I propose the concept of the embodied fabula as a film-philosophical and narratological basis for understanding the embodied and situated nature of cinematic spectatorship. In order to elucidate how disembodied assumptions dominate prevalent modes of conceptualizing narrative comprehension, it is useful to cast a glance on the criticism that embodied cognition has launched against the central assumptions of its classical counterpart.

Towards an Embodied and Enactive Approach to Cognition The argument pursued in this part is that the notion of embodiment – as it has been used broadly in cognitive sciences, (M.L. Anderson 2003; Shapiro 2011; Wheeler 2005), film studies (Gallese & Guerra 2012; Grodal 2009; Marks 2000; Sobchack 1992), philosophy (Clark 1998; Gallagher & Zahavi 2012; Noë 2004; Varela et al. 1992), cognitive and affective neuroscience (Damasio 1995; Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti 1996; Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia 2008), linguistic (film) theory (Coëgnarts & Kravanja 2012; Lakoff & Johnson 1999), and narrative theories (Caracciolo 2011; Fludernik 2010;

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Hogan 2012) – demands a radical reinterpretation of the classical scientific and representational assumptions of dominant structural-linguistic and cognitive-formalist theories of cinematic narration (e.g. Bordwell 1985a, 2007; Branigan 1992; Chatman 1978). Within the cognitive sciences embodiment is a reaction against the classical cognitive approach, which according to Wheeler (2005) has failed to ‘reflect the complex, temporally rich, neurobiological dynamics that occur in [the] brain’ (283). Furthermore, in the classical approach ‘the nonneural body is conceived merely as a physical vessel in which the cognitive system resides’ (283-284). The result has been an overemphasis on the inferential and rational aspect of cognition, which in reference to the computational analogy has been systematically isolated from the ‘causally complex and temporally rich dynamics of the underlying neurobiology’ (284). In relation to this, neuroscientists have grown increasingly disconcerted with the linear, mechanical, and causal concept of mind that connected cognitive science and neuroscience at earlier stages. As early as 1999, the neuroscientist Rafael Núñez remarks this about his field: [W]ithin the last couple of decades, the study of mind has experienced an interesting and gradual change. There has been a tendency to move from a rational, abstract, culture-free, centralized, non-biological, ahistorical, unemotional, asocial, and disembodied view of the mind, towards a view which sees the mind as situated, decentralized, real-time constrained, everyday experience oriented, culture-dependent, contextualized, and closely related to biological principles – in one word, embodied. (59)

In his review of the new cognitive research paradigm Embodied Cognition (2011), Lawrence Shapiro highlights three general themes of embodied cognition that contrast with the computational model of mind. These are 1) conceptualization, 2) replacement, and 3) constitution (cf. Shapiro 2011, 4-5). In short, ‘conceptualization’ can be summarized under the header ‘bodies matter’ and involves the idea that the concepts that an organism develops and relies upon for it to understand its environment depend on the kind of body that it has. In brief, were the bodies of an organism to differ so would their understanding of the world. ‘Replacement’, on the other hand, describes the manner in which the organism’s body in interaction with the environment replaces the need for the representational explanations of classical cognitive science. Finally, there is ‘constitution’ – also known as the ‘constitution claim’ – according to which the body or the world is a constituent of, and not merely a causal influence on, cognition.

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Today most cognitive researchers accept that the body plays a role in cognition, yet, as Shaun Gallagher (2015) has recently observed, there are distinct ways to conceptualize this. As such, the notion of embodiment ranges from [t]he idea that the body, and not just the brain, processes information both prior to and subsequent to central manipulations; the idea that representations can be action-oriented; the idea that the body itself plays a representational role; or the idea that sensory-motor contingencies, bodily affects, posture and movement enter into cognition in a nonrepresentational way; the idea that the body is dynamically coupled to the environment; the idea that action affordances are body- and skill-relative, and so on, are all ways of shifting the ground away from orthodox cognitive science. (97)

Most researchers, however, trace the term ‘embodied’ back to The Embodied Mind (1992) by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch. Here the term is used to make two separate, yet related, points: By using the term embodied we mean to highlight two points: first, that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context. By using the term action we mean to emphasize once again that sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition. (Varela et al. 1992, 173)

Thus, as the term ‘embodied’ was first introduced, it consisted of two interrelated claims. The first claim – the moderate claim – is today generally accepted within the cognitive sciences and states that cognition depends on corporal processes. The second claim – the more radical and controversial – states that these processes themselves are constituted by, situated in, and extend into the specific cultural, psychological, or (media-)technological context in which they are embedded. As embodied cognition has gained dominance a wave of what Gallagher (2015) refers to as ‘body snatchers’ promote a version of ‘embodied cognition that leaves the body out of it’ (97). These researchers invoke the term ‘embodied’ in a form that undermines the more radical version of embodiment according to which ‘the body as it is coupled to the environment,

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plays a constitutive role in cognition’ (99). Against such ‘body snatchers’, the embodied fabula embraces the original, radical notion of embodiment that fundamentally associates mindfulness with purposeful embodied cognitive activities that extend into the tools, technologies, and our sociocultural context that together define our meaningful engagements with the world (cf. M.L. Anderson 2003, 104). As such, the concept of the embodied fabula differs from the ‘moderate’ notion of ‘embodiment’ to be found in cognitive (film) science, which maintains that the body and brain are, partly at least, determined prior to our existence as social and cultural beings. According to this approach, ‘we are universal in the making, before we get a specific language and are formed by the circumstances and times we live in’ (Bondebjerg 2015, 4). Embodiment within contemporary cognitive film theory is thus perceived as an invitation to understand culture on the basis of a neurobiological determination of the brain-body. This is, for instance, the case in Torben Grodal’s (1999, 2009) theory of ‘universal film genres’ as corresponding to various aspects of our evolutionary hardwired reptilian and/or mammalian brain. Another example can be found in Patrick Colm Hogan’s (2012) ‘affective narratology’. Here the author argues convincingly that ‘story structures are fundamentally shaped by and oriented by our emotion system’ but takes this to mean that ‘in order to formulate a systematic theoretical account of stories, we should turn first of all to affective neuroscience and related fields of study’ (1, emphasis added). Given their emphasis ‘on cognitive and emotional mechanisms that all spectators presumably share – or on the universal features of our cognitive and emotional make-up’ (Vaage 2009, 161), cognitive film scholars tend to assume a fundamental distinction between the ‘subject’ (spectator) and the ‘object’ (the film) and in extension, between the ‘story’ and the ‘telling’. From this perspective, the notion of ‘embodiment’ is reduced to the affective, biological, and evolutionary pregiven machinery of the human brain-body while the film’s story is determined by a realist reference to inherent ‘facts’ or ‘clues’ (cf. Bordwell 1985a, 1991, 2007). However, although cognitive and affective neuroscience may prove important for a provisional understanding of emotionality and affect, the ambition cannot be the replacement of structural-linguistic universal laws with a neurobiological reductionist discovery of cross-cultural structures that determine our brain-body and thus our corporal-affective, cognitive, and emotional reactions to cinema. Against this wave of neuro-reductionism, the embodied fabula is an attempt to move beyond the ‘unbridgeable ontological chasms between “objects,” which are “out there,” and subjectivity, which is “in here”’ (Lakoff & Johnson 1999, 93).

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Furthermore, the embodied fabula proposes an intimate linkage of action, cognition, and perception. This contrasts with the classical cognitive position, which assumes that these belong to clearly separate domains. Susan Hurley (2002) has encapsulated the computational and representational presumptions of this position with the metaphor of the ‘classical sandwich’. Hurley explains the framework of this metaphor as follows: A view of perception and action as separate input and output systems complements a view of thought and cognition as ‘central’ and in turn separate from the ‘peripheral’ input and output systems. The virtual processing of cognition is seen as central, even if its implementation is distributed; input to it is provided by perception, and it issues output that generates action. The subpersonal underpinnings of the mind are conceived as vertically modular, with cognition interfacing between perception and action. (20)

Hurley’s acute metaphor encapsulates how the classical stance perceives cognition as the ‘sandwich filling’ between perception and action. In this model, cognition is seen as the necessary mediator between the inputs we receive from the environment and the motor actions we rehearse upon it. Following from this is an ontological disassociation of perception, cognition, and action that has legitimized a detachment of cognition as an autonomous register that can be studied in isolation from bodily changes, emotional and affective reactions, and visceral responses. This classical assumption is also present in cognitive film theory, as, for instance, in Bordwell’s theoretical isolation of the spectator’s cognitive and emotional responses to a film. Here both ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processes are inferential insofar as ‘perceptual “conclusions” about the stimulus are drawn, often inductively, on the basis of “premises” furnished by the data, by internalized rules, or by prior knowledge’ (Bordwell 1985a, 31). Consequently, as Richard Allen (2001) has remarked, according to this framework, ‘all perceptual processes are cognitive, because perception is a form of inference, albeit unconscious inference [i.e. computational]’ (177). Insofar as the cognitive-formalist fabula is the product of the spectator’s cognitive comprehension of the story material and since it can be theoretically isolated from other types of responses to the film (e.g. emotion and affect), it is possible to argue that the fabula occupies the role of the filling in Bordwell’s classical sandwich of narrative comprehension. Thus, the fabula can be seen as the mediating entity between film (perception) and

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the spectator’s responses (action). In this fashion, cognitive formalism isolates and accentuates the mental operations usually associated with high-level cognition and conscious awareness (e.g. inferences, evaluations, hypothesis testing, and schemata application) as principal for the construction of the fabula. Consequently, the cognitive analyst often reasons backwards from a complete and coherent version of the fabula with the aim of analysing the obstacles and hindrances that the narration played on the viewers in their construction of the narrative. Cinematic narration is here perceived according to a unidirectional communication model constructed around two isolated parts (input and output) and mediated by cognitive processes such as inference-making, picking up the film’s cues, problem-solving, a framing and testing of hypotheses, applying schemata, etc. Due to the constant flow of incoming inputs, the cognitive machinery must constantly revise its output until a final fabula can be constructed. Bordwell proposes this model on the assumption that our main cognitive goal can be taken as (or, perhaps we could say our inner computer is programmed for) the ‘construction of a more or less intelligible story’ (Bordwell 1985a, 33). The fabula has long proven a useful analytical tool; however, Bordwell – in drawing upon cognitive science – has gone a step further than seeing the fabula as merely an analytical tool. He considers the fabula to be a mental representation, i.e. to be psychologically real. In a blog entry from 2011, Bordwell reflects upon the criticism that Narration in the Fiction Film has received since its publication in 1985. Interestingly, Bordwell appears to be especially critical towards his conception of the fabula as an easy-accessible and coherent mental construction. Considering the criticism maintaining that his computational version of the fabula is psychologically implausible, Bordwell (2011) writes: Eventually I had to agree. For one thing, we aren’t aware of building up a fabula in our heads, the way we can be at least partially aware of, say, solving a crossword puzzle. For another, we can’t access it easily: try stopping a film on video and reciting the entire chain of events leading up to the moment of pause. Worse, try at the end of the movie to grasp mentally the entire fabula you’ve purportedly worked out. Chances are you can’t do it. Given that our memories are reconstructive rather than photographic, creating an accurate fabula is extremely difficult [...] What is built up in our memory as we move through a film is something more approximate, more idiosyncratic, more distorted by strong moments, and more subject to error than the fabula that the analyst can draw up. (sec. 2)

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It would appear that Bordwell here acknowledges that the rational, computational data processing and the production of a final, coherent, closed, linear, and causally ordered fabula no longer amounts to a satisfactory description of the viewer’s mental experience while watching the film. The Bordwellian fabula may, nevertheless, still prove to be an acute description of the particular analytical and rational engagement with ‘solving’ cinematic narratives, which I have referred to as the analytical fabula. Thus, the analytical fabula remains a useful concept for describing a particular manner of organizing narrative perception with the aim of conjuring up a clearly defined linear trajectory. It is, in other words, a valuable description of the processes underlying linear cinematic perception (cf. Chapter III). Yet, the cognitive model is still shaped by ‘the observer of the modern’, which according to Elliott (2011), today ‘has given way to the experiencer of the postmodern’ (2). Therefore, the analytical fabula must be complemented with a concept of the fabula better apt at highlighting how films rely on ‘embodied sensations for their meaning’ (5). As most of the pioneer cognitive film theory has focused its attention on matters such as classical narrative techniques (cf. Bordwell et al. 1985), narrative comprehension (cf. Bordwell 1985a; Branigan 1992), and the basic rules of spectator psychology (cf. Currie 1995; Persson 2000), it was initially thought that ‘a weakness of the cognitive approach was its inability to deal with the elicitation of emotion in film’ (Plantinga 2002, 19). Yet, due to the importance of emotions in cinema, it did not take long before a catalogue of cognitive approaches to the examination of the role of emotion and affect in cinema appeared (cf. Carroll 1996; Tan 2013; Grodal 1997; Smith 1999; G.M. Smith 2003). Carroll (2006) has, for instance, argued that ‘affect is the glue that holds the audience’s attention to the screen on a moment-to-moment basis’ (21). Consequently, despite Bordwell’s original reluctance to include emotion and affect into his model of narrative comprehension, it would be an overstatement to criticize cognitive film science more generally for ignoring the role of these in cinema. 4 What is of interest here is, therefore, the role that emotions have been granted within cognitive film theory in light of their adherence to a research paradigm that has traditionally attempted to factor out emotion and affect to the maximum degree possible (Gardner 1985, 41). The cognitive film-theoretical answer to this problem, as Plantinga (2002) concisely sums up, has been ‘that emotions have reasons’ (24). According to this view, ‘our emotional response to texts (and other phenomena) is dependent in part on how we evaluate and assimilate information’ (24). This enables film cognitivists to treat emotions and affect as part of – rather than secluded from – our cognitive processing.

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In this fashion, emotions are the result of ongoing cognitive processes that can be evaluated along with other modes whereby a film ‘cues’ its viewers. Emotions must thus bear on the textual ‘data processing’ and are considered primarily in terms of cognitive-textual processing of the narrative. Ed S. Tan (2013) expresses the cognitive comprehension of emotions in cinema, when he argues: As is customary in theories of the cognition of discourse, we are assuming that the viewer’s comprehension of the film narrative begins with the formation of the text base, a propositional representation of the discourse. This text base is the first result of following with understanding the filmic action, which is relatively close to the directly observable surface structure of the film. (197)

As Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener (2010) have noted, the separation of body and mind is guiding most cognitive film scholarship, insofar as [t]he cognitivist position would hold that all sense perception and physical sensations are processed by the brain, including in the cinema. Therefore it is neither ‘the body’ nor ‘the senses’ but the brain that decides whether something is pleasant or painful, hot or cold, wet or dry. (166)

Mullarkey (2009) has argued that as a result ‘affectivity is reduced to the brain’s information processing’ (56). A related criticism of the cognitive account of how cinema elicits emotions has been proposed by Daniel Frampton (2006), who criticizes the cognitive approach for failing to do justice to the affective, poetic, pure sensuous, and aesthetic dimension of cinema (106-107). Indeed, a general objection to the cognitive approach concerns its anchorage in what is assumed to be ‘everyday’, ‘universal’, or ‘natural’ processes specific neither to art nor cinema. This focus, as Daniel Yacavone (2015) maintains, necessarily causes an emphasis on cinema’s realism over its more creative potential (169). Robert Sinnerbrink (2011) has labelled this dimension – often ignored by cognitive film scientists, possibly because they have a problem fitting it into the rational vocabulary of computational data processing – the ‘aesthetic dimension’ of the image. This comprises those features which contribute to, but also remain independent of, narrative meaning: the images’ sensuous qualities, their visual rhythms and tempo, their use of colour, texture and form, their dramatic (and undramatic) moments of singularity in gesture and performance, their

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mood-disclosing capacities, their orchestrating of aural and visual patterning, their ability to reveal and conceal nuances of expression in the human face and body, their capacity to express movement and time in novel ways, and so on. (52)

Although he recognizes that Bordwell does have a theory of film style, Sinnerbrink insists that the aim of cognitive formalism is to ‘avoid “impressionistic” interpretation in favour of formalist analysis, generic classifi­cation and historical contextualization’ (52).5 In a manner comparable to that of Yacavone and Frampton, Sinnerbrink (2011) questions whether ‘this intellectualist account of narrative does justice to the receptive viewer’s aesthetic experience of cinema’ (52). In relation to complex narratives, Sinnerbrink concludes that the cognitivist approach overlooks ‘the varieties of “non-cognitive” affective response, cognitive dissonance and visual fascination that such ­f ilms can also powerfully evoke’ (52). In recent years, much research within embodied cognition has been devoted to replace the ‘sandwich’ model, emphasizing instead a more direct relation between stimulus and response (Gallese & Guerra 2012; Hurley 2002). Rather than being reliant on cognition and the construction of representations, Alva Noë (2004) posits that ‘we take advantage of the fact that we have more immediate links to the world because we are in the world from the start, and that we have the sorts of bodily skills to exploit those linkages’ (24).6

Embodying the Narrative Experience An alternative account of how cinema elicits emotions and affects is currently being formulated with reference to the much-debated mirror neuron system (cf. Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia 2008) and/or to affective neuroscience (cf. Damasio 1995, 1999, 2003, 2011). Both have been interpreted as challenges to the earlier discussed principles of cognitive science as identified by Wheeler (2005); in particular to the principle #7, which states that ‘intelligent action remains conceptually and theoretically independent of the agent’s physical embodiment’ (27; cf. Chapter II). This principle has been challenged by the discovery of mirror neurons by a group of researchers at the University of Parma.7 These unique neurons received their name because they ‘fire’ not only when an animal performs an action, but also when it observes the same movement performed by another animal (cf. Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti 1996; Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004). Thus, at a neuronal level at least, no difference is made

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between observation (perception) and sensory-motor activation (action). Consequently, mirror neurons are perceived to demonstrate how intimately cognitions and sensory-motor activities are coupled in the brain, insofar as the same brain areas are activated upon execution of a motor action and perception (cf. Pfeifer & Bongard 2007, 171). The discovery of mirror neurons has had immense implications throughout the cognitive sciences, and Vilayanur Ramachandran (2000), one of the leading neuroscientists, has predicted that ‘mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology’ (par. 5). Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia (2008) have explicitly stated that mirror neurons render visible the inadequateness of the ‘classical sandwich’ in which ‘the problems inherent to movement would be reduced to the mechanics of its execution – according to the classical pattern: perception → cognition → movement’ (x). Against the presumptions of classical cognitive theories mirror neurons ‘show how recognition of the actions of others, and even of their intentions, depends first of all on our motor repertoire’ (xii). The result is that the link between body and cognition (or mind) becomes a lot more intricate and direct, and emotions and affect are not merely the products of higher processes of cognition nor the hardware ‘noise’ they were conceived to be in classical cognitive science. While it appears that mirror neurons may work best in real life, face-toface situations (cf. Iacoboni 2008), there is evidence that suggests mirror neuron activity in humans while being exposed to moving images (cf. Murray et al. 2008; Iacoboni & McHaney 2009). Although it is still unsure what precisely the future research on mirror neurons will reveal, the discovery of mirror neurons has been an encouragement for those who explain mental activity beyond the abstract level of representations. Similarly, mirror neurons make it possible to conceptualize a mode of spectatorship, which is not modelled on cognitive and emotional representations, but on a much more direct and immediate bond between film and spectator. As such, mirror neuron activity caused by observation calls for new modes of thinking about the cinematic experience in a more enactive and embodied manner than allowed for by representational and computational cognitive studies of spectatorship.8 Vittorio Gallese (one of the researchers behind the discovery of the mirror neurons) & Michele Guerra (2012) have proposed a theory of ‘embodied simulations’ to understand how we engage with cinematic stories and characters. The authors reject the ‘mind-reading’ and ‘folk-psychological’ explanations that underline cognitive theories on cinema from Bordwell’s on narrative comprehension to Murray Smith’s on character engagement. As an alternative, Guerra and Gallese propose an immediate, non-mediated, and direct bond between spectator and film,

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which appears surprisingly commensurable with the Deleuzian conception of ‘the brain is the screen’.9 John Protevi (2010) has maintained that the Deleuzian tripartite ontological differentiation of the virtual, intensive, and actual could prove a valuable philosophical framework for embodied scholars. Following the work of Brian Massumi (2002), Manuel DeLanda (2002), and Jeffrey Bell (2006), who have demonstrated that Deleuze’s philosophy offers a wide-ranging ontology that can be applied to current research projects that like embodied cognition use complex system theory, Protevi emphasizes the ability of Deleuzian philosophy to ‘think material systems in terms of their powers of immanent self-organization and creative transformation’ (421). Deleuze interestingly maintains that ‘individuated entities’ (e.g. a person, a hurricane, or a perception) are produced by an actualization of a virtual field. In short, such a view replaces representations (or platonic Ideas) with a tripartite ‘ontological difference’ in which ‘(1) intensive morphogenetic processes follow the structures inherent in (2) differential virtual multiplicities to produce (3) localized and individuated actual substances with extensive properties and differentiated qualities’ (422). The Deleuzian virtual is non-Platonic, insofar as it is different from, yet not completely separated from, the actual. As such, the actual ontological register is the level of properties of formed substances, while the virtual is the ‘level of the structures of the intensive processes productive of such actual substances’ (424, emphases added). The communication between the virtual and the intensive processes is bidirectional, because ‘the interaction of intensive processes changes the virtual conditions for future processes’ (422), and the virtual can therefore not be opposed to the real. In Bergsonism (1991), Deleuze explains that the virtual can be distinguished from the possible, since the possible is opposed to the real, whereas the virtual is opposed to the actual. Thus, ‘the possible has no reality (although it may have an actuality); conversely the virtual is not actual but as such possesses a reality’ (96, emphasis in original). Furthermore, to become actualized, ‘the virtual cannot proceed by elimination or limitation, but must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts’ (97, emphasis in original). Returning to Protevi, the point is that the replacement of the opposition between the possible and real with that of the virtual and actual, can also be utilized in extension of the criticism that embodied cognition has directed towards the ‘classical sandwich’ model of perception. Whereas the ‘classical sandwich’ leads to a unidirectional and causal-linear information-processing model according to which perception is inferential and representational, the embodied approach differs by defining cognition

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in terms of constant feedback loops or ‘continuous reciprocal causation’ (cf. Clark 1998).10 According to Protevi (2010), Deleuze’s philosophy grants perception with a new ontological framework, which no longer depends on the ‘classical sandwich’: Sensory input (changes in body correlated with changes in the world) continually feeds into the system along the way, either reinforcing the settling into a pattern or shocking the brain out of a pattern into a chaotic zone in which other patterns strive to determine the behavior of the organism. The neurological correlate of a decision is precisely the brain’s falling into one pattern or another, a falling that is modeled as the settling into a basin of attraction that will constrain neural firing in a pattern. There is no linear causal chain of input, processing, and output. Instead there is continually looping as sensory information feeds into an ongoing dynamic system, altering or reinforcing pattern formation; in model terms, the trajectory of the system weaves its way in and out of a continually changing attractor landscape whose layout depends on the recent and remote past of the nervous system. (426)

Hence, perception is no longer regarded to be constituted by linear mechanics, but is instead understood as a complex or non-linear system. Consequently, the linear laws guiding classical cognitivism have been replaced with a more dynamic conception of the brain-body. The feedback loops of embodied cognition combined with the Deleuzian tripartite ontology make it possible to challenge the ‘classical sandwich’ model of perception that shapes the Bordwellian conception of spectatorship. Furthermore, it can be argued that complex narratives – although containing classical, causal-linear traits – experiment with non-linear starting points that resonate with complex system theory and the embodied cognitive conception of the brain.11 Thereby, these films likewise challenge the classical ‘sandwich’ of cognitive film science, where the output (the fabula) is inferentially constructed from the input (the syuzhet) in terms of a computational data processing that has been ‘programmed’ to comprehend the story material in causal-logical and coherent terms. In the ‘hip-hop’ montages of Requiem for a Dream or in the reverse-chronological narrative structure of Memento, spectators cannot simply master the images cognitively (i.e. comprehend them by ‘re-chronologizations’ or ‘de-complexifications’). As shall be argued in the next chapters, our attempts nevertheless to do so – i.e. to provide the images with causal-linear meanings – play a vital part to the narrative immersion that characterizes

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these films. The affective and cognitive dimensions are thereby being reconfigured in a manner that challenges the ‘classical sandwich’ according to which our emotional, affective, and bodily responses are divorced from the cognitive-representational mode of comprehending the narrative. According to Damasio, the discovery of mirror neurons is merely one indication of why cognitive neuroscience must revise its philosophical roots and replace the computational model of mind with a more embodied concept of cognition. In Descartes’ Error (1995), Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (2003), and more recently Self Comes to Mind (2011), Damasio’s central thesis is that the body and brain (and, it could be added, consequently the body and brain of the cinema spectator) cannot be separated. Not surprisingly, his research has drawn the attention of both embodied film cognitivists (cf. Grodal 2009) and film-philosophical scholars (cf. Bellour 2010; Pisters 2012). His invocation of Spinoza as a relevant philosophical framework for understanding the neuroscientific findings concerning the body’s relation to the mind (and as Pisters [2012] rightly notes, ‘specifically in the direction of body to mind’ [19, emphasis in original]) reveals the possible linkage to – plus a scientific pendant to – an appreciation of cinematic spectatorship as embodied. This is encapsulated in the Deleuzian phrase: the brain is the screen (cf. Deleuze 2000). This formulation suggests that the brain of the spectator cannot properly be thought of as independent from the environment that it simultaneously forms and by which it is being formed. In fact, Damasio’s research, as Elliott (2010) observes, is remarkably complementary to the philosophy of Deleuze: In Damasio’s conception of the neuro-somatic organism, we see reflections of the Deleuzio-Guattarian heuristic framework [...]: the connections between the flesh and the mind are indeed revealed to be more grass than tree and the perceptual processes are discussed within the physical framework that they are inevitably rooted in. As Damasio is at pains to point out throughout his texts, this is a recent direction in neuroscience, a discipline that has traditionally privileged thought over feeling and that has, more recently, viewed the mind as the more important software that runs on the hardware of the body. 12 (6)

However, we should be careful not to conclude that the discovery of mirror neurons and Damasio’s research point univocally in the direction of Deleuzian film-philosophy insofar as it has also been used in support of a moderate interpretation of embodiment (cf. Bondebjerg 2015; Grodal 2009). It is important to note that this research primarily points to an intricate

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bond between the cognitive and the affective, and thus holds the potential of bridging the polarized positions of cognitivism and film-philosophy. In fact, Damasio’s answer to the Cartesian error (of posing a mind untouched by the body) is adding a third dimension between the body proper and the cognitive mind. This would be the emotional and feeling somatic self, which couples the activities of the mind with the functioning of the body. Thus, Damasio retains the idea and importance of a cognitive brain (although cognition can no longer be taken as the primary and autonomic machinery of human thought), while simultaneously confirming the Spinozian/Deleuzian claim that ‘to think is to learn what a non-thinking body is capable of, its capacity, its postures’ (Deleuze 2005b 182, emphases in original). Implied is a far more complex relation between the affective, emotional, sensuous, audial, and cognitive aspects of cinema than proposed not only in the ‘sandwich’ models of classical cognitivism, but also in film-philosophy, since Deleuze – being a philosopher rather than film theorist – is mainly interested in the morphogenetic processes in which the virtual and actual interchange. In short, Deleuze neglects classificatory questions that can be posed from the perspective of the actual register (cf. Protevi 2010), which is why it is important always to keep in mind that he is primarily interested in cinema as a philosopher and not as a film theorist. Consequently, it is worth noting that Deleuzian film-philosophers and cognitive film theorists may converge in terms of their research interests, but are ultimately not intrigued by the same problems. As a philosopher Deleuze is, in other words, not concerned with the cognitive-representational symbol manipulation that occupies cognitive theorists. At the same time cognitive theorists have proven to be less concerned with understanding the experimental and aesthetic aspects of cinema. In proposing the embodied fabula, the aim is to offer a narratological and film-philosophical tool sensible to both higher cognitive processes and the ‘aesthetic’ dimension of cinema. In David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), the narrative folds around itself like a Möbius strip – a strip of paper twisted 180° and then looped so the opposing ends are connected (cf. Pickover 2007). This figure has been used to explain how the film’s two main characters – Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and Pete Dayton (Balthazar Getty) – suddenly double each other and switch places. In fact, the film’s co-author Barry Gifford (1997) explicitly mentions the Möbius strip as a source of inspiration for the narrative of the film: We realized we didn’t want to make something that was linear, and that’s why the Moebius strip [came to function as a metaphor for the film’s structure]. A Moebius strip is a long strip of paper curved initially into

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a circle, but with one end flipped over. The strip now has only one side that flips both inside and outside the shape. It made it easier to explain things to ourselves and keeping it straightforward. The story folds back underneath itself and continues. (par. 3)

The Möbius strip is a helpful device for conceptualizing the play of inside and outside (e.g. subjective/objective and bodily/cognitive) in Lost Highway, which comes full circle as Fred at the end of the film is revealed to be the sender of the mysterious message he receives in the beginning of the film.13 Yet, the explanatory powers of the Möbius strip can also be extended and act as model of the feedback loops of complex narratives more generally. Here the cognitive and the affective, the subjective and the objective, and the linear and the non-linear constantly change roles and interact. Elsaesser (2009) also refers to the continuum of the Möbius strip to explain contemporary ‘mind-game’ films, where the narrative engenders its own loops or Möbius strips, where there may well be a beginning, a middle, and an end, but they certainly are not presented in that order, and thus the spectator’s own meaning-making activity involves constant retroactive revision, new reality-checks, displacements, and reorganization not only of temporal sequence, but of mental space, and the presumption of a possible switch in cause and effect. (21)

The Möbius strip further contributes to highlight contemporary cinema’s indebtedness to classical and modern(ist) cinema, while simultaneously demonstrating the difficulties of trying to reduce the narratives to the avatars of either of these. As we have seen, Deleuze sees in modern(ist) cinema an expression of the Bergsonian conception that memory, opposed to how it has traditionally been viewed, is not something stored in our brains as a mental representation of the past (cf. Chapter IV). Rather memory is a powerful, expressive, and inventive force, which must be constantly re-enacted (even when it takes the form of an involuntary Proustian memory) and thus nothing that the brain can be said to contain. We call up memories, ideas, and fantasies as a means of navigating the world. Deleuze (2005b) finds an expression of this by quoting Federico Fellini, who once stated that ‘[w]e are constructed in memory; we are simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity’ (96, emphasis in original). Deleuze gives this a concise expression, when he writes: ‘Memory is not in us, it is we who move in a Being-memory, a world-memory’ (96).

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In extension of this, I suggest that contemporary complex cinema makes evident that narrative is not in us, but it is we who move in a Being-narrative, a world-narrative (cf. Hven 2014). This creative rewriting of Deleuze’s take on the role of memory in the time-image provides us with a conceptualization of how complex narratives challenge us to replace the ‘classical sandwich’ conception, where spectators create a cognitive-symbolic representation of the narrative (i.e. fabula). It, furthermore, allow us to formulate a principle of narration as a form of embodiment, enactment, and experience that occurs in the dynamic process of film viewing. Since this concept includes the existence of the analytical fabula and acknowledges the influence of linear cinematic perception , it reconfigures – rather than abandons – the higher, cognitive and analytical processes that guide our interaction with the narrative environment. Although reminiscent of the cognitiveformalist fabula, the analytical fabula differs in being the description of one particular analytical, goal-oriented, logical, and detached attitude to the cinematic narrative. Consequently, it is not an adequate representation of the ‘actual’ story of the film (at best, a particular analytic and ‘offline’ depiction of it). Both the analytical and embodied fabula should thus be understood as operational representations by corporeal agents engaged in culturally mediated, practical activities of perceiving, working, playing, deciding, evaluating, and judging in a world that simultaneously responds to those operational representations and exceeds them. (Connolly 2002, 91)

Such a conception allows for an incorporation of both the cognitive and affective aspects of spectatorship, but also for the study of their interactions. Furthermore, it challenges the cognitive computational analogy and its preference for organizing narrative in linear terms exclusively. The embodied fabula allows us to think about complex narratives as being structured as Möbius strips capable of immersing the audience in their own cognitive and affective processes of narrative comprehension. As a result, narrative comprehension is not simply dependent on textual processing but is also (mis)guided by cognitive distortions and emotional or cognitive dissonances. The argument that cinema and narrative in this fashion involve us directly, furthermore, proposes a richer conception of narrative pleasure, which is able to complement cognitive theories that examine how ‘[a] film’s narrative structure is largely a structure designed to cue emotional, visceral, and cognitive experience’ (Plantinga 2001, sec. 5). Plantinga traces out five

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principles of the spectator’s pleasure of which the first four pertain to what he terms ‘intratextual pleasures’ organized by the film’s structure, such as orientation and discovery, visceral experience, and character empathy. To these Plantinga includes the ‘intertextual pleasures of the text’, which he dubs ‘reflexive criticism and appreciation’. He explains: Any technique that draws attention to itself, and away from the story, is thought to transgress that fundamental rule. Yet although this is a common rule of thumb, it is also one that is commonly ignored, as reflexive works become increasingly popular on both film and television. We also enjoy the intertextual pleasures of the text. (sec. 6)

Complex narratives frequently employ a non-linear or achronological sequencing of the events. Susan L. Feagin (1999) explains that sequencing ‘is the order of the presentation of events of a narrative or story. This order, the order of the discourse, may or may not be the same as the order of the events in the story’ (173). Pulp Fiction (Tarantino 1994) provides Feagin with an example of this: ‘Pulp Fiction [...] no doubt enjoys some of its popularity because of the way one’s understanding of the story develops along with one’s understanding of the structure of the film’ (173). Branigan (2002) has granted this conception of narrative comprehension with a cognitive explanation: Filmmakers employ the psychology of the everyday in order to aid spectators in comprehending a narrative. Filmmakers also employ this psychology against spectators when it is important that something not be seen or fully understood during the telling of a story (e.g., to create mystery or surprise), or when the spectator must understand in a new way (e.g., in a metaphorical way or through a sudden revelation), or when something disturbing or traumatic must be reconfigured by the text or repressed. As spectators, we make mistakes in making inferences because we are systematic in drawing inferences and authors count on that. (106)

The intriguing question implied, but left unanswered by Branigan, is: Why do we experience pleasure when films transgress and reveal the boundaries of logical computation and reasoning? David Mitchell (2002) has pointed out that complex narratives can thwart the viewers’ logical fabula construction and still provide pleasure in a move beyond what Murray Smith (1995) terms ‘alignment’. Mitchell discusses how M. Night Shyamalan in The Sixth Sense (1999) manages to trick the

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audience to miss the ‘clues’ planted in the film to make a pre-anticipation of its twist ending – revealing that the main protagonist Dr Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) himself is a ghost – possible. While arguing that the film manages this in a move beyond Smithian ‘alignment’, Mitchell makes a vital observation about the film, which it can be argued is a prominent feature of complex narratives more generally. He writes: To me, it seems clear that the reason we ignore such clues is that we have become like Malcolm. We ‘see what we want to see’, we ‘don’t even know that he’s dead’. What Shyamalan does so well is to present us with what Malcolm sees, and no more, aligning us with him. (sec. 2)

Mitchell proposes a more direct relation between the character and the audience than the cognitive-appraisal theory underlining the work of Ed S. Tan, Murray Smith, and Carl Plantinga. Cinema gives us a new depersonalized perspective on the world, and the pleasure stems from our immersion in the narrative-world: ‘[W]e must take part in it; we must “interact with it as an ongoing story, as our story”’ (sec. 2). Such a view is supported by studies of how narration shapes our everyday life. Kay Young & Jeffrey Saver (2001), for instance, discuss different types of ‘dysnarrativia’, which are ‘states of narrative impairment experienced by individuals with discrete focal damage in different regions of the neural network subserving human self-narrative’ (75). The authors argue that studies of ‘dysnarrativia’ have shown that narrative framing and recall of experience is a dynamic, variable, and vulnerable process and that an awareness of this prompts a new understanding of the brain and, consequently, of human experience: Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that retrieving memories is not the simple act of accessing a storehouse of ready-made photos in a stable neural album, preserved with complete fidelity to the moment of their formation. Rather, each act of recall is a re-creation, drawing upon multiple, dynamically changing modular fragments to shape a new mosaic [...] All memories are suspect, at the neural level. Fidelity-stable recall and self-interpretation of the past is not a property of the human brain and mind. The varied subjectivity of literary autobiographic productions has inescapable subjectivity of the brain’s narrative and memory system. (79)

This seems to suggest that we do not necessarily align ourselves with characters because we share their values and beliefs, but at times also because we

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as an audience ‘incorporate the narrative we are watching’ (Mitchell 2002, sec. 2). Young and Saver draw on the work of the psychologist Jerome Bruner, whose basic claim they summarize as follows: [N]arrative organizes not just memory, but the whole of human experience – not just the life stories of the past, but all of one’s life as it unfolds. Bruner describes narrative as an instrument of mind that constructs our notion of reality, and asserts that the experience of life takes on meaning when we interact with it as an ongoing story, as our story. (75; cf. Bruner 1991, 2004)

Bruner imagined this to operate on a purely cognitive level, yet recent neuroscientific findings suggest a neurobiological underpinning of the centrality of narrative in human cognition (Young & Saver 2001, 75). In combination with the aforementioned discovery of mirror neurons and the research on emotions undertaken by Damasio, Smithian ‘alignment’ as based on cognitive appraisal appears to be more like the tip of the iceberg than the core asset of character engagement. However, these layers remain imperceptible in films that do not produce a cognitive-emotional dissonance between our immediate bodily preposition to the images and our moral judgements relating to the characters’ beliefs and goals. Alignment on the basis of cognitive appraisal, in other words, appears to be a valid explanation, when films follow a classical, linear trajectory bereft of cognitive-emotional dissonances. In contemporary screen culture, however, viewers and characters no longer necessarily share a moral compass.14 The fragmented narrative structures prominent in contemporary cinema, furthermore, promote an intuitive mode of spectatorship that encourages the audience to embody (rather than comprehend) the narrative to reach an understanding of the characters. As I have already embarked upon, the idea that we incorporate, or embody, the film that we are watching – as opposed to representing it to ourselves in the mind’s eye – is closely reminiscent of the Deleuzian contention that ‘the brain is the screen’. In a frequently cited interview entitled ‘The Brain is the Screen’ (2000), Deleuze clarifies what neurobiology has to offer the study of cinema: The brain is unity. The brain is the screen. I don’t believe that linguistics and psychoanalysis offer a great deal to the cinema. On the contrary, the biology of the brain – molecular biology – does. Thought is molecular. Molecular speeds make up the slow beings that we are. As Michaux said, ‘Man is a slow being, who is only made possible thanks to fantastic

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speeds.’ The circuits and linkages of the brain don’t preexist the stimuli, corpuscles, and particles [grains] that trace them. Cinema isn’t theater; rather, it makes bodies out of grains. The linkages are often paradoxical and on all sides overflow simple associations of images. Cinema, precisely because it puts the image in motion, or rather endows the image with selfmotion [auto-mouvement], never stops tracing the circuits of the brain. Cinema not only puts movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind. Spiritual life is the movement of the mind. One naturally goes from philosophy to cinema, but also from cinema to philosophy. (366)

For Deleuze, cinema sets images going in the mind, and in this sense one ‘naturally goes from philosophy to cinema, but also from cinema to philosophy’.15 In other words, the cinematic experience is caught up in dynamic cinema-brain-world patterns, which can be thought of in terms of the Möbius strip. In Psycho (1960), Hitchcock experiments with how much he can manipulate the audience’s emotions and bodily arousal. In the beginning of the film, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is entrusted with the task of bringing USD 40,000 to a safety deposit box, yet falls for the temptation of stealing the money and leaving both job and city behind. Before Marion makes her decision, she weighs the pros and cons of the situation, allowing us to get an insight into the motives that drive her immoral act. Leaving the city at dusk, Marion eventually falls asleep in her car. She is clearly in shock as she is woken up by a police officer, and she starts to act suspiciously, thereby increasing the danger of being exposed. When she is asked to show her driver’s license, she almost reveals the envelope containing the stolen money. Hitchcock orchestrates the scene in his trademark suspenseful manner to create an anxious sensation in the audience that mirrors Marion’s fear of being caught. Although Marion’s act of stealing the money is not exactly a righteous moral one, its consequences are also not too dire (the owner, Tom Cassidy, declaring: ‘I never carry more than I can afford to lose’). In cinema, viewers have proven willing to accept certain immoral actions, as long as the consequences for the victim are ignored (it can be argued that the main theme of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence [2005] is the cinematic ignorance of the consequences of violence), marginalized (as in this particular example from Psycho), or if the victims have displayed an even more depraved morality (e.g. The Boondock Saints [Duffy 1999]). On a first glance, this example appears to confirm Smith’s theory of alignment, since our acceptance of the characters’ actions seems to be structured by

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the three components of character engagement (recognition, alignment, and allegiance). Yet, when Hitchcock later mirrors this scene from the perspective of the film’s ‘psycho’ this theory is challenged. After Marion is killed in the famous shower scene halfway through the film, her murderer Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) becomes the film’s main character, as we follow his attempts to clear all evidence by disposing of Marion’s corpse. He loads her dead body into the trunk of her car, and drives to a deserted swamp, where he intends to conceal his dark crime forever. Interestingly, Hitchcock now orchestrates the scene from the perspective of Norman to create suspense. As Norman has driven the car into the swamp, the car is slowly disappearing and the evidence consequently seems to vanish with it. Suddenly, however, the car stops sinking, as if the swamp is not deep enough to cover the car. For a brief second, Norman’s murky smile freezes and at the very same moment an anxious sensation of being caught – comparable to the earlier one, when Marion was the main character – is aroused in the audience (or at least some of us). However, this time around it is clearly not the beliefs, morals, or our approval of the aims of Norman that can be deemed the proper cause of this corporal-affective sensation. Instead, the film arouses a primordial bodily sensation that is in dissonance with our higher-level cognitive response to the scene. If spectators become consciously aware of this dissonance, the eerie sensation may intensify further once we feel relieved to see the car being swallowed by the nothingness of the swamp.16 How are we to explain this phenomenon? I believe that in the example drawn from Psycho, the viewers are enabled to grasp – if only for a brief moment – what Deleuze terms our ‘pre-hodological’ disposition towards the ongoing action of the plot. Deleuze (2005b) derives the concept of hodological spaces from the psychologist Kurt Lewin. A hodological space is ‘a field of forces, of oppositions and tenses between these forces, of resolutions of these tenses according to the distributions of goals, obstacles, means and detours’ (125). Before our bodily responses are formed in accordance with the action we are about to perform and to the sensory-motor linkages that enfold this action in line with our beliefs, judgements, and morality – i.e. according to our hodological space – we inhabit a ‘pre-hodological’ space. This is a space with ‘overlapping of perspectives, which does not allow the grasping of a given object because there are no dimensions in relation to which the unique set would be ordered’ (125). A ‘pre-hodological space’ is thus a bodily state yet to be formed by higher cognitive processes. It can be perceived as a gesture that occupies the interval between stimulus and response and prepares the body for a later response. In the pre-hodological space, the obstacle (in our

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examples from Psycho this would be the police officer or the car that will not sink) ‘does not, as in the action-image, allow itself to be determined in relation to goals and means which would unify the set, but is dispersed in a “plurality of ways of being present in the world”, of belonging to sets, all incompatible and yet coexistent’ (196).17 Deleuze develops his concept of the ‘pre-hodological space’ in proximity to Gilbert Simondon’s concept of individuation. Simondon argues that the obstacle, as it is really lived, is the plurality of ways of being present in the world. Hodologic space is already the space of a solution [...] Prior to action the subject is firmly lodged between many worlds, between many orders. Action is the discovery of the meaning of this disparation, of that by which the particularities of each set are integrated in a richer, larger, set, one possessing a new dimension.18 (Simondon in Deleuze 2001, 47, n. 1, emphasis in original)

Returning to our example, our ‘pre-hodological’ bodily response to the scene with Marion and the police officer can easily be assimilated into the ongoing sensory-motor linkages of the plot, insofar as the film has already gone some way to justify Marion’s act. It is, in other words, possible to explain our arousal by reference to cognitive dispositions, such as our willingness to accept that Marion ought to keep the money so she can quit her dreadful job (which gives her recurring headaches), marry well, and start afresh. Thus, our emotional experience of the narrative information resonates with the corporal-affective arousal instigated by Hitchcock’s mastery of the cinematic medium. In this case, the anxiety we experience as Marion is almost caught, is likely to be interpreted as caused by our compassion for the character. Due to the lack of incongruity between our emotional responses and our general cognitive dispositions, this scene does not produce the cognitive dissonance we experience in the scene with Norman. The example from Hitchcock’s Psycho thus paves the way for a deconstruction of the causal reasoning implied by cognitive theories that assert that our emotional response is structured by our cognitive processing of the narrative. Such can be achieved along the lines of Friedrich Nietzsche’s deconstruction of causality as outlined by Jonathan Culler (1986). Causality has long been taken as a fundamental and universal principle of our universe. Much of our thinking is constructed around the idea that one event causes another, and that causes produce effects. As Culler notes, ‘the principle of causality asserts the logical and temporal priority of cause to

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effect’ (86). Yet, Nietzsche challenges the concept of causal structures as given a priori, and asserts that it is rather the product of a precise tropological or rhetorical operation, which amounts to a reversal of chronology (a chronologische Umdrehung). Culler provides the following example of this. When we feel pain, we look or search for a cause of that sensation of pain, say a pin. When a proper cause has been identified, one posits a link that reverses the perceptual and phenomenal order. The initial order of experience ‘pain → pin’ is now reversed into the causal sequence ‘pin → pain’. Nietzsche writes: The fragment of the outside world of which we become conscious comes after the effect that has been produced on us and is projected a posteriori as its ‘cause’. In the phenomenalism of the ‘inner world’ we invert the chronology of cause and effect. The basic fact of ‘inner experience’ is that the cause gets imagined after the effect has occurred. (Nietzsche in Culler 1986, 86)

I believe such a reversal, in addition to being central for the cognitive aspect of narrative comprehension, may prove valuable for our comprehension of how cinema structures our emotional response according to – or in disagreement with – the sensory-motor linkages that structure our higher cognitive experience of the narrative. That is, spectators first feel a sensation, and then search for a cause in the narrative for this sensation. Our cognitive construction of a coherent and chronological fabula – most obviously in cases of a non-linear or reverse chronological syuzhet – relies exactly on such chronological reversals. Thus, rather than posing causation as an intrinsic organizational principle of the narrative itself (or our representation of it), causality should be understood as a basic organizational principle, with which humans give meaning to a system. In 1946, Baron Albert Michotte completed a series of experiments designed to reveal how humans attribute causality to objects that are – theoretically – not impacted by one another. By cinematic means, Michotte demonstrated that when objects move with respect to one another within highly limited constraints, viewers are more than likely actually to see causality. In actuality, however, all we see is an object which moves towards another and makes contact, and the second object is then seen moving in the same direction, which is what produces the effect that one object is ‘launching’ the other like billiards. (Bruner 1986, 17) Of interest here is the fact that causality is an underlying basic scheme with which most people understand and make sense of the world. This, for

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instance, becomes important when we argue that a given story is causallinear. It makes a difference whether this is supposed to mean that causality is an intrinsic quality of the narrative in itself, or that causal-linearity is one among several principles of organization that can be utilized by the audience to give meaning to the cinematic material. Nietzsche’s deconstruction of causality ensures that causality cannot be thought of independently from the narrative it is designated to explain in the first place. Consequently, not only our understanding, but even more important, our application of causality requires increased sensibility to whether we impose causality on the narrative, or the narrative perhaps rather imposes it on us. Considering how film analysts perceive the question of causality in relation to complex narratives turns out to be quite revealing of the basic onto-epistemological assumptions of their interpretative strategies.

VI. The Complexity of Complex Narratives In spite of all this diversity and the different ways of approaching and assessing this body of films, most theorists would agree to subsume these films under the predicate ‘complex narratives’. However, this complexity is itself a rather complex phenomenon, since each author seems to have different films and different aspects of film narrative in mind. ‒ Simons 2008, 111 Complexity is not only a feature of the systems we study, it is also a matter of the way in which we organize our thinking about those systems. ‒ Tsoukas & Hatch 2001, 979

Introduction This chapter examines two complex narratives: Tom Tykwer’s ‘forkingpath’ narrative Lola rennt (Run Lola Run 1998) and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ‘mosaic’ narrative 21 Grams (2003). Despite their differences in narrative form, national, historical and political context, audio design, acting style, and visual expression, much of the critical attention that has been granted these films has followed a similar line of reasoning. Both films have been perceived as representatives of a particular mode of complexity, which certain critics have claimed dominates contemporary narration. The idea is that despite their intricate narrative forms, complex narratives actually adhere to a classical, linear logic. This chapter aims to show how this view is rooted in the linear onto-epistemological conception of the cognitive-formalist fabula. In order to do so, a discussion will be undertaken with a number of analytical approaches to the two selected films, which in different manners exhibit prevalent modes of dealing with cinematic complexity. The aim of doing so is twofold: 1) to elucidate the distinguishable manner in which both films challenge typical analytical, narratological, and conceptual frameworks for understanding cinematic complexity, and 2) to formulate alternative approaches that avoid the reductionist and dichotomized principles according to which complex narratives have often been examined. Although embodied cognition rarely employs the actual mathematical or physical theories that have been developed within the vast research f ield of dynamical system theory, chaos theory, non-linear

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dynamics, or the study of complex systems (henceforth ‘complexity theory’), this orientation makes use of concepts derived from these fields as ‘a highly intuitive set of metaphors for thinking about physically embodied agents’ (Pfeifer & Bongard 2007, 93). Thus, within embodied cognition the brain and its interaction with the environment are quite often thought of in terms that have been derived from complexity theory.1 Similarly, the appeal of complexity theory to film studies lies not in a straightforward mapping of these concepts onto the theory of cinema. Rather our interest in these concepts should be seen in relation to their capability of opening up the cinematic experience to those processes that go beyond causal-linearity. It, in other words, pertains to their ability to heighten our sensibility for the complexity of the historical, social, environmental, and temporal matters that have largely been ignored within the long-dominant Newtonian scientific ideals (cf. Capra 1996; Goodwin 1994; Hayles 1990; Prigogine & Stengers 1984 1997; Shotter 1993; Toulmin 1992; Tsoukas & Hatch 2001). Hence, complexity theory has been perceived as the scientific expression of a more general tendency in which ‘our vision of nature is undergoing a radical change toward the multiple, the temporal and the complex’ (Prigogine & Stengers 1984, xxvii). Significantly, it is capable of revealing the limitations of the monolithic linear perspective of classical Newtonian science without resorting to the non-linear side of the dichotomy. Unlike a linear system, a dynamic system is non-linear since it cannot be decomposed into subsystems that can be solved individually in isolation from ‘disturbing’ elements, after which its pieces can be reassembled to provide a complete picture of the system. The mathematician Steven Strogatz (2000) has provided an often invoked real-life example of the nature of non-linear systems. Think about your favourite two songs. According to the linear logic, playing them both at the same time would amount to the double pleasure. Yet, actually doing so is more likely to ruin the pleasure of both songs.2 Complex systems display non-linear behaviour insofar as small differences in initial circumstance can have impact on the system elsewhere (the ‘butterfly effect’) in a manner that exceeds the perspective of a causal-linear logic. In addition, feedback loops make the system selfgoverning and unpredictable (cf. Cilliers 2002; Holland 1999; Johnson 2001).3 The ‘butterfly effect’ – also called ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions’ – is probably the most famous example of how complexity theory challenges the classical scientific notion of causality. The butterfly effect takes its name from the poetic example provided by Edward Lorenz, who claimed that a hurricane in one part of the world could be influenced by minor initial conditions such as the flapping of the wings of a butterfly

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weeks earlier in an entirely different part of the world (cf. Gleick 1988; cf. Lorenz 1995). However, as William Brown (2014) has pointed out, this example is potentially misleading because it appears to suggest that the butterfly ‘caused’ the hurricane. Yet, the lesson to take from this example is that instead of thinking about the butterfly as a direct cause, we should think of it as part of a vast and complex system that comprises all kinds of potential ‘causes’ such ‘that we cannot attribute a single cause at all’ (129). For Poulaki (2014a), complexity inevitably constitutes a challenge to classical narratology. According to her, the ‘proliferation of chance events in a film is incompatible with classical narrative causality, because chance cannot easily be attributed to one single cause’ (393). Consequently, the causality we find in complex narratives is ‘better conceived as a cumulative, non-linear and emergent effect rather than as an event-sequence of causes and effects’ (393). For Prigogine & Stengers (1984) complexity means that ‘we must accept a pluralistic world in which reversible and irreversible processes coexist’ (257). In classical science, the authors argue, the focus has been on reversible processes in which stability, order, uniformity, and equilibrium are prevailing. However, reversible processes only occur in closed systems where the parts relate to one another linearly. Therefore, classical science has largely ignored the irreversible processes of open systems that are considered most common by Prigogine and Stengers. Complexity theory thus initiated a shift in attention towards irreversible processes governed by disorder, instability, diversity, disequilibrium, and non-linear relationships. In reversible processes, such as, for instance, the motion of a frictionless pendulum, no privileged direction of time exists. Hence, the term ‘reversible’ refers to the classical scientific assumption that ‘if the velocities of all the points of a system are reversed, the system will go “backward in time”’ (61). Reversible processes can then be said to be symmetrical in time. As such, the directionality of time becomes irrelevant insofar as a temporal reversal would produce no significant material or physical change. Irreversible processes, on the other hand, are governed by the ‘arrow of time’, which ensures that ‘time flows in a single direction, from past to future’ (277). Alcohol and water spontaneously mix, yet, we never see the reverse occurring, the spontaneous separation of the mixture into pure water or alcohol. Interestingly, in narratology and the study of cinema reversibility and irreversibility have become granted a set of connotations, which do not resonate with how they are comprehended and used in complexity theory. Especially, it should be remarked that irreversible temporality within

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cinematic narratology is intimately tied to the inevitable forward movement of the time-based medium. As Doane (2002) has observed ‘film is in some sense popularly understood as the exemplar of temporal irreversibility’ (66, emphasis in original). Irreversibility for Doane, however, does not merely relate to the forward progression of the ‘arrow of time’, but is also tied to the mechanistic nature of the cinematic apparatus, which famously caused Bergson to refuse cinema as an example par excellence of the spatialization of time and of the ‘snapshot’ logic of perception (cf. Bergson 1998, 296-402). Consequently, irreversibility within cinema has been connected to the linear and causal-deterministic understanding of the narrative at the level of the fabula, whereas temporal reversibility has been connected to the non-linear sequencing at the level of the syuzhet. In most narratological studies, non-linearity is understood as reversible processes that have been temporally disorganized and thus appear in a non-linear sequencing. The task of the analyst thus becomes the restoration of the proper causal-linear order of the narrative events. However, from the perspective of complexity theory this analytical procedure amounts to a classical scientific reduction of complex temporal processes, since the underlying assumption at stake here is that the components of the narrative can be arranged without causing a qualitative change of it. Hence, the narrative continuum is perceived as atemporal or temporally reversible. Bordwell (2008) has also noticed the shift in causality in ‘network narratives’ such as 21 Grams. He argues that the plot structure present in such films must ‘find ways to isolate or combine characters in compelling patterns that will replace the usual arc of goal-oriented activity’ (199). For him, these films are organized around chance and thus their causal structure is ‘loose’. Poulaki (2014a) argues that Bordwell’s comprehension of ‘network narratives’ relies on a default understanding of causality as ‘tight’ that resorts back to the classical Hollywood film (384). As she rightly points out, Bordwell approaches ‘complex causality’ by means of ‘classical narrative and anthropomorphic standards – the latter in the sense of events caused by human actors and bringing forth other events as consequences of previous actions’ (384). Ultimately, Poulaki reveals that underlying Bordwell’s definition of ‘network narratives’ as causally ‘loose’ is an incompatibility between the classical narratological and complexity-theoretical understanding of causality. In this chapter, I argue that classical narratology often reduces complex causality and chance to a matter of predestination and determinism. Yet, as Poulaki (2014a) reminds us, a ‘network is not caused by the individual actions of its elements, nor by a single transcendent and overarching cause or motivation; it rather emerges as an organization of a

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multiplicity of agencies and their complex relations’ (394). Consequently, ‘causality in network films is not loose, but complex and non-linear’ (395). Therefore, it is not sufficient simply to mix old classical narratology with complexity theory. Instead, complexity theory should be allowed to fundamentally challenge our narratological tools. Until then, as Poulaki states, complex narratives will remain insufficiently addressed (394).

21 Grams – How Much Does Life Weigh? In the ‘Production Notes’ (2003) made available on the official website for 21 Grams, the film’s director Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu enigmatically declares that we are ‘all just floating in an immense universe of circumstances’ (par. 3). This declaration finds a visual expression in the bewildering collection of seemingly unrelated scenes satiating the opening of the film. Here the editing is fast, the handheld camera unsteady, and the tone of the film grainy. In this fashion, the style reflects the muddled states of mind that the films’ three main characters Cristina (Naomi Watts), Paul (Sean Penn), and Jack (Benicio del Toro) find themselves in respectively. Iñárritu’s baffling description of the film also reflects the film’s narrative structure, or rather the spectator’s experience trying to come to terms with it. Eventually, however, the film facilitates the emerging of narrative patterns and meaningful relations between the events. The mosaic narrative circles around a traffic accident in which Cristina’s husband and two girls are killed. The hit-and-run driver Jack is a devoted Christian, whose faith in God has given him the strength to leave his criminal past behind. 21 Grams thus presents its narrative events from the perspective of both victim and offender. In addition, the film tells the story of Paul – a mathematician and the unapprised receiver of the heart of Cristina’s deceased husband. After the transplant Paul cannot come to terms with not knowing the precise string of events that changed his destiny. Despite being encouraged simply to accept his fortune, Paul nurtures an obsession with learning the identity of his donor. Eventually he succeeds in tracking down Cristina, who has returned to an old habit of self-destructive carousing and drug abuse. Their meeting resuscitates them both and salvages Cristina from her suicidal existence. Eventually their mutual affection amounts to what is possibly one of the most peculiar love affairs in the history of cinema. 4 As their relationship develops, Cristina convinces Paul that it is his duty to kill Jack (‘You are in his house, fucking his wife and sitting in his chair, you owe it to him!’). Paul eventually gives

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in to Cristina’s demands and together they plan to kill Jack, who for them is simply a hit-and-run driver, but who, from the perspective of the spectator, is also a recovered alcoholic and a devoted family father. However, Paul is unable to carry out their plan, and in a courageous act of self-sacrifice he shoots himself instead of Jack. This act not only rescues Cristina from pursuing her destructive path of vengeance (she would not simply take Jack’s life but also his constant feeling of guilt), it also opens up a brief, yet pivotal, instant in which the eyes of victim and offender meet in a moment of recognizing their shared suffering. The Fabula and the ‘Decomplexification’ of the Narrative Continuum Cognitive approaches often perceive narrative complexity as being measurable according to the intricacy of the computational processing that it requires its spectators to perform. Narrative complexity thus becomes a measure of how complicated the construction of a linear, coherent, causal, and chronological story is. Since the formal structure of 21 Grams requires a high degree of quite knotty backward reasoning, the film would typically be perceived as a highly complex narrative. However, Michael Z. Newman (2006) has questioned whether such complexity automatically guarantees an overall complex narrative design. In the present context, Newman’s argumentation is remarkable since it allows for the uncovering of a series of dominant presumptions about the nature of cinematic complexity. In particular, Newman’s treatment of 21 Grams illustrates how film scholars utilize the fabula-syuzhet distinction to study the complexity of narrative designs. Furthermore, it helps to elucidate the restrictive role cognitive theories grant emotions (since these are entirely cognitive and as such deprived of affect) when dealing with the narrative compositions of ‘mosaic’ films such as 21 Grams. The hypothesis of Newman’s article is that a complex plot, or syuzhet, often comes at the expense of complexity in other cinematic areas. In the particular case of 21 Grams, the lack of complexity purportedly occurs at the level of the characters. Newman’s basic argument can be summed up according to the following line of reasoning: Due to the temporally disintegrated, non-linear, and fragmentary narrative structure of 21 Grams, spectators will be heavily burdened with the cognitively demanding task of reorganizing the story material into a chronological order. This procedure ensures complexity at the level of the syuzhet. Yet, at the same time the film must compensate for this complexity elsewhere. In 21 Grams this is achieved by a trivial depiction of its characters, which ensures simplicity at the level of the fabula.

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By comparing 21 Grams with the more classical storytelling of Passion Fish (Sayles 1992), Newman hopes to demonstrate that ‘character complexity is independent of plot complexity, and that it is possible that the complexity gained through temporal reordering may even come at the cost of complex characterization’ (91). Newman’s contention that a multifaceted character depiction does not necessarily follow from a complex plot is compelling. However, it is problematic to assume that narrative complexity can be determined with a procedure that isolates characters from the structure of the plot. Newman is aware of the uneasiness that this modus operandi may instigate at a theoretical level, but asks the readers to suspend their scepticism, and allow him to use this distinction for purely analytical purposes: If we may think of the narrative text as having a discursive level separate from its content – a dichotomy that may not withstand theoretical scrutiny but that is nonetheless useful as a heuristic – then 21 Grams throws us on the mercy of the narration in a way that Passion Fish does not. (93)

In other words, the fabula-syuzhet distinction is an analytical tool for isolating a story from the manner in which it is told, and it thereby helps the analyst to focus more clearly on these parts separately. This, however, also means that it is a principle designed for the reduction of complexity – in particular evoking Morin’s third principle for the rejection of complexity by classical science, which ‘consists in isolating and separating cognitive difficulties from one another’ (Morin 2007, 5; cf. Chapter I). My objection here is not that such reductions cannot serve as useful analytical tools, merely that we should not forget the task that such concepts have been designed to perform. In fact, the fabula-syuzhet distinction can be a useful tool for studying the interaction between two levels of the narrative otherwise obscured. Newman’s treatment of Passion Fish is a good example of how an initial reduction can promote an even more complex understanding of the workings of a narrative. In this case, Newman carefully examines how the film – through an insightful use of classical narrative devices – repeatedly flaunts certain viewer-expectations, regardless of whether these rely on cinematic conventions or (negative) social stereotypes. The film achieves this by holding back vital information to reveal it at a strategically important point in the narrative. In this fashion, Passion Fish exploits what Bordwell (1985a) has called ‘suppressed gaps’ to force its viewers to re-evaluate their initial inferences and judgements about the characters. Newman (2006) persuasively argues that the effect

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of this is ‘one of intensifying the complexity of the story, its characters, and themes’ (97). To demonstrate how this narrative strategy works in the film, it is useful to think of the fabula and syuzhet separately. As an analytical tool this distinction renders visible the ‘trick of narration’ played by the film, which according to Newman is an even subtler and ‘not nearly as intrusive or flashy an effect as those we find in 21 Grams’ (97). Thus, in his treatment of Passion Fish, Newman’s initial heuristic reduction of separating the fabula from the syuzhet is employed to reveal a deeper-lying, yet not immediately detectable, complexity. The heuristic separation of fabula from syuzhet is given another flavour when Newman subsequently employs it to explain how, and with what consequences, 21 Grams ‘resists its readers’ desire for it to cohere and their cognitive effort to make it so’ (94). In this manner, the non-linear style of 21 Grams contrasts with the ‘self-effacing and unobtrusive’ classical mode of narration that characterizes Passion Fish. Newman argues that the result of this is that the attention of the audience is primarily invested on the cognitively demanding task of constructing a chronological and coherent fabula, thereby leaving little room for cognitive complexity elsewhere. In other words, much of the spectator’s cognitive focus will be devoted to achieving chronology and causality between the events, an effort that is eventually rewarded insofar as underlying the film’s ‘disentangled syuzhet, the narrative reveals itself as rather straightforward’ (91). Beneath the initial narrative complexity of 21 Grams, Newman detects a far more straightforward and linear logic governing the film. This becomes especially evident, so Newman argues, once the film is compared to the narrative design of the less flashy, yet highly complex, storytelling of Passion Fish. Therefore, Newman can conclude that when all is said and done both 21 Grams and Passion Fish are classical narratives: ‘Even with all of [21 Grams’] temporal manipulations, the movie has the design of a canonical narrative’ (100). Ultimately, Newman treats the narrative complexity of 21 Grams in a classical scientific manner, which means that it has to be ‘straightened out’ and ‘explained away’. Newman takes upon him the analytical task of ‘salvaging’ the spectators from their confusion by offering a dissective treatment of the film capable of revealing the superficial reality of the ostensibly narrative complexity. This seemingly harmless shift in the approach to the question of narrative complexity becomes especially significant, insofar as the methodological tool applied – i.e. the fabula-syuzhet distinction – is itself designed for the reduction of narrative complexity. However, Newman appears to apply this distinction to 21 Grams as a perfectly legitimate tool for determining the

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overall complexity of the narrative design. Assuming that a narrative will reveal its ‘true’ complexity at the level of the fabula, as Newman does, is dubious. This is mostly so because the concept of the fabula presupposes the linear, chronological, and coherent comprehension of the narrative continuum that the analyst detects behind the temporal disjunctions of the syuzhet. It also reduces the spectator’s comprehension and experience of the narrative to the cognitive task of solving its narrative structure. Newman in this manner treats the narrative continuum as consisting of isolated narrative modules, which constitute a unidirectional relationship to the viewer, who may find pleasure and amusement in organizing these pieces, but whose comprehension of the underlying fabula remains unaffected by this narrative design. In this cognitive reductionism, the spectator’s affective experience of the narrative is assumed to be of no relevance to the question of narrative complexity. Affect is simply the result of the lack of information that temporarily blocks the emergence of a complete representation of the narrative. According to this view, the apparent complexity of the syuzhet exercizes little, if any, influence on the complexity of the fabula, since from the analytical perspective this is predestined to transform into a causal-linear series of events. Consequently, according to this approach, ‘linearization’ is perceived to be the condition of narrative comprehension as such, rather than an analytical tool or a mode of organizing experience. In his analysis of 21 Grams, Newman mistakenly perceives the fabula as an objective representation of the film’s story independent from the spectator/analyst, who has constructed it. Consider, for instance, when Newman in relation to 21 Grams argues that ‘the sophistication of the storytelling functions as a screen behind which the rather unsophisticated story material is hidden’ (100, emphases added). Or, when he concludes from this that 21 Grams ‘ends by decomplexifying its narration’ (104). Even if Newman probably does not believe the narrative to be able to ‘decomplexify’ itself, it nonetheless reveals that something vital is lacking in his equations. What, more precisely, is lacking, is an understanding of how the narrative structure facilitates an affective, emotional, and cognitive experience of the film that cannot be reduced to a series of chronologically ordered events or ‘facticities’.5 In earlier chapters, it has been argued that cognitivist theorists often utilize the fabula as an analytical tool that ensures an intersubjective perspective on the narrative as it is (cf. Chapter II & Chapter V). A pervasive cognitive assumption is that since narrative comprehension primarily operates according to rational, disembodied, and computational information

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processing, both the fabula and the manner in which we construct it can be understood independently from the viewers’ emotional, bodily, or affective responses (cf. Bordwell 1985a). Following this logic, Newman does not find it imperative to study how the syuzhet influences spectators affectively or emotionally, and their subsequent experience of the characters, since such subjective matters are not perceived as relevant factors for a strictly objective determination of the complexity of the fabula. For Newman (2006), 21 Grams takes us on a more cognitive than emotional ride, thus the ‘pleasure in watching [21 Grams] to a large extent, is the pleasure of working out explanations for how people and events are connected’ (93). In other words, the narrative pleasure lies in the computational processing of the narrative, rather than in its ‘aesthetic’ (cf. Sinnerbrink 2011), affective, or emotional dimensions. To counter this position, there is certainly no need to reject the possibility that viewers will feel a kind of satisfaction once the narrative suddenly ‘adds up’.6 However, the conception that our engagement with narratives is largely a matter of computational processing and puzzle solving has demonstrated little explanatory value when it comes to narrative deceptions and cognitive-emotional dissonances (cf. Sinnerbrink 2011, 52). Instead of considering it in isolation, the cognitive pleasure of sense-making and narrative order must be connected to other aspects in which the narrative moves us (e.g. emotionally and affectively). However, Newman evaluates the complexity of 21 Grams’ characters entirely from the perspective of the already constructed fabula, which presupposes a rational comprehension, and excludes a more intuitive apprehension, of the characters. Newman’s understanding of characters appears to rely on the early cognitive film theory on emotions as developed in the work of Murray Smith (1995) and in the anthology on the subject edited by Carl Plantinga & Greg M. Smith (1999). This theory is primarily concerned with how spectators engage with fictive characters to draw conscious, intellectual, and voluntary conclusions that form the basis of the spectator’s judgement of the characters. This will eventually lead spectators to form ‘allegiances’ or ‘pro-attitudes’ with certain of them while defying others (Smith 1995, 187-227). As such, we ‘identify’ with characters in ‘aligning’ (or possibly misaligning) ourselves with their goals, beliefs, and motifs. This approach harmonizes with the general tendency of cognitive researchers ‘to discuss emotion states in terms of goals, objects, characteristics, behaviors, judgements, and motivations’ (Plantinga & Smith 1999a, 3). To appreciate how 21 Grams moves beyond the notion of ‘alignment’, we should not pose an affective dimension of the film isolated from the

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spectator’s cognitive endeavours. Instead, we may refer to research within the study of the classical film, which maintains that the usual conception of this paradigm as fundamentally linear should be replaced with a more ‘complex weaving together of anticipation/culmination structures in which our emotional reactions to present events are just as important as our anticipatory reactions to future events’ (Keating 2006, 7). According to this view, Hollywood storytelling does not subordinate our emotional response to the linear progression of the narrative such as it is popularly claimed (cf. Bordwell et al. 1985). Yet, classical cinema matches our affective, precognitive responses (the immediate arousal caused by the image) to our emotional and cognitive responses.7 Consequently, it is useful to think of ‘narrative not simply as a tool for the production of coherence but also as a tool for the creation of emotions like hope, fear, delight, and despair’ (Keating 2006, 11). In a classical fight scene we would typically experience an affective incipience to act, which can be linked to the immediate task of the hero, with whom we are also cognitively aligned due to his morally righteous aspirations. The lack of any discrepancy glues our affective, emotional, and cognitive responses together in a dynamic process that makes these inseparable for the viewer. Yet, this also renders the manipulations made by the film less visible. As spectators, we are inclined to think that our compassion for the hero is based solely on our rational and cognitive appreciation of his righteous ideals. Hitchcock is, perhaps, one of the earliest classical directors to experiment with dissonances integrated into this seemingly ‘natural’ gluing together of the spectators’ affective-emotional-cognitive circuitry.8 Because of his acute awareness of his viewers, and his willingness to play with their responses, Hitchcock has rightly been perceived as a significant precursor of the contemporary complex narrative. However, whereas Hitchcock only experimented with momentary breaks in the automatisms of the affect-emotion-cognition circuitry, modern(ist) cinema went a step further and ruptured this circuitry (or, in Deleuzian terms, the sensory-motor linkages). I would suggest that complex narratives, on the other hand, explore various potential reconstructions of this circuitry, which emphasizes the embodied – rather than merely cognitive-analytical – aspects of cinematic spectatorship. From this perspective we can expand on a number of observations that Sandy Camargo (2002) has made in relation to ‘mosaic’ cinema.9 In brief, her thesis is that the ‘mosaic’ structure works primarily to suspend rational and moral judgements of the characters. Instead of premature and schematic judgements, spectators are encouraged to form more intuitive

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and affective bonds with the characters. In this sense, the employment of a ‘mosaic’ narrative structure expresses a desire for going beyond the ‘moral evaluations and judgments [that] frequently underlie our emotional reactions’ (Smith 1999, 218). In other words, the ‘mosaic’ narrative structure destabilizes the bond between our emotional and cognitive appreciation of the characters to enhance the relation between affect and emotion instead. In relation to the mosaic narrative of 21 Grams, Camargo’s explanatory framework appears more rewarding than that favoured by Newman. In the film, character complexity is more than the sum of information provided by the film, because it also involves the emotional and affective investments of the spectator. The narrative structure of 21 Grams thus prompts a more intuitive than rational bond between character and spectator. Furthermore, the visual style of the film – the grainy and washed-out imagery and the unsteady handheld photography – makes it possible for spectators to descend into the messy emotional states of the characters. Noticeable in relation to this is the appearance of Iñárritu’s star ensemble, which includes Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Costume designer Marlene Stewart has explained that Iñárritu constantly ‘stressed creating looks for the characters that didn’t overwhelm the viewer, that didn’t force the viewer to jump too quickly to conclusions about the characters’ (Stewart in ‘Production Notes’ 2003). In de-romanticising his cast, Iñárritu possibly wanted to prevent spectators from identifying with the star persona of the actors, thereby enabling us to recognize them as human beings in the midst of deep personal suffering. The characters instead become individuals who express a human suffering, which is capable of uniting us beyond cultural, social, and emotional distinctions related to class, race, religion, etc. At the same time, the characters demonstrate how human beings affect each other in both positive and negative ways. This is a key for understanding the narrative form of 21 Grams, since the fragmented ‘mosaic’ narrative emphasizes the interconnectedness between individuals that otherwise only share a geographical space (cf. Azcona 2010; Pisters 2011b; Tröhler 2006). As an example of how the film connects affect and emotion, consider how 21 Grams engages the spectator with the characters in the scene at the hospital where Cristina and Jack have eye contact and an ephemeral moment of hope and forgiveness suddenly occurs. The scene is not primarily effective because spectators cognitively designate this scene to be ‘about’ hope or forgiveness. The emotional tone of this scene has been carefully prepared by the film’s fragmented narrative, since it has built up a tension in our affective registering, which finally finds its release in this moment.

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Thus, by obstructing schematic, cognitive responses or accommodation, the film attempts to tie a more emphatic than cognitive-emotional bond between characters and spectators. In a sense, we are allowed to embody their pain and forgiving. Due to the ‘mosaic’ structure, the scene allows us to acquire both of the characters’ perspectives at once. As Camargo (2002) argues, (computational) cognitivism has been criticized for marginalizing the role of empathy as ‘an involuntary response to the film’s cinematic techniques rather than as a product of the conscious processing of a film’s narrative’ (16). In a similar line of criticism, it can be argued that Newman exclusively searches for character complexity in terms of cognition and cognitive emotions, and that he in doing so ignores the role of affect. In his later work, Murray Smith appears to have grown increasingly influenced by the embodied perspective according to which empathy reveals a far more intricate connection between affect, emotion, and cognition than allowed for in the computational model of mind. Murray Smith (2011), for instance, argues: We might regard empathy as a mechanism of the coupling between the mind and that part of the world through which it extends itself [...]. When we empathize with another person, we extend our mind to incorporate part of their mind. [...] In doing so, we exploit some part of the environment around us – in this case, another human being – and thereby learn something about the environment. (108, emphasis in original)

Thus, it would be false to assert that 21 Grams ruptures the affect-cognition linkages, and consequently cognition is not eschewed but granted a new role in the reconstruction of the affective-emotional-cognition circuitry of the ‘mosaic’ film. Consequently, to push our understanding of the complexity of these films it is important to acknowledge another prominent aspect of the ‘mosaic’ film – namely that the non-linear, acentric, and non-hierarchical narrative starting point usually develops gradually towards coherence, stability, and linearity. In relation to this, 21 Grams – although widely considered a radical example of the non-linear and fragmentary style of the ‘mosaic’ film – is no exception. Bordwell (2006) observes that the Setup [of 21 Grams] is tantalizingly fragmentary, but the plot becomes steadily linear, presenting more sequential scenes and fewer flashbacks as it proceeds. We arrive fairly soon at a stable event frame: a fatal hitand-run shatters the lives of the driver, the victim’s wife, and the man

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who gains the victim’s transplanted heart. 21 Grams achieves closure, and it motivates this, in the approved manner, as at once random and determined. (112, emphasis in original)

Following Murray Smith’s theory of empathy it is, furthermore, significant that the moment of eye contact comes at a point in the film where a broader context about the characters has been facilitated. This is the case, since ‘it is precisely the density of information available to us that is likely to precipitate empathic imagining’ (Smith 2011, 115). At this point, we must be careful not to fall back into the unidirectional classical ‘sandwich’ according to which it is primarily our cognitive-emotional comprehension of the narrative information that causes the sensation of empathy (cf. Chapter V). Thus, it should be clear that affect plays a central role in preparing the emotional discharge once sufficient narrative information is facilitated. As such, I agree with Allan Cameron (2008), who argues that ‘modular’ narratives like 21 Grams ‘oscillate between instability and uncertainty on the one hand, and schematic structures on the other’ (26). A Problematic Combination: Classical Narratology and Complexity Theory Although Cameron (2008) counts the cognitive film science of Bordwell among his main influences, he is not satisfied with the conception of contemporary cinema found here. According to Cameron, Bordwell ‘ignores the way that such modular narratives address broader questions of time and mediation’ (5). In his study of the ‘modular’ narrative, Cameron is primarily interested in exploring aspects that relate to the modernist elevation of narrative contingency and the postmodern explorations of chaos and order (17). In relation to 21 Grams, Cameron argues that ‘[t]he interplay between linear and non-linear time [...] parallels complexity theory’s articulation of determinism and chaos, reversibility and irreversibility’ (53). This thesis is alluring not only because 21 Grams makes explicit reference to chaos-theoretical thinking, but also given that such references have been plentiful within contemporary cinema more generally.10 Furthermore, complexity theory may prove productive for examining how 21 Grams reconstructs the role of cognition. Cameron assures us that he is aware that classical narratology and complexity theory have a different understanding of certain concepts such as ‘determinism’. As Simons (2008) acutely sums up this difference: ‘In complexity theory [...] determinism is associated with reversible (Newtonian) time, whereas in the narratological accounts [...] determinism is strongly

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associated with irreversible linear time’ (124, n. 2). Although Cameron recognizes this incommensurability, he appears to be ignorant about a much more severe disparity between classical narratology and complexity theory – namely their different understanding of complexity and temporality. This can be seen in Cameron’s appreciation of the narrative continuum as consisting of reversible ‘blocks’ of temporality. From this perspective, ‘modular narratives’ ‘present themselves as made up of discrete temporal or narrative units, arranged in ways that gesture towards non-linearity’ (5). The term ‘modularity’ – supposedly intended as a gesture to narrative non-linearity – thus reflects a conception of the narrative continuum as consisting of ‘modules’ that can be broken down and rearranged without any qualitative change to the system. As Bergson has vigorously maintained, this classical mechanistic conception is not able to capture real movement or time (cf. Chapter II). Paradoxically, in complexity theory non-linearity implies that a whole (e.g. the fabula) cannot be fully understood as the sum of its components (e.g. its narrative ‘modules’) (cf. Cilliers 2002). Given that it implies that the narrative is composed of independent, closed, and domain-specific entities, the term ‘module’ is itself entrenched in the classical scientific ideals.11 Ultimately, Cameron’s narratological methodology commits to an understanding of the narrative continuum as small segments of reversible, decontextualized, and isolatable units of narrative time. It is this understanding of narration that Cameron wants to pair with the concepts of non-linearity, complexity, and irreversible time such as these are used and applied in complexity theory. That Cameron understands the narrative continuum in terms of reversibility becomes even more evident, when he aligns the concept ‘modularity’ with Paul Ricœur’s idea of the ‘configurational dimension’ of narrative. According to Cameron (2008), the latter ‘makes of the events a meaningful whole, defines these events in relation to an ending and, via the repetition and recollection of the story, provides an alternative to linear time, encouraging us to “read time backwards”’ (54; cf. Ricœur 1990, 68-69). Now, if this kind of temporality can be opposed to linear time, it is only in the limited sense as opposed to the forward progression of the ‘arrow of time’. However, in complexity theory the arrow of time is not an expression of linear time but a condition of irreversible (and thus non-linear) time. Yet, for Cameron non-linearity implies an atemporal, or temporal symmetrical, understanding of the narrative continuum. This, however, is no different from the classical linear conception of time rejected by Bergson. From this classical perspective, the directionality of time is irrelevant, because a reversal of time here would not produce any significant material or physical

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change (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 1984). Hence, Cameron’s idea of ‘reading time backwards’ expresses exactly the classical scientific understanding of temporal processes that has been challenged by the complexity sciences. In his preface to Order out of Chaos, Alvin Toffler (1984) explains that within classical science, ‘events begin with “initial conditions,” and their atoms or particles follow “world lines” or trajectories. These can be traced either backward into the past or forward into the future’ (xx). Consequently, Cameron’s narratology shares its predilection for reading time backwards with classical science ­­­­– not with complexity theory. Cameron’s classical methodology is, further, problematic since it lacks sensibility for how irreversible processes nurture an ontological determinism (cf. Morin 2007; Prigogine & Stengers 1984). As has been argued, the fabulasyuzhet distinction comes with a comparable predilection for ontological determinism, because it organizes the narrative continuum causal-linearly (cf. Chapter II). As we are about to explore, the temporal detachment of the spectator and/or analyst from the actual cinematic experience, which is implied by the fabula, negatively influences Cameron’s (2008) treatment of how the ‘non-linear narrative structure [of 21 Grams] allows for a heightened examination of causes, effects and coincidences’ (48). The problematic consequences of Cameron’s classical narratology become apparent, when he asserts that ‘the fact that we are given information regarding the story’s culminating events at the very beginning of [21 Grams] seems to imply that the future is determined in advance’ (73, emphasis added). However, rather than implying an intrinsic narrative determinism, 21 Grams is disposed to causal-linearity only if our methodological, analytical, interpretative, or habitual mode of organizing experience is already predisposed to such patterns (cf. Chapter III). Cameron’s analysis of the scene, where Paul at dinner with Cristina explicitly evokes complexity theory to explain the inexplicable contingency of them having met, helps to elucidate the reasoning underlying Cameron’s approach. At this point, Cristina is still unaware of the fact that Paul carries her husband’s heart. Cameron argues that the scene can be taken as exemplary of how the events of 21 Grams may appear contingent but are in fact predetermined. According to him, ‘their encounter was effectively pre-determined rather than accidental, as it was orchestrated in advance by Paul’ (58). And yet is the extent to which their meeting appears contingent not merely a matter of the amount of information available to them respectively? Thus, for Paul the element of contingency rests in the fact that it was exactly the heart of Cristina’s husband that saved him. It is hard to see how the film implies this event to be explainable in reversible, causal-linear, or

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predeterministic terms. Granted, for Paul the accident can be seen as a cause for their meeting, yet to a certain degree the accident has also conditioned their meeting for Cristina, who is now widowed. The predeterminist tone that Cameron detects in 21 Grams appears to be the brainchild of the backward reasoning that he utilizes to comprehend the scene. As per the definition given earlier, backward reasoning can only operate from a future perspective in relation to the past events (in this case the fabula). This model dispenses with time, or rather; temporality becomes a reversible function that allows for a structural organization of the system. As Roland Barthes (1977) has acutely declared: Analysis today tends to ‘dechronologize’ the narrative continuum and to ‘relogicize’ it [...] the task is to succeed in giving a structural description of the chronological illusion – it is for narrative logic to account for narrative time. To put it another way, one could say that temporality is only a structural category of narrative (of discourse), just as in language [langue] temporality only exists in the form of a system; from the point of view of narrative, what we call time does not exist, or at least only exists functionally, as an element of a semiotic system. (99, emphasis in original)

The vital point to be taken from this is that the backward reasoning so profound to narratology depends upon an abstract suspension of time from the system. As Simons has argued, it is exactly the atemporal conception of the narrative continuum that allows ‘database’ narratologists like Cameron to reason forwards or backwards. The price of this is a serious reduction of temporal complexity since the narrative must first be made to conform to the reversible structures of classical science (cf. Simons 2008, 119). In relation to this, we may recall that Morin’s (2007) first principle of how classical science has traditionally reduced complexity is the principle of universal determinism associated with Laplace (cf. Chapter I). It is by necessity of this temporal reduction that narratologists perceive of the past as a series of necessary events. In so doing, they systematically rule out all the virtual possible – yet never actualized – outcomes, which could have resulted from the initial condition. Applied to narrative comprehension this logic is often accompanied with a lack of sensibility to questions that examine ‘what could have happened’. According to Ben Shaul (2012), the canonical story format discourages ‘optional thinking’, i.e. it actively discourages spectators from comprehending the narrative along the lines of ‘what-could-have-happened’ (cf. Chapter III). Cameron’s analysis would seem to imply that 21 Grams – as its events are causal-determined – in

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this regard is ‘closed-minded’. However, I will argue that the fragmented, non-linear, and ‘mosaic’ narrative structure of the film in fact encourages ‘optional thinking’. The accident, around which 21 Grams circles, is an irreversible event that completely changes and turns upside down the characters’ entire life situations: Cristina goes from a core family existence to excessive drug abuse, Jack suddenly turns against God, and Paul no longer finds meaning in his relationship, or, in life as such. Cristina, Jack, and Paul are in different manners forced to make meaning out of an ultimately meaningless event. Relentlessly playing the last message she received from her family on the answering machine, Cristina cannot understand why the accident had to happen. Similarly, if ‘God knows every hair that turns on your head’, as Jack tells a student in a scene before the accident, why must he experience so much suffering and guilt? Faced with the pure contingency of life, Jack’s Christian worldview starts to crack. Instead of believing in God, Paul ‘believes’ in fractals. He explains to Cristina that ‘there is a number hidden in every act of life, in every aspect of the universe [...] Numbers are a door to understanding a mystery that is bigger than us’. It is this conviction that leads him to Cristina, since he perceives the accident to be a message stemming from the mysteries of the universe. However much the characters attempt to induce a higher meaning to the accident, the fact remains that the accident is irreversible (the characters cannot prevent it from having happened). This nevertheless does not mean that the accident itself and the events that follow from it have been causally predetermined (the accident is not the outcome of causal chains already set in motion). The narrative structure of 21 Grams, therefore, rather than encouraging simplistic backward reasoning to reconstruct the one true, linear path of the fabula (the narrative structured around the analytical fabula), allows us to explore all the virtual pathways of the narrative continuum – i.e. it allows us to embody the fabula. Rather than suggesting that the events are predetermined, the fragmented narrative structure of the film allows the spectator to consider the available paths, which were never realized, but which could have given the narrative a completely different outcome. Recall Ben Shaul’s contention that the spectator’s strive to achieve narrative closure results in a cognitive and affective bias that leads to premature acceptances of inadequate or incorrect hypotheses as discussed in Chapter III. Could this not exactly be argued about the analytical proceedings that come with the cognitive-formalist concept of the fabula? Once taken as a representation of the actual story (rather than as a mode of organizing experience), the fabula reduces the temporality of

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the narrative continuum to a coherent causal-linear trajectory. It would thus be the linear, interpretative tool of the classical narratologcial fabula, and not as Cameron (2008) has it the ‘modular’ narrative, that is ‘flirting with determinism’ (48). Cameron uses complexity theory as a metaphorical and conceptual toolbox because he recognizes the shared interests of contemporary cinema and modern science. He, however, does not allow complexity-theoretical insights to reflect on his own narratological method (cf. Simons 2008, 117). This has unfortunate consequences, since the discrepancies are too grave between Cameron’s narratology and complexity theory. Eventually, instead of moving beyond the linear-non-linear dichotomy, Cameron falls into a grey area between them. As a result, Cameron’s theory of the ‘modular’ narrative has been perceived as ‘the best example of how good old-fashioned narratological thinking gets in the way of understanding the role and meaning of temporality in the new sciences of complexity’ (Simons 2008, 117). Alternatively, the embodied fabula allows for an appreciation of the virtual pathways of 21 Grams. Instead of regarding 21 Grams as a series of causallinear and predetermined narrative events, the embodied fabula perceives the narrative continuum as a series of complex and irreversible events open for virtual explorations. In this fashion, this concept resonates with recent attempts in historical studies to loosen the causal-linear conception of past events. Not only the study of narratives, but also the study of history, has traditionally sought to make sense of past events through a strong adherence to backward reasoning. In history, the past is inevitably considered from the temporally detached future perspective of the historian, who constructs a line of important events that find a (possible) endpoint in the present situation. To counter this methodological approach, certain historians have proposed a ‘virtual’ alternative to the study of history (cf. Ferguson 1999). The aim is to complement the retrospective backward reasoning of traditional historical approaches with a ‘virtual’ approach that takes the perspective – or demands that the analyst embeds himself in the situation – of the historical protagonists to consider ‘those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered’ (Ferguson 1999: 86; original emphasis omitted). ‘Virtual’ historians thus compensate for their temporal displacements from the past events by placing themselves in the midst of events, from which history can be explored not merely from the point of view of ‘what actually happened’, but also from the plausible, yet never realized, alternative paths of what ‘could have happened, but never did’. It is exactly their ability to allow

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spectators to explore the virtual pathways of the narrative that has caused Simons (2008) to perceive the complex narrative as the ‘filmic equivalent of “virtual history”’ (122). In 21 Grams the fragmented opening of the f ilm provokes a reconf iguration of the affective-emotional-cognitive circuitry, because the incipience to action invoked by the images can neither find an emotional nor a cognitive release. It, in other words, ‘short-circuits’ our perceptual habit of selecting images that interest us only for potential action (Colebrook 2002, 40; Powell 2007, 3; cf. Chapter II) In this sense, the film opens up the affective dimension by enabling spectators to explore the virtual dimension of the images and those narrative pathways that could have been actualized, yet never were. In relation to this, the concept of affect in the work of Deleuze, Massumi, or Shaviro becomes an instrumental tool, since it opens up an exploration of the virtual pathways induced by the cinematic experience. The affect created by the narrative structure of 21 Grams influences the manner in which spectators comprehend the plot, the characters, and how they emotionally connect to the narrative. In this manner, the film integrates affect into its plot mechanics that, again, build the affective landscape into which the film’s narrative is absorbed. As a result, it would be mistaken to argue that 21 Grams privileges affect over emotion and cognition. More precisely, the film reconfigures their relation to explore new venues of cinematic spectatorship. Its fragmented non-linear structure introduces a desire for meaning, order, and chronology, which can only find satisfaction in an exploration of the virtual pathways of the film. Furthermore, the narrative structure of 21 Grams is capable of inducing a cognitive awareness of how we make sense of images, when the circuits of affect, emotion, and cognition operate smoothly, i.e. in what we have termed ‘linear cinematic perception’. The film initially immerses the audience in a narrative world best described by Iñárritu as an ‘immense universe of circumstances’. Spectators will take this as an invitation to ‘solve’ the narrative by performing cognitive tasks such as hypotheses testing, schemata application, and establishing patterns and connections in order to reconstruct the narrative according to the analytical fabula. Gradually, patterns and linearity will emerge and bestow meaning upon the chaotic narrative universe. In this sense, the affect-laden, fragmented narrative structure of the film intensifies a desire for meaning and order. At the end of the film, Duncan MacDougall’s theory that the human soul in average weighs 21 grams is introduced. Spectators will react differently to this emotionally and rationally. On the one hand, the theory

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introduces that glimmer of hope and profound meaning of life that the characters and spectators (in their attempts to make sense of the story) have been yearning for. The theory of the weight of the human soul can thus be taken as a form of explanation that provides narrative coherence and clarity. The paradox, however, is that this can only be achieved if spectators are willing to accept a theory whose rational and scientific value is contentious. In such cases, our incipience (affect) towards meaning (cognition) is so dominant that ‘believing becomes seeing’.12 The 21 grams of the film’s title can be seen as providing narrative resolution, meaning, or closure. However, the 21 grams can also be seen as an expression of the impossibility of measuring the human ‘soul’ and as a testimony to what will remain forever beyond human comprehension. As such, the title reflects the film’s preoccupation with death as the place of both absolute contingency and eternal meaning. The novel achievement of 21 Grams lies in how it allows its spectators to explore these ‘eternal questions’ through an embodied, immersive, affective, emotional, and cognitive experience of the narrative.

‘Forking Paths’ – Complex Storytelling in Lola rennt In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Garden of the Forking Paths, the mysterious figure Ts’ui Pȇn has created a labyrinth of time rather than space.13 In cinema, it can be argued that Ts’ui Pȇn’s labyrinth has materialized in its own rights in a series of complex narratives identified as ‘forkingpath’ narratives. Characterizing these films is the narrative thread that at one or several points departs from its linear unfolding and bifurcates, thereby showing the different virtually possible, yet mutually exclusive, outcomes of a given event. In Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (Przypadek 1987), to take an example, the main character Witek (Boguslaw Linda) runs after a train. From here, the narrative forks into three possible futures in each of which Witek’s life has developed in surprisingly diverse directions. Another variation of the ‘forking-path’ narrative is Groundhog Day (Ramis 1993) in which a pessimistic weatherman (Bill Murray) is forced to relive the worst day of his life until he ‘learns’ to embrace the joyfulness of the day. In narrative terms, both films – initially at least – appear to challenge the idea of the unified and linear progression of narration. This is the case since the construction of a coherent fabula is rendered problematic, because not all bifurcations, or ‘forking paths’, are possible at once. It is, therefore, tempting to understand ‘forking-path’ narratives

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as a subcategory of the Deleuzian regime of time-images insofar as they reveal ‘the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts’ (Deleuze 2005b, 131). However, ‘forking-path’ narratives do not dispense with cinematic linearity in a similar radical fashion as time-images supposedly do. For reasons we are about to explore, not ‘every model of truth collapses’ (131) in these narratives that are instead located somewhere between the movement-image and the time-image (cf. Martin-Jones 2006). In relation to this, ‘forking-path’ narratives have often been studied as an example of how complex narratives – despite incorporating certain characteristics of the time-images – must be understood as belonging to the linear paradigm of canonical Hollywood storytelling. In the ‘forking-path’ narratives of contemporary cinema, Bordwell (2002a) argues, ‘linearity helps make these plots intelligible’ (92), while David Martin-Jones (2006) claims that these films ‘bear testament to the reterritorialising power of the movement-image’ (85). Given the fact that the two scholars in question depart from the polarized theoretical frameworks of cognitive film science and Deleuzian film-philosophy, it is startling that they arrive at such similar conclusions. For both, cinematic ‘forking paths’ provide merely a glance of the Borgesian labyrinth of time, which has been thoroughly domesticated by the reterritorializing powers of the movement-image associated with classical Hollywood. Interestingly, both authors resort to the German experimental box-office success Lola rennt as an example of how classical linearity pervades ‘forking-path’ narratives. The aim of the following is to demonstrate that their respective treatments of the film are restricted by a linear-non-linear dichotomy that the film itself has left behind. With extravagantly red-dyed hair and a trashy, punkish look, the title character (Franka Potente) of Lola rennt runs the streets of Berlin to the persistent heart-beating sound of the film’s techno score. Lola is running to save the life of her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) – a foolish antihero, who lost possession of a bag containing DM 100,000 that he was supposed to deliver to his merciless gangster boss. Passive and incapable of even the simplest tasks, Manni is contrasted to Lola, who literally and visually sets things in motion, trying to get hold of the money within a 20-minute deadline. If Lola is not back in time, Manni has proclaimed to rob the nearby supermarket. In the first of Lola’s three runs, she fails to reach Manni in time, who then decides to rob the nearby supermarket to obtain the money. She nevertheless does come in time to help him, and the couple manages to get away with a large amount of money, but quickly thereafter

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find themselves surrounded by the police. As Manni throws the bag with the money to a police officer, the latter’s firearm is accidently triggered and Lola is shot in the breast. In the second attempt, Lola fails to obtain the money but manages to reach Manni in time. However, this time the timing is wrong and Manni is accidently hit and killed by an ambulance. In the third run, both Manni and Lola are successful in retrieving the money. The ironic twist is that both are successful by chance: Lola wins on the roulette and Manni accidently encounters the homeless person, who is still in possession of his bag. The relatively simplistic set up allows for the film’s complex dramaturgical form and style. Besides from splitting into Lola’s three attempts to retrieve the DM 100,000, the film entails an abundance of different visual modalities (such as 35 mm, animation, black and white images, red monochrome images, and grainy video images). These further engage with a manifold of devices for orchestrating or manipulating cinematic temporality (such as slow and fast motion, jump cuts, rhythmical editing, the use of split screens, etc.). Some scholars have attempted to trace out a consistent logic able to connect the visual modalities to the various temporal layers of the film, or, to understand these as a mode of character focalization (Evans 2004, 107-108). Others have argued that the film as a whole is consistent only in its constant complicating and disorienting of any straightforward attempts to map out one-to-one relationships between the visual modalities and the temporal layers of the film (Wedel 2009, 131). Another prominent device for orchestrating the temporality of the film is the deadline that is used to structure each of Lola’s runs. A classical narrative device thus complements the more experimental device of the bifurcations. Whereas the latter ensures repetition and temporal non-linearity, the former provides the film with a persistent and goal-oriented forward movement. In combination, this mixture alludes to the narrative structure of a variety of computer games in which the player is granted three lives/attempts to complete a level within a given time slot. Each run is separated by a scene – functioning as an interlude – of the couple lying in bed. These scenes are stylistically and thematically comparable to Hiroshima mon amour. Not least because the lovers lie entangled, naked in bed in what suggests a pre- or post coital situation, which marks the temporality of the scene as one ‘in-between’ events (cf.  Chapter  IV). Like the lovers of Resnais’s modern(ist) landmark, Lola and Manni talk about the contingency of their love affair. Their conversation, too, reflects upon the film’s narrative form; however, in a

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quite different way than is the case in Hiroshima mon amour. The main difference is that Lola rennt – unlike Hiroshima mon amour – is not constructed as a criticism of linearity, representation, narration, or history (cf. Chapter IV), but, perhaps, rather expresses a certain mode of being in the world. As Bianco (2004) has pointed out, this particular mode of being in which ‘the image and we are always running, always movement in play and always opening onto the emergent’ (378) far more resembles a narrative game. The film introduces the metaphor of the narrative game already in the opening prologue in which a man (later to appear in the film as a security guard working in the same bank as Lola’s father) states: ‘The ball is round. The game lasts 90 minutes. That’s a fact. Everything else is pure theory’. He then proceeds by kicking a ball high up in the air to gesture that the game can now begin. What follows is a 2D animation sequence of Lola running through a tunnel, which graphically resembles a computer game. Even more explicitly than 21 Grams, Lola rennt incorporates concepts derived from complexity theory into its dramaturgical form. Especially prominent is of course the idea of bifurcations. However, also the butterfly effect, in which the proportions of cause and effect relate to each other in a non-linear fashion, is prominent in the form of the film’s flashforwards. These appear in different variations in each of Lola’s runs and reveal the different outcomes pertaining to the minimal changes in Lola’s encounter with the people that she quite literally runs into. The flashforwards indicate that each moment of the narrative is a potential starting point for a bifurcation, which, if it would be followed instead, would steer the narrative in another direction. It is worth noting that in some of the bifurcations the future scenario of the sub-characters is positive while it is tragic for Lola. Simultaneously, in the third run Lola encounters a woman whose virtual future is tragic, while Lola finally succeeds in solving her task (or completing the level). A question that has been perceived as a significant key to the comprehension of the film is how to interpret the third and final run dramaturgically. Is it to be perceived as a narrative resolution in which the ‘right’ path has been chosen, or, is it rather an affirmation of the pure contingency of life? It should be obvious that the ‘either-or’ framing of this question is formulated alongside the classical-modern(ist) dichotomy, since it inevitably desires to categorize the film in continuation of the linear logic of classical cinema or to position it among the ‘pure’ non-linear artworks of modern(ist) cinema. In relation to this, Bordwell has, perhaps not surprisingly, argued that the film adheres to the linear principles of canonical storytelling.

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Are Forking Paths Linear? For Bordwell, Lola rennt is not merely another example of the general prevalence of classical storytelling in cinema, it is also evidence of its persistency within contemporary complex narratives. In an interview, Bordwell sums up his understanding of Lola rennt concisely: A movie like Lola Rennt, for instance, which is very experimental in some ways, is in many ways also very traditional. Beginning-middle-end, she gets three chances, the last one is the right one [...] I mean this is very much in the spirit of classical cinema. (Bordwell in Donecker 2005)

Bordwell (2002a) proposes that in the forking paths of cinema, the Borgesian labyrinth of time has been ‘trimmed back to cognitively manageable dimensions [...] designed for quick comprehension’ (91). He traces out seven conventions whereby this is achieved. In the following, three of these – particularly relevant for the recuperation of linearity in Lola rennt – are presented and discussed. These conventions are as follows: #1) ‘Forking paths are linear’ (92); #6) ‘All paths are not equal; the last one taken presupposes the others,’ (97) and #7) ‘All paths are not equal; the last one taken, or completed, is the least hypothetical one’ (100). #1 is connected to Bordwell’s contention that ‘forking-path’ narratives ‘are built not upon philosophy or physics but folk psychology’ (90). Despite the f ilms’ frequent and often explicit references to philosophy and/or science, Bordwell argues that these theories can shed only modest light on narrative conventions insofar as the latter are customized to fit ‘the ordinary processes we use to make sense of the world’ (90). In the end, the highly complex and abstract theories of modern physics and philosophy, so Bordwell’s thesis, simply do not conform to the cinematic requirements for painless consumption: Storytellers’ well-entrenched strategies for manipulating time, space, causality, point of view, and all the rest reflect what is perceptually and cognitively manageable for their audiences, and the multiple worlds of Borges and quantum mechanics don’t fit that condition. (91)

Bordwell is justified in claiming that the complexity of the philosophical and scientific concept of ‘multiple worlds’ exceeds the boundaries of what is cognitively comprehensible in narratives. It is indeed hard to imagine a cinematic narrative that would do absolute justice to the complex idea of

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multiple and equally possible futures. This is mainly the case, since it would require the actualization of the virtual pathways into genuine, linear, narrative trajectories. Hence, doing absolute justice to the complexity entailed in the short story is a false requirement for determining how these films deal with the Borgesian thought experiment. Bordwell seems to accept that narratives must always oscillate between convention and transgression, thus his actual line of inquiry is also not whether ‘forking-path’ narratives actually realize a Borgesian labyrinth of time or not. The question he poses instead is whether these films open up to the complexity of ‘multiple worlds’ or rather enclose them in a linear, classical worldview that conforms to the idea of the one necessary and ‘true’ path. Bordwell believes the latter to be the case. Bordwell’s convention #1 (‘forking paths are linear’) describes how each of the narrative forks ‘adheres to a strict line of cause and effect’ (92). Although the overall linear trajectory may split, each of the bifurcations eventually establishes its own linear trajectories. Bordwell assumes that the mode of causality that pertains to each of the bifurcations is identical with the causal-linear narrative drive of the classical film. However, it should be noted that the fact that linearity can be restored after each bifurcation is not necessarily a contradiction to the temporality of complexity theory. Prigogine & Stengers (1984) explain that it can be expected that ‘near a bifurcation, fluctuations or random elements would play an important role, while between bifurcations the deterministic aspects would become dominant’ (176). In other words, the contingency or non-linearity is constituted in the moment of bifurcation, whereas more causal-linear patterns dominate each fork, when these can be observed in isolation, i.e. once the inherent potentiality for further bifurcations of each fork is reduced from the equation. In relation to this, the flashforwards of the film operate as constant reminders of the endless virtual possibilities of each narrative trajectory. Admitted, it is quite common for ‘forking-path’ narratives only to visualize a limited amount of forks (often even the minimum of two), and for Bordwell (2002a) this means that in Sliding Doors (Howitt 1998) and Blind Chance the ‘narratives assume that one moment of choice or chance determines all the rest’ (92). Although it might be the intention of some films to invoke such an interpretation of its events (the early, more classical ‘forking-path’ narrative It’s a Wonderful Life [Capra 1946] comes to mind), one must be sceptical towards proclamations about the intrinsic nature of the narrative itself (as isolated from the spectator/analyst). Another issue with Bordwell’s theory is that it does not distinguish between different modes of causation, or, more precisely, between the linear

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causality associated with classical cinema and the structural multicausality of complex narratives (cf. Shaviro 2013). The flashforwards of Lola rennt involve causality, but this causality is entangled in an infinitely complex system of networks and patterns. It is, therefore, to be differentiated from the causal-linear trajectories towards absolute knowledge that Bordwell has argued characterize classical storytelling. In the same stroke, this multicausality diverts from the classical scientific understanding of linearity, since it no longer implies a proportional relation between cause and effect. The causality of Lola rennt instead forms part of a complex or non-linear system, which is governed by a ‘startling incongruity between cause and effect, so that a small cause can give rise to a large effect’ (Hayles 1990, 11). Thus, although Lola rennt facilitates cognitive comprehensibility, it does not promote determinist causal-linearity. Furthermore, as Bordwell (2008) has argued elsewhere, the narrative device of the flashforward is ‘unthinkable in the classical cinema’ (155). Nevertheless, Bordwell is right to observe that the deadline device is used to orchestrate each run temporally in a manner that is comparable to its standard use in the classical film. However, this alone does not mean that Lola rennt adheres to the causal-linear logic typically associated with classical cinema (notwithstanding the question of whether this logic is an inherent attribute of the classical film as Bordwell and several others have suggested, cf. Chapter III). In any case, the difficulty pertaining to Lola rennt is not the identification of a well-known temporal mode of orchestration, but is instead to be found in the complex interplay between the diverse temporal modes of the film. As Wedel (2009) has argued: [T]he temporalities within each individual episode are in themselves far too complex and convoluted – perforated and punctuated as they are by jump cuts, discontinuities on various levels, internal repetitions, snapshot bits and pieces, slow and fast motion shots – for one to really speak, as Bordwell does in his first definition, of each forking path as being organized in a strictly ‘linear’ fashion. (135)

In other words, even if certain events relate to one another in terms of causal-linearity, it does not automatically mean that the overall temporal design of the film is pervaded by this logic. Bordwell’s argument, however, appears to become more persuasive with the introduction of his two last conventions. Bordwell’s convention #6 (‘All paths are not equal; the last one taken presupposes the others’) is concerned with the range of knowledge that

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characters and spectators have across the multiple worlds of the narrative. Bordwell (2002a) asserts that ‘[t]he future shown first supplies some preconditions for later ones, always for the audience and sometimes for the character’ (99). That is, the information that spectators receive first will influence how they experience later events. This, as Bordwell explains, is ‘due to the exigencies of telling in time’ (99).14 Bordwell here touches upon the irreversible nature of the cinematic medium, which it has been argued cannot be equated with causal-linear reversible time. However, this convention also concerns those incidents where characters, too, can accumulate knowledge across the parallel universes. When this is the case, the film introduces a linear, narrative trajectory that cuts across the dispersed narrative continuum, and gives it a uniform direction towards a final resolution. In Bordwell’s interpretation of the film, Lola ‘learns to control the chance that ruined her previous futures’ (99).15 In combination with convention #7 (‘All paths are not equal; the last one taken, or completed, is the least hypothetical one’) Bordwell has collected strong support for the thesis that the Borgesian labyrinth is domesticated by classical linearity within ‘forking-path’ narratives. The question is how this linearity was achieved. In other words, does the narrative encourage spectators to single out the last path taken as the least hypothetical one? Alternatively, is Bordwell analytically predisposed to single out a privileged path due to the cognitive bias towards linear organization of his conceptual framework? Considering Bordwell’s constructivist theory of narrative comprehension, it is startling that he assumes linearity to be an intrinsic quality of the narrative itself. If this is not to be perceived as merely a personal interpretation but an intrinsic quality of the narrative itself, it would be fair to assume a broad consensus that Lola’s last run should be taken as the one ‘true’ path. This, however, is not the case. Elsaesser & Hagener (2010), for instance, count Lola rennt as a ‘postmortem film’, where ‘while the body is (un)dead, the brain goes on living and leads an afterlife of sorts or finds different – ghostly, but also banal, mundane – forms of embodiment’ (165). Brockmann (2010), following a quite different string of arguments, denies that the film’s trajectory replicates that of the classical film, because its characters do not grow more introspective, reflective, or enlightened over the course of the narrative, instead the film places Lola in motion, and the point of the movie’s repetitions is not so much to come to some sort of ultimate enlightenment as it is the pleasure of the game itself. ‘Everything else,’ as the uniformed bank guard in the movie’s prologue had declared, ‘is theory’. (461)

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Finally, Kovács (2007) denies that any of the three bifurcations should be regarded as the most privileged or ‘true’ one, thus denying that Bordwell’s convention #7 is at work in the film. He instead argues that Lola’s story exists in three alternative versions each as plausible as the others. The role of chance here is not to confirm the rule of order by showing that what should happen happens anyway, like in classical narrative, nor to demonstrate the dramatic disaster caused by unpredictability, as in modernist narratives that show what should happen accidentally does not happen, or what should not happen happens accidentally. Tykwer’s film wants to show that nothing that happens happens because that is the way it ‘should be’. (76)

It is noteworthy that Kovács believes the film to be demonstrating that nothing happens because it had to happen, which implicates a total rejection of the causal-linearity that Bordwell perceives to be the constitutive logic of the film. Alternatively, it could be argued that the linear principles that constitute the logic of Bordwell’s methodology become apparent in his interpretation of the film. Bordwell first dissects the film into three smaller units, which he then relates to one another causal-linearly. This method, however, assumes the narrative continuum to be understandable in linear terms from the very outset. In this manner, Bordwell forces causal-linearity onto the narrative whose intrinsic logic he aims to observe objectively. In relation to this, Mitchell (2002) has acutely contended that the difficulty Bordwell faces in his treatment of Lola rennt, is that ‘[t]here is no problem in understanding each story; it is their relationship that is confusing. Seeing the whole as more than just the sum of the three separate parts is the cognitive problem’ (5). Bordwell’s interpretation of Lola rennt depends upon isolating and separating cognitive difficulties from one another (cf. Morin 2007), only to reunite them again in a linear order. In relation to this, Elsaesser (2009) has argued that in the hands of Bordwell’s causal-linear methodology ‘the para-normal features are given normal explanations, and the narratives are restored to their “proper” functioning’ (21). This can be seen in extension of the discussion of Michotte’s experiment with how humans introduce causality to the system even in cases where there by definition is none (cf. Chapter V). The argument is not that causal-linearity is extraneous to the comprehension of narratives, but rather that we should be wary about contentions that this exists as an intrinsic value of the narrative itself. Bordwell,

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I believe, rightly argues that narratives consciously play with predictable viewer patterns of making shortcuts, expecting stereotypes, making faulty inferences, or jumping to erroneous conclusions (cf. Bordwell 2002a, 90). However, could causal-linearity not in certain instances be counted among such ‘errors’ to which we are prone due to our predisposal for organizing our surroundings in easily accessible terms? In any case, making us aware of our biases towards causal-linear organization is a recurring element that can be found in complex narratives. Embracing the Narrative Rhythm of Lola rennt A predisposition to causal-linearity is not only to be found within cognitiveformalist informed approaches to contemporary complex narratives. From his film-philosophical perspective, Martin-Jones (2006) has located a surge of ‘hybrid films’ within contemporary cinema – hybrid, because these films ‘contain characteristics of both the movement- and the timeimage’ (39). Martin-Jones sets out to examine how within these f ilms ‘the [movement-image and time-image] interact as a mutual struggle of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation’ (4). Whereas the first ‘enables a displacement of narrative into multiple labyrinthine versions’ (4), the latter ‘entails a constraining of a narrative into one linear timeline’ (4). The logic of categorization at work here is simple: Whether an image is a movement- or a time-image depends on the degree to which it de- or reterritorialises time. The closer it is to establishing a linear narrative, the more likely it is to be a movement-image. By contrast, the more visible the labyrinth, the closer to the time-image. (27)

Rather than being interested in this mutual struggle as a dynamic and creative force in itself, Martin-Jones aspires to determine the degree to which the selected films either de- or reterritorialize time. Exemplifying how within contemporary cinema ‘the labyrinthine possibilities offered by the time-image are caught in the process of reterritorialisation as movementimages’ (113), Martin-Jones has selected two ‘forking-path’ narratives: Lola rennt and Sliding Doors. Martin-Jones declares that he will ‘use David Bordwell’s article, “Film Futures” [...] to demonstrate how the overriding narrative logic that [Sliding Doors and Lola rennt] manifest is that of the movement-image’ (85). Bordwell and Deleuze are thus united in the task of categorizing cinema according to the linear-non-linear dichotomy. MartinJones shows little concern for the discrepancies between the cognitive

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and film-philosophical perception of cinema. In fact, Bordwell’s ideas on the ‘forking-path’ narrative are assumedly translatable into a Deleuzian vocabulary, insofar as [i]n Deleuzian terms, Bordwell is observing how classical narrative devices are used to order the multiple narratives of these films into the coherent, linear schema we expect of a movement-image. Thus, their labyrinthine visions of time are mapped in a user-friendly way, once reterritorialised within the parameters of the movement-image.16 (87)

In effect, Martin-Jones combines Bordwell’s linear narratology with a Deleuzian valorization of Bergsonian durée and the time-image in his treatment of Lola rennt. Scholars have often pointed out the implicit favouring of the time-image in Deleuze’s cinema books (e.g. Mullarkey 2009; Rodowick 2003; Smith 2001). This valorization of modern(ist) ideals has nurtured the establishment of a clear hierarchy between the reterritorializing, non-linguistic, affective, non-linear, intensive, non-narrative, artistic, and aesthetic qualities of the time-image, and the conventionality, linearity, commerciality, easy comprehensibility, focus on cognitive problem-solving, and the epistemological classicism of the movement-image. This has nurtured a too simplistic mode of apprehending the differences of the movement-image and time-image. An example of this is Martin-Jones’ comparison of Lola rennt to Resnais’s L’a nnée dernière à Marienbad (1961): Despite [Lola rennt’s] apparent use of deterministic chaos [...] the labyrinthine possibilities this model offers are actually restrained by the linearity of a much more classical view of time. Unlike previous films such as L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961), which sacrificed the clarity of a classical narrative in order to experiment with a labyrinthine view of time, Run Lola Run – for entirely understandable, commercial reasons – owes its financial success to a reterritorialised representation of chaos within fairly classical (both narrative and time) parameters. (Martin-Jones 2006, 112-113)

Ultimately, it becomes evident that Martin-Jones has chosen an approach to cinema that stresses the differences between the classical and modern(ist) and allows him to advocate for the superiority of a specific form of cinematic temporality associated with the philosophy of Bergson. Due to the processual nature of cinema, the devices associated with this form, however, have

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themselves been reterritorialized – or at least been conventionalized – as modern(ist) cinematic devices have been incorporated into mainstream cinema (cf. Mullarkey 2009, 10). According to Martin-Jones (2006), Lola rennt ultimately adheres to the linear logic of classical Hollywood narration. To support this claim, the author singles out an illustrative image that ‘encapsulates the rationale behind the film’s linear sequencing of its narratives’ (112). The image in question is a split-screen divided in three. On the left side of the image, Manni is waiting for Lola. If she fails to show up in time, he will rob the nearby supermarket. On the right side of the image, Lola is seen sprinting full speed ahead to reach Manni in time. Finally, in the lower part of the image, a clock is ticking. According to Martin-Jones, the clock is perceived as an objective and visual representation of time, and more precisely of the ticking deadline that orchestrates the time pressure conveyed in the scene. In this fashion, the film reterritorializes time in the concerned splitscreen image: On one side of the screen, as Manni waits on his fate, time passes slowly for him; on the other, for Lola running to beat the clock, time passes almost too quickly. For the spectator, however, their relative movements appear to be seen objectively, due to the presence as measure of time of the hands of the clock that appears at the top of the screen. (112)

Hence, ‘the spectator is given the illusion of objective, spectatorial mastery over the relative experiences of time lived by the characters’ (112). This illusion relates to the manner in which the image renders different incommensurable temporalities commensurable. That is, the presence of the clock falsely suggests that Lola’s and Manni’s personal temporalities can be mediated by an objective representation. Thus, Martin-Jones argues that the true logic of the scene is causal-linear, although it has been disguised in the form of Bergsonian durée. Therefore, the scene is exemplary of how the film more generally domesticates the Borgesian labyrinth of time into the linear trajectory of ‘two “wrong” narratives and one “right” one’ (112). According to Martin-Jones, the spectator is constantly provided with a detached narrative perspective since it is through ‘the fixing of the first story as the originary model that we view the effects on the others as due to Lola’s relatively faster or slower flight’ (112). In essence, Martin-Jones’ and Bordwell’s arguments here amount to the same: the Borgesian forking paths conform into a single, overarching, linear, narrative trajectory from which ‘the observer can judge the relative merits of the others’ (111).

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Again, I am not convinced that the emergence of a single, ‘true’ temporal logic can be considered an intrinsic quality of the narrative itself. Rather, in adopting a Bordwellian interpretative strategy, Martin-Jones fails to see the extent to which he himself imposes a linear logic onto Lola rennt. Due to its multimodal temporality, the film in fact appears to be questioning Martin-Jones’ presumption that a narrative must adhere to only one, rather than several, temporal logics. In this fashion, the film actively undermines Martin-Jones’ endeavour to establish the ‘true’ underlying logic behind the appearances of the film. That Martin-Jones despite being theoretically informed by Bergson and Deleuze chooses a narratological approach that is rooted in the classical linear onto-epistemology (cf. Chapter II), evidences the lack of a genuinely film-philosophical approach to narration. In his brief treatment of Lola rennt, Slavoj Žižek (2001) encourages a reversal of the narratological common sense, which holds that the style has necessarily been appropriated to the narrative. This, he argues, is not the case in Tykwer’s film, since ‘it is not that Lola [rennt]’s formal properties adequately express the narrative; it is rather that the film’s narrative itself was invented in order to be able to practise the style’ (81). What Žižek suggests is neither that Tykwer has chosen the ‘forking-path’ dramaturgy for commercial reasons nor that the film owes its financial success to a reterritorialized representation of chaos within classical parameters (cf. Martin-Jones 2006, 112-113). It is rather that this form has been deemed the best suitable companion to the film’s fast-motion sequences, musical editing, frozen still images, slow and fast motion, grainy images, and above all the iconic kinetic image of the energetic, flamingly red-haired protagonist of the film.17 For Žižek (2001) the film embodies a new life experience, which amounts to ‘a perception of life that explodes the form of the linear, centred narrative and renders life as a multiform flow’ (78). In this line of reasoning, all the film’s visual modalities and temporal layers have been orchestrated in an attempt to express the distinct rhythm of the film. The commercial appeal of the film may, therefore, result not as much from the domestication of linear temporality, such as Martin-Jones argues, but rather in its ability to prompt a mode of spectatorship, which reconstitutes the classical cinematic circuitry of affect-emotion-cognition to complement the contemporary ‘life experience’ – for better or worse. Furthermore, the success of the film pertains to its incorporation of certain aesthetics of the music video to highlight the audiovisual nature of the cinematic experience (cf. Chion 1994, 2009). In doing this, Lola rennt appears to give weight to Shaviro’s (2010) argument that ‘films [...] are machines for generating affect’ (3, emphasis

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in original). This view calls attention to the non-linear and virtual aspects of the film in a manner that does not subordinate them to the narrative. Shaviro (1993), for instance, argues: Film’s virtual images do not correspond to anything actually present, but as images, or as sensations, they affect me in a manner that does not leave room for any suspension of my response. I have already been touched and altered by these sensations, even before I have had the chance to become conscious of them. (45)

I believe this to be a more adequate context for approaching the frequent references that Lola rennt makes to complexity theory than the one proposed by Martin-Jones. From this perspective, the film is driven by a desire to produce a sensation of life as a ‘multiform flow’ in the viewers. Here reversible and irreversible processes coexist (cf. Prigogine & Stengers 1984, 257), and it is thus tempting to describe complex narratives, such as Lola rennt, in terms of ‘open-systems of bifurcating emergence [...] unfolding non-linear, multi-dimensional and durational, complex, chaotic, if not catastrophic, realities that register affectively’ (Bianco 2004, 402, n. 9, emphasis added). Yet, the danger in taking such an approach, as has already been argued, is that it leads to an overemphasis on affect as a dimension of cinema entirely separated from the cognitive dimensions that interest the likes of Newman, Cameron, Bordwell, and Martin-Jones. The challenge, then, is not to isolate the cognitive from the affective aspects of the film, but to group them together. To shift our focus onto the interplay between affective and cognitive spectatorial address in Lola rennt, it is central to accentuate both the film’s cognitive and affective as well as linear and non-linear dimensions. Wedel (2009) turns to the philosophy and rhythmanalysis of Henri Lefebvre (1991, 1992, 2002, 2004) to understand the complex temporal design of the film. Wedel (2009) is discontented with Bordwell’s reading of Lola rennt, and feels it needs to be complemented ‘on the grounds of a reconsideration of cinematic rhythm and sound’ (135). The advantage of Lefebvre’s framework is its multimodal conceptualization of temporality that moves beyond the opposition of the ‘clock’ time versus Bergsonian durée. Wedel observes: Already in the late 1920s, Lefebvre had challenged the then dominant philosophical theorization of time along Bergson’s notion of durée (duration), and set out to develop what he himself referred to as a ‘theory of moments,’ privileging the importance of the instant. In Lefebvre’s understanding

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the single instant as potentially non-calculable, as a critical moment of virtual openness, as a contingent unit of temporal resistance encapsulates both the difference between linear and cyclical time, and the contrast between clock time and ‘lived’ time. (138; cf. Lefebvre 2004)

For these reasons, Wedel f inds Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis suitable for examining how the ‘disguised persistence of linearity’ (139) in Lola rennt is simultaneously connected to ‘those dimensions of space, time, and subjective experience opened up by rhythms, repetitions, and intervals’ (139). Lefebvre (2004) conceptualizes temporality in musical terms such as melody (as the linear sequence of notes in temporal succession), harmony (the simultaneous sounding of notes), and rhythm (as the placement of notes and their relative length, which gives rise to issues of change, repetition, identity, contrast, continuity, etc.) (cf. Wedel 2009, 138-139). The rhythmical approach to temporality offers a new conceptual palette beyond the linear-non-linear dichotomy. As such, it allows for an examination of the linear dimension of Lola rennt as a vital component, which is nevertheless merely a part of the larger and more complex rhythm of the film. From this point of view, reducing the film to a linear logic would be comparable to reducing a musical piece to a series of notes in temporal succession. Rhythmanalysis offers an alternative to Martin-Jones’ and Bordwell’s arguments that Lola rennt is constrained within a linear view of time, and it thus resonates with Shaviro’s concept of ‘post-continuity’ discussed in Chapter II. Michel Chion (2009) has suggested that in contemporary cinema ‘music has become the ever more privileged “place” of the film and the reference point of its editing’ (416). For this reason, we no longer ‘have the same need for the film to construct a coherent, coordinated, and homogeneous visual space’ (416). An analysis of the narrative rhythm of the film thus appears to be a relevant place to understand the role of ‘post-continuity’ in Lola rennt. In the film, the persistent techno-beat sets the pace, vitality, editing, and visual style of each of Lola’s three runs. A dynamic that complements the narrative rhythm is created when the techno-beat is replaced by ‘What a Difference a Day Makes’ performed by Dinah Washington, when the film shows Lola being shot and falling to the ground in slow motion accompanied by Charles Ives’ ‘The Unanswered Question’, or in the complete absence of any soundtrack in the bedroom scenes. The dynamic role of the soundtrack becomes particularly perceptible when the recurring techno-beat fades in over the last 20 seconds of the bedroom scene before the second run to prepare spectators affectively and cognitively for the coming visual and narrative explosion.

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In her study of the soundscape of Lola rennt, Caryl Flinn (2004) suggests that the choice of techno music has – at least – two plausible motivations. First, techno music with its persistent ‘backbeat’ has a direct and bodily appeal, which is underlined in its function as dance music. The music thus attaches our affective engagements with the film to the movements of the title character, and thereby constitutes a very basic and precognitive bond between spectator and protagonist (that feeds back into and thus influences our cognitive appreciation of the film). It can be argued, as Bordwell has done, that this is accompanied by an epistemological bond between spectators and Lola since both are able to ‘learn’ across parallel universes (cf. Bordwell’s convention #6). In this manner, the film connects us to Lola cognitively as well as affectively. The music, however, does not only tie spectators to the film’s main character, but equally connects them to the persistent and riveting flow of the film. As Flinn argues, the ‘musical beats dictat[e] much of [Lola rennt’s] rhythm, pace, editing, and energy’ (202). The techno music thus sets the overall rhythm of the film. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that this means a complete reintroduction of the affective-emotional-cognitive circuitry associated with classical cinema. The music does not lead up to the inevitable climax of the story, since ‘unlike traditional tonal music, techno has no clear beginning, patterns of development, or resolution; unchanging and energetic, it is repetitive without standing still’ (202). Rather than simply inducing a moment of progression, the film attempts to enfold or embed us into its (narrative, audiovisual, stylistic, etc.) rhythm (cf. Chapter V). This is primarily achieved at the level of affection since the spectator here is connected to the musical rhythm of the film and to Lola’s relentlessly forward-moving body. At times, the rhythm of the film, the movement of the main character, and the affectedness are so enfolded into one another as to appear inseparable. The film, for instance, achieves this in a scene where Lola’s heartbeat synchronizes with the beat of the techno music to create one united pumping rhythm. When the audiovisual aspects of the film are considered, the dramaturgical ‘forking-path’ structure is given a dimension that has been obscured by Bordwell’s and Martin-Jones’ obsession with linearity and continuity. The narrative structure, the film’s multimodal visual style, and the dynamics of the soundtrack all simultaneously complement Lola’s restless forward movement and the film’s repetitive loops in order to accentuate recognizable patterns of change and difference. It is in this manner that Lola rennt contains, yet cannot be reduced to either the linear logic of continuity or the non-linear ruptures of discontinuity. Wedel (2009) turns to Flinn to rehearse

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a similar string of arguments when he asserts that the techno music acts ‘[a]s a musical idiom and temporal marker which is both a linear forward driving force that vectorizes movement and unleashes a pulsating energy and, at the same time, constitutes a highly “repetitively structured form, organized around beats per minute”’ (137; cf. Flinn 2004, 202). In a similar fashion, the split screen that for Martin-Jones encapsulates Lola rennt’s linear rationale is perhaps better understood as comprising several modes of temporality – including linearity and non-linearity. Once the split screen is seen as part of the overall narrative rhythm of the film, the linearity of the scene incorporates the spectator, who takes part and actively forms this rhythm. This does not happen in the form of a struggle between reterritorializing and deterritorializing powers, but is perhaps better perceived as ‘unities in opposition’ formed between different spatiotemporal logics (Lefebvre 2004; Wedel 2009). Whereas the relation between these in the first strives towards dominance, the latter brings these elements into synthesis. The split screen should be seen in unison with the narrative structure, the soundtrack, the bedroom scenes, the flashforwards, etc. All are operating towards ‘synthesizing linear and cyclical temporalities into the one common logic of rhythm’ (Wedel 2009, 137). The common logic of rhythm should not mistakenly be understood as a ‘true’ logic, since it itself implies a multiplicity of many logics. Instead, it is the logic of persistent feedback loops in the system that connects non-linear affects with cognitive strives for meaning. We are here approximating the logic of the embodied fabula. This differs from the binary logic as exemplified by Martin-Jones, who perceives the clock in the split-screen image to be a symbol of the disembodied, objective, and temporally detached perspective that the film proffers (cf. Martin-Jones 2006, 112). Here the film is ultimately reduced to its linear dimension. However, once the spectator is actually perceived to embody the various temporalities of the films – in the split screen, the spectator embodies the dissonance in temporal perspectives – the temporal logic conveyed in the scene appears multilayered and complex. This is not a recuperation of linear temporality, since according to the logic of rhythm ‘[t]ime and space, the cyclical and the linear, exert a reciprocal action: they measure themselves against one another; each one makes itself and is made a measuring-measure; everything is cyclical repetition through linear repetitions’ (Lefebvre 2004, 8). The film ties us affectively and cognitively to the characters, but also to the narrative and audiovisual rhythm of the film. This ‘synchresis’ (Chion 1994) (an acronym formed in the merging of the words synchronism and synthesis to describe the forging

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between an audio impression and a visual impression, when those occur at exactly the same time) ties the visual image to the soundscape of the film. In Lola rennt, the ‘synchresis’ underlines the embodied cognitive-affective mode of spectatorship that characterizes the film. In this fashion, the film does what Marshall McLuhan (1994) has famously argued electronic technology does more generally, it ‘dethrones the visual sense and restores us to the dominion of synesthesia, and the close interinvolvement of the other senses’ (111). Wedel’s application of Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis provides an example of how an embodied methodological approach can go beyond the linear-non-linear dichotomy, and in doing so enhance our understanding of the temporal logic of Lola rennt.

VII. Memento and the Embodied Fabula In post-theory, the ‘beautiful’ is not necessarily consilient with goodness, the romantic, or transcendent notions, but to a feeling of duration, movement and continual process: what Deleuze refers to as ‘haecceity’ or ‘intensity’. [...] ‘Beauty’ thus pertains to a process that takes empirical precedence over form. [...] The determination of beauty becomes temporal, not reflective: an open-ended process, a feeling of flowing, rhythm, or ‘becoming’. Indeed, a refreshing concern with sensation, rather than desire or pleasure, requires us to think about sensation as a rhythmical experience, not one of static shock of excitations on the nervous system. ‒ Kennedy 2000, 30-31 What will you find once you have completed the intricate and exhausting path and found the centre of the maze? Yourself – in the middle of a maze.1

Introduction Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) – based on Jonathan Nolan’s short story Memento Mori – is perhaps the most debated complex narrative to date. In addition to countless formal dissections, the film has been the subject of innumerable critical examinations. It has been perceived as exemplary of various different philosophical and theoretical positions, and the philosopher Andy Clark (2010) has even suggested that the film’s main character can be perceived as the embodiment of his extended mind thesis.2 On account of this, Robert Sinnerbrink (2011) has humorously asserted that Memento should now be considered the philosophers’ favourite film, thereby suggesting that it has trumped such beloved examples as Rashômon (Kurosawa 1950) or more recently The Matrix (Andy & Larry Wachowski 1999) (48). The extended attention devoted to the film demonstrates that ‘Memento is a very good example of what a complex narration can be’ (Ghislotti 2009, 87). Although Memento affirms the inferential nature of cinematic spectatorship, it simultaneously renders difficult the cognitive processes that organize narratives into chronological series of events. This chapter argues that Memento thereby questions the narratological coupling of realist and constructivist epistemologies and defamiliarizes linear cinematic perception . In so doing, the film enfolds or embeds the

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spectator into the narrative, and thus spectator and film become deeply intertwined. To better capture this aspect of the cinematic experience induced by Memento an embodied reconfiguration of spectatorship is required. In contrast to our everyday experience of time as forward progression, Memento opens with a sequence in which the ‘arrow of time’ has been reversed (cf. Chapter VI). Here a Polaroid photo appears on the screen, which is only later to be identified with the film’s main character Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), who suffers from anterograde amnesia – a condition that makes him unable to create new long-term memories. Curiously, rather than gradually developing, the Polaroid dissolves each time it is shaken. Suddenly, the Polaroid ‘jumps’ back into the camera, blood ‘runs’ up the wall, a gun ‘springs’ into Leonard’s hand, and a cartridge ‘flies’ back into the gun, before a man – later to be identified as Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) – ‘comes alive’ with a scream. The scene contains a media-conscious play on the anxieties and desires associated with the cinematic and photographic ability to ‘preserve the lifelike movements of loved ones after their death’ (Doane 2002, 3).3 Yet, Memento goes even further in this respect, since it has integrated an awareness of how the cinematic medium structures human perception and cognition into its dramaturgical arrangement. The innovative and experimental narrative structure of Memento has been instrumental for the extensive attention devoted to the film by fans, critics, and academics alike. Following the suggestion of film critic Andy Klein (2001), the narrative structure can be illustrated according to an intricate, yet systematic, scheme where the coloured reverse chronological scenes (A, B, C, etc.) are separated from the black-and-white, chronological scenes (1, 2, 3, etc.). Klein’s suggestion provides us with the following visualization of the narrative structure: Credits, 1, V, 2, U, 3, T, 4, S, 5, R, 6, Q, 7, P, 8, O, 9, N, 10, M, 11, L, 12, K, 13 J, 14, I, 15, H, 16, G, 17, F, 18, E, 19, D, 20, C, 21, B, 22/A.

Each reverse chronological sequence is interrupted by a black-and-white scene from which a new reverse chronological sequence follows, etc. Scene 22/A is pivotal in relation to this, since the two narrative threads merge in this scene. The black-and-white scene 22, as Klein observes, ‘almost imperceptibly slips into color and, in an almost vertiginous intellectual loop, becomes (in real-world order) scene A, the first of the color scenes’ (par. 30).

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With the merging of the two narrative threads, the film allows for the construction of a causal-chronological continuum, which can be translated into the following structure: 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22/A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, Credits (in reverse).

In applying this narrative logic, Klein continues by providing an extensive and meticulous account of the film’s events once these have been organized causal-linearly. Stefano Ghislotti (2009) has examined the difficulties that this narrative structure causes to memory and cognition. According to him, ‘the difficulties we experience [in comprehending the narrative of Memento] are deeply rooted in the skillful way we normally watch ordinary movies’ (88). Ghislotti is intrigued by the viewers’ mental capacities and their ability to comprehend the narrative despite its demanding structure: ‘[H]ow one can cope with a film so intricate and difficult to understand is a very stimulating question’ (87). Interestingly, Memento first becomes truly exciting once our cognitive processes can no longer operate in the unattended and automatic manner that cognitivists refer to as ‘successful’ (cf. Bordwell 1989, 12). Because it makes us aware of the standard quotidian processes that constitute what is experienced as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ cinematic perception, Memento is ideal for exploring the distinction between the cognitive-formalist and the embodied fabula. Ghislotti’s study makes it evident that Klein’s analytic dissection of the film’s fabula does not equal the cinematic experience of the spectator, who during the screening is trying to work out the narrative structure mentally. This owes to the reverse chronological dramaturgy of Memento, which allows spectators to experience their active contribution to the construction of the narrative. The film thus questions the fabula as a representation of the narrative via an initial affirmation of core cognitivist assumptions about cinematic spectatorship. In this fashion, Memento allows us to grasp how the ‘sensory data of the film at hand furnish the materials out of which inferential processes of perception and cognition build meanings’ (Bordwell 1991, 3). Hence, Memento makes visible the inferential nature of cognition and perception, whereby it becomes evident that the ‘perceiver is not a passive receiver of data but an active mobilizer of structures and processes’ (3). Touching upon this, Sinnerbrink (2011) has contended that Memento ‘chimes with cognitivist theories of narrative that emphasize the roles of rational inference-making, the testing and adjusting of beliefs, and the cognitive matching of affective tone with perceptual awareness’ (48).

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The reverse chronological dramaturgy is thus not only connected to the film’s discursive exploration of memory, it also proves a demanding task for the spectator’s own memory capacities. Both reflect upon Leonard’s inability to build new memories, despite his ability to remember the past before the accident normally. 4 Consequently, much of the narrative centres on Leonard’s ‘memory system’ – consisting of mementos in the form of annotated photographs, notes, and tattoos for the most important ‘facts’ – that aids him in his strive for revenge. Leonard harbours an unrelenting belief in the capability of his methodological system to acquire facts that are superior to those that a normal working memory would be able to conjure: Facts, not memories: that’s how you investigate. I know, it’s what I used to do. Memory can change the shape of a room or the color of a car. It’s an interpretation, not a record. Memories can be changed or distorted and they’re irrelevant if you have the facts.

Since the film’s difficult narrative structure challenges the spectator’s own memory capacities, it can be argued that it substantiates Leonard’s disbelief in the accuracy of memory. However, as viewers will progressively come to recognize it is not just memory that is deemed unreliable, but also the ‘facts’ of Leonard’s ‘memory system’. Viewers become aware of how easily Leonard is manipulated in a scene where he is tricked into helping Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) – the femme fatale whose boyfriend was killed by Leonard, who, nevertheless, has forgotten about the incident. Natalie hides all pencils in her home, then she provokes Leonard into hitting her (in passing, it should be noted how revealing it is that violence is his instinctive reaction to being provoked). Natalie leaves only to return moments after, yet long enough for Leonard, who has been struggling to find a pen, no longer to remember the episode. Seeing the marks on her face, he agrees to help Natalie pacify the man whom he now firmly believes to be responsible for harming her. From such scenes, it becomes clear that all the characters surrounding Leonard are in fact interested in taking advantage of his condition, which makes an accurate version of the story hard to conjure. Yet, for Bordwell (2006) the difficulties of the film are merely the result of the order in which information is presented: If story events had been presented in chronological order, Teddy would at the start have explained fully how he duped Leonard into killing Jimmy

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and others, providing us with all necessary exposition. In reverse order, however, Teddy’s explanation serves as a climactic revelation, resolving many uncertainties. (80)

As argued in Chapter III, the linear interpretative method implied by the fabula rests on an elimination of ambiguities. Consequently, Bordwell is willing to accept Teddy’s account of the events presented at the end of the film.5 In short, Teddy denies that Leonard’s wife was killed in the accident, and claims that she died from an overdose of insulin. According to him, Leonard did in fact lose his memory in the accident, yet his surviving wife could not live with her ‘new’ husband and in a final test to ‘shake him out of his condition’, she made him give her repeated injections of insulin. This explanation suggests that Leonard’s story about Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a former client who suffered from the same condition, is in fact a revised version of Leonard’s own story. Leonard explains that the story of Sammy ‘helps [him] understand [his] own story,’ but believes that his ‘memory system’ will prevent him from suffering the same fate as Sammy: Sammy Jankis wrote himself endless notes. But he’d get mixed up. I’ve got a more graceful solution to the memory problem. I’m disciplined and organized. I use habit and routine to make my life possible. Sammy had no drive. No reason to make it work.

When Teddy suggests that Sammy is merely Leonard’s psychological projection of himself, this can be interpreted as providing the ‘solution’ to the narrative. Since this interpretation is supported by a subliminal image, where Leonard takes the place of Sammy in a mental hospital, it has often been perceived as the unambiguous solution to the narrative.6 However, nothing ensures the absolute reliability of Teddy’s version. As the film ends, spectators have witnessed Leonard killing twice (Natalie’s boyfriend Jimmy and Teddy), and we are left with the impression that his search for revenge/justice has become instrumentalized; mostly for drug dealing. In what we come to realize is just a Sisyphean loop, the question we thought was central – who killed Leonard’s wife – no longer bears the promise of epistemological clarity.7 The original poster for the film plays with the mise en abyme, or infinite regression, of its narration, hinting that our attempts to linearize and rationalize the narration will result in a journey down the rabbit hole.8 However, this journey is also the attraction of the ‘game’ Memento plays with its spectators (cf. Elsaesser 2009), and should be seen in the context of the particular kind of self-reflexitvity to

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be found in complex narratives. As Poulaki (2014b) observes, this differs from its Brechtian and modern(ist) kind. Thus, ‘instead of alienating the viewers, or making them reflect upon the film (by means of a subject-object relationship and positivist epistemology), self-reflexive techniques engage them, as already broached, in an increasingly complex communication’ (41).

Realism and Constructivism: A Narratological Deadlock To better appreciate how Memento engages us with the narratological paradox that lies in the double role of the spectator as both creator and discoverer of the fabula, it is useful to differentiate between realist and constructivist epistemological positions. Bebe Speed (1991) has provided a concise description of the realist position, as that according to which ‘reality exists, can be discovered by people in an objective way and thus strongly determines what we know’ (396). This is countered by various forms of constructivism. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld (1991), constructivism in its ‘radical’ form was conceived as an attempt to circumvent the paradox of traditional epistemology that springs from a perennial assumption that is inextricably knitted into Western philosophy: the assumption that knowledge may be called ‘true’ only if it can be considered a more or less accurate representation of a world that exists ‘in itself,’ prior to and independent of the knower’s experience of it. (13, emphasis in original)

In Memento the realist position is expressed with reference to Leonard’s ‘memory system’ and the manner in which he takes upon him the role of the classical detective, who must unravel the true nature of events in the name of an altruistic justice (altruistic insofar as Leonard himself will be unable to remember that justice has been served). In relation to the cognitive-formalist fabula, the realist aspect is expressed in the search for a ‘true’ account of the events, whereas the constructivism is emphasized in the inferential nature of narrative comprehension (perception, cognition, and memory are all inferential). Memento brings attention to the latter insofar as its ‘unusual composition hinders some basic functions of memory’ (Ghislotti 2009, 88). From this perspective, the difficulties pertaining to the construction of a coherent fabula involve: the formation of a mental representation of the state of affairs; the processing of the audiovisual stream of data; the sorting of important aspects into mental schemes; the storing of important information

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and order of events; the constant revision and reintegration of new fabula events; and the capacity of sensing time (89). The film thus overloads the mechanical operations of our memory systems, insofar as ‘[i]t is impossible to keep more than a few elements in our short-term memory’ (97). This renders difficult the realist search of a coherent, meaningful, and unified ‘truth’. Thus, the narrative structure of Memento both activates our realist desire for knowing the ‘truth’ while spelling out the imperfect nature of knowledge based on the unreliable nature of memory. Consequently, ‘[w]hile the film continues to present new elements to be processed, we cannot keep the complete ordered fabula structure in mind’ (97). This introduces a gap, since the solidity of the fabula available to the analyst after a critical retrospective dissection of the film (cf. Klein 2001) can no longer meaningfully be said to correspond with the story that spectators operate with during the screening of the film. This renders evident that the fabula can be seen as an analytically detached representation of the narrative (the analytical fabula), which is generally more systematic and linear than the spectator’s mental experience of the narrative (the embodied fabula). My point is that Memento activates our desire for constructing an analytical fabula, yet in doing so demonstrates that narrative experience extends far beyond the ‘problem-solution’ or ‘question-answer’ models of cognitive formalism. Volker Ferenz  (2009) has pointed out that Memento stages a clash between the realist and the constructivist positions on epistemology. Besides carrying the traces of a realist epistemology, Ferenz (2009) has contended that Memento and similar f ilms simultaneously reflect upon the ‘modern discourse of epistemological scepticism because they playfully stage the epistemic limitations experienced by their respective character-narrators’ (260). Since Memento does not deny the existence of an external reality, but restricts the possibility of knowledge to the sphere of that which ‘the autopoietic human being makes of it’ (274), Ferenz argues that Memento can be perceived as a ‘textbook case of psychological constructivism’ (274). Although the constructivist theory appears to be a suitable framework for understanding Leonard, Ferenz argues that the film ultimately demonstrates how this epistemological position can ‘easily lead to the erosion of personal responsibility’ (277). On this interpretation, the film actually contends that ‘a philosophical realism, where we discover features of objective reality rather than construct them, is preferable in the real world’ (277). This argument should be seen in the light of how Leonard actively constructs his memories according to a classical and autopoietic narrative, where he plays the role of the innocent victim, who must fight an unjust world against all odds. In the pivotal

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scene at the end of the film (22/A) Leonard manipulates himself into killing Teddy (we see Leonard shoot Teddy in the opening scene, but it is only at the end of the film that this act can be put into a more rewarding context). As Leonard scribbles down Teddy’s number plate in his notebook with the addition ‘fact number 6’, his voiceover is heard: ‘Do I lie to myself to be happy? In your case, Teddy... Yes, I will’. For these reasons, Ferenz argues that Memento expresses the modern anxieties connected to a radical constructivist epistemology and the loss of stable truths. However, it could equally be argued that the moral deprivation of Leonard neither originates from his realist nor constructivist tenets but their unfortunate combination. Leonard acts and reacts as an ‘affective machine’, because the mnemonic devices around which he structures his environment are unable to connect with deeper layers of memory (cf. Bianco 2004). This means that Leonard’s tattoos, Polaroids, notes, etc., prompt immediate actions. His facts are bereft of their complex context, and his methodological and realist system thus relies on a problematic deductive reasoning. As Bianco (2004) has observed, ‘the injunction inscribed on the Polaroid of Teddy, “Don’t believe his lies,” becomes a generalized, “don’t believe Teddy,” since there can be no distinction made between perception and memory, Teddy and his lies’ (384). Due to Leonard’s misuse of the constructivist epistemology to justify his immoral actions, Ferenz concludes that the film demonstrates the moral implications of the radical constructivist position: For [Leonard], because (a) in such an objective and mind-independent world somebody else killed his wife (a subjective interpretation), his goal of (b) revenging her death is just (it is a self-righteous concept). Therefore, (c) it is okay for him to hunt down that mysterious John G. (a subjectively understandable form of justice). However, the assumption that some junkie killed his wife has already been shown to be untrue, and thus this whole line of reasoning collapses. On the level of the film’s story, Leonard’s line of reasoning is but an excuse of sorts to remain a serial killer. (276)

Paradoxically, this interpretation is itself enunciated from a realist narratological perspective, since it levels out the carefully constructed ambiguity of the film – the question of whether Teddy can be trusted – to provide an authoritative fabula. Moreover, this interpretation is conducted from a rationalist position that posits to gain knowledge about the narrative world through an analytically detached gaze. It thus fails to acknowledge how Memento implements the spectator’s and analyst’s desire for ‘solving’

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the narrative. The film’s reverse chronological structure makes us aware of our own ongoing linear, cognitive reconstruction of the story. In accentuating the spectator’s active construction of the narrative (constructivism), the film thus simultaneously questions the idea of settling on an intersubjective narrative truth (realism). Ferenz’s approach is representative of the difficulties that cognitive formalism confronts, when it fails to properly take into account the dynamic relationship between narrative and spectator/analyst. In the case of Memento, spectators are aligned to the protagonist in a shared desire to learn about the ‘true’ nature of the events. This alignment is further established by an epistemological bond stemming from the reverse chronological dramaturgy. Consider how Nolan explains his motive for telling the story in reverse chronology: One day I drank too much coffee and said to myself, ‘Well, if you tell the story backwards, then the audience is put in the same position as Leonard. He doesn’t know what just happened, but neither do we.’ (Nolan in Molloy 2010, 45)

In this fashion, the narrative structure not only creates an epistemological bond between the spectators and Leonard, it also accentuates the similarity between Leonard’s situation and narrative interpretative strategies that aim to conjure up a coherent fabula. Unlike Leonard, the spectators are capable of retroactively connecting the disjunctive elements into a fairly coherent string of events. In doing so, they realize the unreliability of Leonard’s realist ‘memory system’ and his ‘autopoietic narrative’. This causes a destabilization of the epistemological bond, which in turn renders visible the similarities between Leonard’s endeavours and a cognitive-analytical comprehension of the narrative. As Simons (2008) explains, ‘the narratologist does what [...] the main character of Memento do[es]: [both] reason backwards from the end to identify the events that necessarily had to occur to make the “terminal event”, the ending possible’ (119; cf. Barthes 1977, 99). Consequently, it can be argued that the epistemological scepticism of Memento goes beyond Leonard’s manipulation of his mementos (and hence his memory construction) to also include the narratological mode of reasoning backward. Leonard’s moral deprivation is thus not the result of an epistemological constructivism per se, but arises when such is implemented into a classical, realist narrative of an innocent man seeking justice. Without his realist ‘memory system’ Leonard would not be able to design the paths that repeatedly send him on a Sisyphean hunt for a

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murderer who may or may not exist – but whose existence in any case has ceased to be important. In this fashion, Memento explicates the mise en abyme of cinematic narrative comprehension as a paradoxical oscillation between constructivism (we actively construct the narrative) and realism (to establish an approximately ‘true’ fabula). In doing so, Memento playfully stages a modern predilection for reconciling constructivist insights within a realist epistemology. Nowhere is this as explicitly pronounced as in Bordwell’s theory of narrative comprehension. According to Bordwell (1996a), radical or strong constructivist positions risk the lure of absolute relativism: If beliefs are relative to culture, then belief in relativism must be relative to our culture; but then that doctrine cannot claim true insights into the beliefs, relative or not, of other cultures. As far as I can tell, no film theorists have addressed the self-contradictions haunting the radical constructivist premise. A radical constructivism is also empirically limiting. Universal or cross-cultural regularities can play an important role in our explanation of human action. (13)

Consequently, Bordwell’s (1991) version of constructivism ‘assumes that it is possible to arrive at inferences which are at least approximately true; it is thus compatible with a critical realist epistemology’ (277, n. 9). Nick Redfern (2005) has not only convincingly argued that Bordwell’s objections to radical constructivism arise from a (common) misunderstanding of this position, he has also presented a precise criticism of Bordwell’s attempt to reconcile the constructivist and realist positions.9 Redfern explains that radical constructivism denies neither the existence of an ontological reality nor the existence of a mind-independent reality. However, insofar as radical constructivism contends that an ontological reality is not reachable given that human knowledge is constructed, this position should be understood as ‘second-order knowledge’, i.e. a form of knowledge about knowledge itself. For the radical constructivist, cognition thus serves the organization of the experiential world, and not the discovery of an ontological reality (Glasersfeld 1988, 83). According to Glasersfeld (1991), this distinguishes the ‘radical’ from the ‘trivial’ constructivist position: Those who merely speak of the construction of knowledge, but do not explicitly give up the notion that our conceptual constructions can or should in some way represent an independent, ‘objective’ reality, are still caught up in the traditional theory of knowledge. (16)

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In being knowledge about knowledge, radical constructivism is not concerned with the ‘true’ nature of things. Redfern (2005) explains that ‘the key to evaluating competing knowledge claims [...] is not to seek to compare them to a mind-independent reality that cannot be known, but to assess their cognitive viability or functional fitness’ (sec. 3, emphases in original). In relation to Bordwell’s theory of cognitive spectatorship, Redfern argues that it falls short on two points. First, Bordwell assumes that spectators are able to conjure inferences that are ‘at least approximately true,’ but he fails to account for the circumstances that would ensure such proximity. Redfern (2005) reasons as follows: Confronted with such a model the following question remains: How do we know that our inferences are ‘at least approximately true?’ An answer to this question has eluded Western philosophy since Socrates, and, without a solution to the ontological problem, constructivism remains trapped within the epistemological trap of realism. (sec. 3, emphasis in original)

Secondly, Bordwell lacks a convincing theory of communication, since he perceives the fabula to be constructed from the ‘mind-independent’ cues that are perceived to be inherent entities of the film. Redfern rejects the proposition that the cues can act as the ‘facts’ from which the fabula can be constructed in more or less proximity to the film’s ‘true’ story. Instead, ‘“facts” in the cinema are [...] not the pre-existing cues in a film described by Bordwell, but are the result of an active process of observing on the part of the spectator. These facts are then put into a context by a spectator (i.e. they are interpreted)’ (Redfern 2004, 45-46, emphasis in original). The result of the combination of realism and constructivism is that cognitive approaches tend to assume that the cinematic experience is restricted by the formal properties of a given film. Ben Shaul (2012), for instance, criticizes Memento for being a f ilm that forces viewers to construct the narrative along a closed-minded path (cf. Chapter III). He reasons as follows: [T]he disjointed dynamic of the backtracking narrative, figuring and formally replicating the mentality of its mentally unstable protagonist, rather ends up encouraging in viewers an intense attention, heightening their need for closure, along with an intense fear of invalidity due to the random and dissociative narrative. While this process is intriguing, in

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that it evidences the cognitive ability of viewers to manage to nevertheless follow and figure out the narrative, it nevertheless ends up encouraging loopy thinking both in the required and repetitive back-and-forth puzzlesolving activity, and in the latter’s short-circuiting at the end by a loop that returns the viewer to the film’s opening shot. (106)

Here ‘loopy thinking’ describes the act when individuals, fearing a lack of closure, ‘fix on a mental loop whereby options are reduced to a narrow and recurring set of irresolvable alternatives, a mental maze from which they cannot escape’ (9). In proposing a ‘fear of invalidity’, Ben Shaul assumes a spectator for whom the main cinematic and cognitive pleasure resides in the achievement of closure, i.e. of learning the ‘truth’ about the narrative. This assumption resonates with Bordwell’s theory of narrative comprehension, which assumes that a great deal of cinematic pleasure lies in the cognitive reorganization of the narrative continuum into a causal-linear and coherent series of events. As has been argued elsewhere, this account has revealed its explanatory limitations, since it cannot account for the narrative pleasures invoked by films that disrupt the urge for narrative certainty or otherwise upset our expectations (Sinnerbrink 2011, 52). Consequently, cognitive theories have displayed a general lack of sensitivity for how the spectator experiences the (successful or failed) attempts to construct a fabula, and the possible reflections to be drawn from this experience are lost as a result. In fact, it can be argued that Ben Shaul’s criticism of Memento reflects back upon his own restricted conception of narrative comprehension. Since the linear interpretative model that Ben Shaul presupposes is uneasy with narrative ambiguity, the spectator is bound to a ‘closed-minded’ diminishing of ambiguity by prematurely settling on one of the possible interpretations as the correct one. Otherwise viewers are caught in a catatonic state of ‘loopy’ thinking in which no progress is being made. However, perceiving the narrative maze as a limitation to thought – rather than a productive and creative force – appears to be an erroneous belief, which, I believe, stems from the marriage of constructivism and realism found in cognitive film science. In order to avoid the problematic union of realism and constructivism, Redfern proposes an alternative to Bordwell’s unidirectional communication model. Redfern’s alternative is a self-referential model that relies on constant feedback loops (cf. Fig. 3). While Redfern’s model can be criticized for not allowing emotion or affect into the model of knowledge construction (cf. Chapter V), its advantage over Bordwell’s model is that it does not presuppose the existence of inherent narrative meanings or cues. This model

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Figure 3.  Stages in the Construction of Knowledge (Redfern 2004, 46)

Theorising, abstracting conceptual structures to construct general explanations and general taxonomies.

Interpreting, putting facts in to an experiential context in order to build up conceptual structures.

Testing, applying a theory to new experiential contexts.

Observing, constructing empiric all facts on the basis of regularities in the subject’s experience.

accounts for how cinematic images can be meaningful without succumbing to the epistemological fallacy of understanding these as inherent features of the artwork itself. Hence, meanings do not reside in the cinematic images but arise from the encounter between the perceiver and the perceived world. Redfern’s model allows for a more open examination of cinematic narratives, since it does not rely on pre-existing meanings that the spectator must uncover – an idea that contributes to the limited freedom of the cognitive spectator (cf. Chapter III). According to Redfern’s model, cinema is constituted in the encounter between the cinematic material and the cognitive-perceptual system of the spectator, from which structures and interpretation are conjured. Due to the feedback loops of this model, the viability of these is then continuously tested and evaluated against the world (or narrative universe) it is supposed to reflect upon. As such, this model avoids the problem of representation, since it ‘uses the world as its own model’ (cf. Brooks 1999, 79; Chapter II). From this perspective, cinema does not communicate meanings to the spectator, but structures pathways to be explored in a myriad of manners. In relation to cinematic complexity, this means that the formal properties of a film do not determine the meanings that can be constructed from it (Redfern 2004, 47). Although Redfern’s model does not account for the

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affective and emotional role in the construction of meaning, it is useful for understanding how the embodied fabula can operate with an intersubjective comprehension of narratives without succumbing to a realist epistemology. While the embodied fabula denies the realist and representational assumptions of Bordwell’s cognitive model, it acknowledges the inferential and constructivist nature of spectatorship. A desire for establishing the ‘true’ account of the narrative events can also be found in Deleuzian film criticism. Here this endeavour has, however, been reversed. The task thus becomes to deem the narrative puzzle unsolvable. In her article on Memento, Melissa Clarke (2002) accentuates how the film arouses a desire in spectators and analysts to figure out the ‘truth’ about ‘the circumstances surrounding Leonard’ (168). For Clarke, it is central that the film does not render it possible to arrive at an unambiguous solution. Consequently, her main interest becomes determining the indeterminable nature of the film, and in her efforts to do so she spells out a paradox that haunts the Deleuzian time-image. Clarke explains that time is revealed anywhere there is ‘an indiscernibility between the actual and the virtual, where there is an ambiguity between the real and imaginary on the screen’ (172). However, this indiscernibility cannot ‘be a simple confusion to which there will soon be a resolution in the next scene’ (172). Consequently, determining this indiscernibility readily becomes a classical narratological question. In this Deleuzian version, however, the narratological task becomes the establishment of the fabula as predominantly incoherent rather than as an unambiguous narrative solution. Hence, the film-philosophical discernment of time-images comes to rest upon a method of inquiry that is Bordwellian in essence, since it proposes the most fundamental question of the viewer to be whether a coherent fabula can be constructed. Clarke’s (2002) treatment of Memento is thus representative of a tendency to pursue classical narratological questions within a Deleuzian framework with the aim of categorizing films along the opposition of movement-image and time-image. Consider, for instance, the following passage: Was the story about Sammy ‘true’? Or was the story rather about Leonard, and was it Leonard’s wife rather than Sammy’s wife who was diabetic and killed herself to try to snap Leonard out of it? Was Leonard’s wife even really killed in the accident? These questions are raised by Ted, but can Ted be trusted to tell the truth? In any event, Ted himself does not necessarily know the truth and claims to be only speculating. And so on. The ‘truth’ of the past is undecidable for these and other issues; for example, we never

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do find out whether Leonard did or did not kill ‘John G.’ At this level, the viewer becomes aware of the indiscernibility between the truth or falsity of layers of past. And again, the structure of time is directly revealed. If instead we were confident in a single determinate truth of the past, we would be falling into the more traditional understanding of time as linear progress, and of the present as the only reality, and the past as no longer existent. (177)

Here Clarke perceives the opposition of movement-image and time-image in terms of a reductive formula according to which the film either allows for the construction of a coherent fabula and consequently confines to a linear temporality (movement-image) or it does not allow such to be conjured and thus opens up for a non-linear, Bergsonian time (time-image). Once time-images are perceived as arising from the impossibility of determining a ‘single determinate truth of the past’, these can only be discerned in retrospect. Whether the indiscernibility was permanent can, therefore, first be determined after the fact, i.e. once the narrative has ended. The paradox is that time-images in this manner can only be discerned from a perspective that is temporally detached from the actual viewing experience. Since Clarke addresses the problem of movement-image versus time-image from the linear onto-epistemology of classical narratology, she, too, makes it the central concern to ‘search, behind those appearances, the hidden order that is the authentic reality of the universe’ (Morin 2007, 6; cf. Chapter II). Although she presumes ‘reality’ not as linear but Bergsonian and non-linear (and this obviously entails a series of philosophical self-contradictions). Rendering visible how the cognitive-formalist fabula continues to inform Deleuzian approaches to cinematic narration, and replacing this concept with the embodied fabula may help overcome a tendency, as observed by Sinnerbrink (2008), within post-Deleuzian film-philosophy to bifurcate into two competing directions of interest. On the one hand, there are those who foreground ‘nonsubjective affect or sensation (as Powell and Coleman do)’ (95) or phenomenological studies that pay extensive attention to the visceral aspects of the cinema experience (cf. Sobchack 1992, 2004; Marks 2000, 2002; Barker 2009). The other group of Deleuze-inspired scholars mentioned by Sinnerbrink (2008) emphasizes ‘thought or the cinema as brain (as Lambert and Flaxman do)’ (98). Sinnerbrink observes that one of the difficulties pertaining to contemporary Deleuzian film-philosophy is that these two camps – the ‘affective’ and the ‘brain’ – ‘rarely meet on the same conceptual plane’ (98). He bemoans this situation, since ‘this is surely one of the most interesting questions facing Deleuzian film-philosophers: what is the cinematic relationship between time, affect, and the brain?’ (98).

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Similarly, the cinematic experience conveyed by Memento demonstrates the importance for film-philosophers to embrace both the cognitive and affective dimensions of cinema. The concept of the embodied fabula allows us to unite the affective and cognitive dimensions of the cinematic experience on the same conceptual plane, and to conceptualize the multilayered temporality that arises from this encounter. In relation to this, the clear separation of the actual from the virtual, the linear from the non-linear, which at times follows from the Deleuzian differentiation of movement-images from time-images, becomes problematic. Whereas Deleuze accounts for the distinct nature of the movement-image and the time-image from a (film)philosophical perspective, Rancière (2006) reminds us that ‘in practice this opposition between two logics is almost indiscernible’ (122). Perhaps in order to avoid a clear distinction between these image-regimes, Deleuze (2005b) denies that the actual and virtual aspects of the image should be understood in terms of a mutual exclusion. He explains that there is ‘no virtual which does not become actual in relation to the actual, the latter becoming virtual through the same relation: it is a place and its obverse which are totally reversible’ (67). In the words of Rancière (2006), ‘[t]he gesture that frees the potentialities remains, as always, the gesture that chains them up again’ (118). To come to grips with the actual experience of time conveyed in the cinematic experience, it is thus incisive not to equate the temporality associated with the analytical fabula with that of the embodied fabula; the latter arising from the immediate encounter of film and spectator. In relation to this, Anne Friedberg (1993) has acutely observed: Deleuze’s descriptions border on a theoritization of where – in time – the spectator is, but his discussion of the ‘time-image’ ultimately relies on a conception of diegetic film time, not the alternations in the spectator’s relationship to temporality produced by film-going. (129, emphases in original)

The tendency to conflate the temporality conveyed in the film with that pertaining to the spectator’s experience is thus not reserved to cognitive and classical narratological studies (cf. Chapter VI). The embodied fabula circumvents this conflation by providing a conceptual tool capable of differentiating between these layers of temporality. It can thus reflect how spectators get caught up in their own attempts to render the cinematic continuum comprehensible in causal-linear terms. This in a fashion that does not seek to reconcile a realist narratological desire for establishing the determinable (or, indeterminable) nature of the classical fabula.

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I believe the reason Memento has proven so stimulating to f ilmtheoretical and f ilm-philosophical debates is exactly because it is not ‘about’ current topics such as memory, narration, and personal identity, but offers a cinematic experience that allows for an embodied and filmphilosophical reflection of these themes. Memento has become a site for rethinking the complexity of the cinematic medium, yet both cognitive and film-philosophical examinations tend to primarily perceive the film as a cognitive puzzle (cf. Panek 2006; Buckland 2009b) that can or cannot be solved by a ‘straightening out’ of the narrative continuum. According to Scott Timberg (2001), who interviewed Nolan shortly after the film’s US release, the director ‘insists he knows the movie’s Truth – who’s good, who’s bad, who can be trusted and who can’t – and insists that close viewing will reveal all’ (16). Thus, the director clearly sees a point in engaging us with a narrative puzzle. Having meticulously dissected the analytical fabula, Klein (2001) nonetheless concludes that he no longer believes Nolan in his above-quoted remarks as ‘[t]he only way to reconcile everything is to assume huge inconsistencies in the nature of Leonard’s disorder’ (par. 60). Therefore, I suggest to redirect our inquiries from the analytical-realist question of whether a ‘true’ fabula can be established to the embodied question of how this quest affects the experience of the viewer. Consider, for instance, how Carrie-Anne Moss, who plays the femme fatale Natalie, describes her numerous viewings: ‘I’ve seen [Memento] five times, [...] and I’ve seen it differently each time now’ (Moss in Timberg 2001, 16). Rather than structuring our perception of the film towards the construction of a unified story, the embodied fabula honours the film’s carefully constructed ambiguities and the singularity of each viewing experience. In studying the film from the perspective of the embodied fabula, it becomes possible to carve out the multilayered temporality of the film. Although Mary Ann Doane (2002) herself perceives Memento to be an example of narrative cinema’s tendency to recuperate temporal irreversibility and linearity (252, n. 49), it can be argued that the film exemplifies the double temporal commitment that she observes in relation to early cinema. That is, although Doane rightly detects a linear narrative drive in the reverse chronology of Memento, she fails to acknowledge its non-linear aspects. Non-linearity here does not simply spell out the backward or ‘non-linear’ telling of the film. Once confronted with the idea of Memento being a ‘non-linear film’, Christopher Nolan promptly answered as follows: ‘You referred to the film as non-linear but in fact it’s very linear just in reversed chronology’ (Nolan 2012).

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The linear nature of the film is made explicit on the special edition of the DVD-version, since it includes a chronological version of the film. This version reveals how meticulously the film has been constructed to accentuate the causal-linear relation of the individual scenes. Yet, the chronological version not only affirms the linearity of the film (as ‘effect-cause’ rather than ‘cause-effect’), but also the non-linearity of the cinematic continuum. Although the events of the film remain the same, anyone who has seen both the original and chronological version of the film is likely to have had two qualitatively different cinematic experiences. Given that a non-linear system undergoes a qualitative (rather than quantitative) change once its components have been reassembled (cf. Chapter VI), the addition of the chronological version draws our attention to the non-linear dimension of the cinematic continuum. Again, Nolan himself has been the first to point out this particular non-linearity of the film. In an interview from 2001 with New Times Los Angeles, published shortly after the film’s initial release, Nolan explains: The whole idea was to make a film that bled into the mind a little bit, spun in your head, that you constructed very much yourself. And when I listen to [Radiohead’s album Kid A], no matter how many times I listen to it, I don’t know what comes next. (Nolan in Timberg 2001, 14)

Here it becomes evident that Nolan does not envision the narrative as an inherent feature to be discovered in the film. Instead, narration is a process that occurs in an assemblage with the spectator. It would thus be a mistake to assume that since the film is constructed according to a strict effect-cause pattern, the cinematic experience it gives rise to must necessarily also succumb to this logic. The film rather balances two separate logics at the same time. First, there is the causal-linear logic according to which the narrative continuum can be reassembled. This influences, yet cannot be reduced to, the temporality conveyed in the complex cinematic experience of the spectator trying to straighten out the cinematic continuum. The film’s complexity owes a lot to letting its viewers experience the differences between these two layers of cinematic temporality. In carving out the temporal complexity that is conveyed in the interplay of these, realist interpretative methods reduce the temporal experience of the film to the construction of a coherent fabula (cf. Bordwell 1985a, 33). As suggested in previous chapters, the embodied approach within the cognitive sciences may prove an important cornerstone for bridging cognitive and film-philosophically-oriented positions (cf. Protevi 2010; Pisters 2012;

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Brown 2013; Chapter V). Memento allows for a film-philosophical reflection of this, since it provides the spectator with the possibility to sense or feel time in a manner that arises from the cognitive difficulties in organizing the narrative continuum linearly. In this fashion, it installs in the viewers a unique mode of perception and a sensitivity towards temporal layers that otherwise remain imperceptible. Memento can thus be perceived as a ‘meta-time travel story’, which is to say that it is ‘not one told by cinema, but one enacted by the film-viewing experience’ (Baguer 2004, 250). The film is a perfect expression of cinematic narration as a process not constructed by the detached, computational, and cognitive machinery of the spectator with the aim of establishing a narrative ‘truth’, but a process in which spectators become cognitively, emotionally, and affectively immersed in the narrative environment unfolding before them. It, in other words, demonstrates how in contemporary complex cinema ‘narratives are not in us, but it is we who move in a Being-narrative, a world-narrative’ (cf. Chapter V).

The Defamiliarization of Narrative Perception Memento’s narrative complexity is not primarily caused by the film’s withholding of information or attempts to otherwise disrupt the spectator’s construction of a chronological account of the narrative events. Actually, Memento is very communicable (in spite of being ambiguous at certain points), as evidenced by its abundance of temporal markers and cohesion devices that help the audience to properly connect the events of the film causal-linearly (cf. Bordwell 2006, 78-79). Yet, Memento presents its narrative information in an order that complicates our ongoing attempts to render experience linear. In this sense, Memento defamiliarizes the linear cinematic perception that cognitive-formalism perceives as the consistent, ‘normal’, and ‘natural’ background against which other modes of cinema can be evaluated (cf. Chapter III). In carving out the workings of defamiliarization in Memento, the difference between the analytical and the embodied fabula proves valuable (cf. Chapter V). In relation to this, it is vital to recall that the analytical fabula structures our perception around the cognitive task of solving or answering the questions of the narrative. Thus, Memento does not simply defamiliarize cinematic perception as such. More precisely, it defamiliarizes linear cinematic perception as structured according to the analytical fabula (cf. Chapter III). In doing so, the film-philosophical encounter facilitated by Memento plays a crucial role in the discernment of an alternative mode

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of narrative perception, which is structured around the embodied fabula. Here the spectator inhabits and enacts the narrative environment, which is to say that cognitive problems, emotional states, and affective intensities combine not primarily to solve but rather to explore the narrative universe. As an extension of this, the concept of the embodied fabula makes it possible to argue that Memento does not so much dissolve (Cartesian) subjectivity as it reconfigures and alters its foundations. Due to its defamiliarization of linear cinematic perception, Memento calls for an approach that is able to combine the cognitive understanding of active spectatorship with a film-philosophical sensitivity for the cinematic encounter as direct, embodied, and affective. Unlike Stage Fright, Memento does not limit its defamiliarization to a single cinematic device (i.e. the flashback). In targeting cinematic perception more generally, the film pushes the boundaries of defamiliarization beyond its restricted use in cognitive-formalism, i.e. beyond ‘refamiliarization’ (cf. Chapter III). Taking defamiliarization a step further allows spectators to feel and perceive those automatic linear processes that structure cinematic perception to provide the impression that we perceive a coherent, linear, and unified story. It would be tempting to suggest that Memento in this manner brings forth a ‘pure’ or ‘direct’ time-image. However, something quite different is at stake since the perception of time here is neither facilitated by the breakdown of the sensory-motor system nor from short-circuiting the connections that tie affect, emotion, and cognition together. Memento differs from the Deleuzian time-image by actively encouraging rather than discouraging the linear processes that constitute ‘normal’ narrative comprehension as described by Bordwell et al. In fact, Memento compels the viewer to be more engaged with linear reasoning than the majority of classical Hollywood narratives. In connection to this, it has been noted that with Memento the ‘act of recollection seems to be incorporated into [its] narrative strategy’ (Hesselberth & Schuster 2008, 98). In dramaturgically incorporating the act of recollection, Memento departs from a classical cinematic use of flashbacks as recollection-images (cf. Chapter IV). The film consciously plays on its narrative reversal in a flashback scene, where Leonard has a hard time accepting that his wife can read the same book repeatedly. ‘I always thought the pleasure of a book was in finding out what happens next,’ Leonard asserts. Paradoxically, due to his condition, Leonard is constantly confronted with the inverse of the typical narrative drive towards ‘what happens next’, namely ‘how did I arrive here’, and the film’s narrative structure makes it possible to maintain that this is the condition for its spectators, too.

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Dark City (Proyas 1998), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry 2004), The Butterfly Effect (Bress & Gruber 2004), and Inception (Nolan 2010) are but a few examples of contemporary films in which memory has become a central concern. Memento integrates the contemporary fascination with memory into a narrative structure that relies on the complex interrelation between remembering and forgetting. Memento first requires us to adapt to a mental scheme of temporal integration without which the narrative remains incomprehensible (cf. Ghislotti 2009; Bordwell 2006, 78-81). The film further prompts us to pay attention to certain details that enable the restoring of the lost causality of the story. However, due to the difficulties in keeping the narrative structure organized mentally – this also owes to the unreliability of the main protagonist and the people trying to take advantage of his condition – spectators are forced to constantly discard, overwrite, or reinterpret their version of the film’s story. For these reasons, the narrative structure of Memento does not merely challenge us to remember but also requires us to overwrite and forget (cf. Cameron 2008, 107). In relation to Bergson’s model of the cone (cf. Chapter IV, Fig. 2), it can be argued that Memento oscillates between the most contracted regions (of recollection) and the least contracted regions (of ‘pure’ virtual memory). Here memory is conceived of as a palimpsest that carries traces or ‘mementos’ of all earlier virtual possible pasts of the narrative. Hence, memory is not to be understood in terms of a ‘container’ in which a part of the past can be ‘stored’. This is in line with recent studies that suggest envisioning the memory faculty as a particular attitude towards, or structuring of, the environment. As the embodied cognitivists Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard (2007) explain, ‘when we ask, Where is memory? we should perhaps be looking not only inside the brain but at specific relationships between the agent, its task, and its environment’ (321). In this sense, memory is a particular mode of subtracting relevant information from the environment, not a container for storing elements of the past in the brain. This conception of memory is acutely expressed in a scene in Memento, where Leonard has hired a prostitute to do the morning routines of his deceased wife. In the scene, Leonard constructs his environment in a specific manner to conjure a particular memory. Given that the film is about a man who has lost his memory, it is interesting to note how pervasively the narrative universe is structured around (forgotten) memories, whether in the form of Leonard’s tattoos, his Polaroids, his wife’s items, or countless other ‘mementos’. The double nature of memory is manifested, as Leonard while burning some of his wife’s old possessions states: ‘Can’t remember to forget you’.

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Janet Harbord (2007) has argued that contemporary reverse chronological narratives couple epistemological questions (‘how do I as a spectator construct the narrative’) with ontological questions (‘how would it be to move backwards in time’) to facilitate awareness of the extent to which retrospective knowledge informs (narrative) experience (127; cf. Hesselberth & Schuster 2008, 99-100). Thereby, this type of film renders visible the crucial role that the spectator’s cognitive-perceptual and memory capacities play in the construction of the narrative, while questioning this narrative condition at the same time. In demonstrating that memory is not a container of the past but a ‘dynamic process of appropriation, association and translation of the past (in)to the present’ (Hesselberth & Schuster 2008, 100), Memento not only questions the cognitive processes that constitute our ability to comprehend cinematic narratives, it moves cognition outside the rigid boundaries of the individual brain. Elsaesser perceives Memento as an example of the ‘post-mortem cinema’, which is a cinematic mode related to the ‘post-humanist’ philosophy of Deleuze and Foucault (cf. Elsaesser 2004b; Elsaesser & Hagener 2010). According to Elsaesser & Hagener (2010), films like Memento challenge the Cartesian and classical cognitive scientific idea of a unified and self-assured cogito presupposed by the classical narratological fabula. In the post-mortem cinema, [t]he mental and conceptual images [...] have to do with the limits of classical identity formation, where we assure ourselves of who we are through memory, perception and bodily self-presence. When these indices of identity fail, or are temporarily disabled, as in conditions of trauma, amnesia or sensory overload, it challenges the idea of a unified, self-identical and rationally motivated individual, assumed and presupposed by humanist philosophy. (155-156)

Jamie Skye Bianco (2004), too, perceives Memento as an affective dissolution of the Cartesian subject. For her, ‘[t]he image/matters of Memento affectively force actions of forgetting: forgetting how we have conditioned sensation, thought, and action; forgetting chronology and the structures of narrative genres; and, forgetting our acts of centring’ (384). In accentuating what has become automatic and familiar in the process of forgetting, Bianco touches upon the defamiliarization of Memento. However, from her perspective this defamiliarization amounts to a total dissolution of subjectivity. Cinema is an explosion of energetic flows, and the spectator can no longer be reduced to a cognitive-hermeneutic machinery engaged in the reconstruction of causal-linear patterns and trajectories on the basis of the cinematic

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input. In her inspiring study of the ‘de-subjectivizing’ affectivity of modern ‘techno-cinematic events’, Bianco however, fails to also acknowledge the continued importance of ‘subjectivizing’ cognitive processes. Whereas cognitive film theory can be criticized for largely ignoring the cinematic and aesthetic experience, Hayles (2004) has summed up a problem that I believe could apply more generally to Deleuzian ‘affect theorists’. She maintains that ‘Bianco rightly observes that an analytical approach does not explain [Memento’s] affective dimension, but her affective enactment does not account for the film’s structural precision, including the enfolding of the two chronologies at the film’s conclusion’ (314). This neglect can be traced back to the prominent idea of Deleuze’s cinema books that cinema’s potential to liberate time from its subordination to movement lies in the ability of the time-image to rupture the sensory-motor system. Massumi has taken inspiration from this notion to formulate his comprehension of affect as more or less disconnected from the cognitive spheres of signification, subjectivity, and reason (cf. Chapter II). Yet, I would contend that Memento demonstrates how affect and time can become perceptible in cinema not only through modern(ist) ruptures, but also by a reconfiguration of the interrelation of cognition, emotion, and affect and a defamiliarization of linear cinematic perception. To appreciate how this works, we must again turn our attention to how the narrative structure of Memento hinders some of the basic functions of memory. The film in this way achieves an embodied mode of alignment, since the spectator will experience some of the difficulties of the film’s main protagonist. Due to films like Memento, Elsaesser (2009) proposes that contemporary complex narratives imply and implicate spectators in a manner not covered by the classical theories of identification, or even of alignment and engagement, because the ‘default values’ of normal human interaction are no longer ‘in place,’ meaning that the film is able to question and suspend both the inner and outer framing of the story. (30)

From the perspective of the embodied fabula, cinema is perceived as a narrative rhythm, whose temporal flows have not been predetermined by the linear trajectory of a story. In Memento’s backward flow of narration, the linkages between cognition, emotion, and affect are not ruptured, broken, or disassembled (as in the Deleuzian time-image), rather their interrelation is constantly being reconfigured and renegotiated. One of the great achievements of modern art and philosophy has, according to Maurice

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Merleau-Ponty (2004), been to ‘allow us to rediscover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget’ (39). The rediscovering of the world is not the result of purely intellectual or cognitive capacities, but concerns the reawakening of embodied perception. Therefore, rather than merely arousing intellectual and reflective detachment, artworks like Memento provide an empirical possibility to embody another mode of experiencing the world: [T]he transition from classical to modern was marked by what might be thought of as a reawakening of the world of perception [...] So the way we relate to the things of the world is no longer as a pure intellect trying to master an object or space that stands before it. Rather, this relationship is an ambiguous one, between beings who are both embodied and limited and an enigmatic world. (69-70)

Contemporary complex cinema enables an embodied mode of perception often ignored by the classical linear onto-epistemology. Merleau-Ponty states: ‘It is well known that classical thought has little time for animals, children, primitive people and madmen’ (70). Elsaesser has observed how especially the latter of these has been the subject of extensive attention within contemporary cinema. What appears to fascinate contemporary cinema about these ‘madmen’ is the extent to which they are able to grant us an estranged perception of the world. Observing this Elsaesser (2009) writes: Indeed, the point of giving such subjectivities-in-action the format of a mind-game film would be to draw the audience into the protagonists’ world in ways that would be impossible if the narrative distanced itself or contextualized the hero via his or her (medical) condition. (30)

Contemporary complex narratives hereby challenge the classical conditions of cinematic spectatorship described by Bordwell. Furthermore, these films take us beyond a Smithian engagement or alignment with the characters, since the set of ‘normal’ cognitive processes associated with narrative comprehension is encouraged and simultaneously defamiliarized. However, this does not necessarily mean that the spectator’s sense of subjectivity disappears. Rather, it can be argued that the notion of subjectivity must instead be redefined as emerging out of our bodily engagement with the narrative environment. Karen Renner (2006) has examined the emotional markers of Memento, and proposed that rather than being a result of textual processing, they ‘condition’ viewers to respond with an appropriate emotional response (here sadness)

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to the images. Aside from the recurring musical theme of the film, Renner mentions the close-ups of Leonard’s sad facial expressions as he mourns his dead wife as examples. Unlike traditional cognitive theories that highlight the rational dimensions of our emotional responses to cinema, Renner (2006) is interested in those cognitive processes that are largely ‘unconscious and that occur somewhat independently of the film’s plot or outcome’ (107). She argues that ‘emotion cues’ do more than act as instigators and sustainers of mood (cf. Carroll 2001), and maintains that these can operate more directly to condition the viewer to a particular state of mind (Renner 2006, 107). Thus, Memento demonstrates the intricate nature of emotions as situated in the gap between affect and cognition. Initially the film structures our emotional experience along a classical pattern, insofar as it invites us to sympathize with Leonard, who has been the victim of a terrible crime from which he still suffers greatly. Thereby, the film allows us to experience a rational underpinning to our emotional states by playing with the cinematic conventions pertaining to the righteous hero. This initial alignment is supported by what Greg M. Smith (2003) has termed ‘mood cues’. According to him, the act of ‘generating brief, intense emotions often requires an orienting state that asks us to interpret our surroundings in an emotional fashion’ (42). In addition, ‘film structures seek to increase the film’s chances of evoking emotion by first creating a predisposition toward experiencing emotion: a mood’ (42). Renner (2006) explores four moments in Memento whose primary function she argues is the ‘creation of sympathetic sadness’ (108). The central focal points of these scenes are Leonard’s grief over the loss of his wife, and his inability to move on. As Leonard describes in a scene designed to create sympathy for his character: I know I can’t have her back, but I want to be able to let her go. I don’t want to wake up every morning thinking she’s still here then realizing that she’s not. I want time to pass, but it won’t. How can I heal if I can’t feel time?

For Leonard the memory of his wife continues to pervade his perception, while no new memories are allowed to enter his conscious state. Leonard’s condition is thus misconstrued in terms of a loss of memory, insofar as memories are what define his existence. Towards the end of Memento, Leonard explains his condition to the undisclosed person (presumably Teddy) on the telephone: ‘You know the truth about my condition, officer? You don’t know anything. You feel angry, you don’t know why. You feel guilty, you have no idea why.’ Here we find an acute description of the rupture

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in Leonard’s cognitive-emotional-affective circuitry, which has left him bereft of the ability to connect his feelings of guilt or anger to a subjective and causal-linear experience. Leonard’s ‘memory system’ acts instead in accordance with the ‘autonomic nature of affect’ (Massumi 2002, 28). Similarly, although the film gradually renders problematic our initial apprehension of Leonard, our original sympathetic stance continues to linger on. An affective compassion with Leonard thereby continues to resonate in our emotional-affective systems, despite not being cognitively sustainable any longer. Our allegiance to Leonard thus becomes permeated by dissonances in the feedback loops of affect, emotion, and cognition. Emotion and feeling here take on central roles, because they ‘provide the bridge between rational and nonrational processes, between cortical and subcortical structures’ (Damasio 1995, 128). However, in destabilizing our emotional allegiance with Leonard, Memento does not so much break the linkages that tie cognition, emotion, and affect together, as it defamiliarizes the invisible underpinnings of these processes. The film thereby expands the boundaries of what is cinematically perceptible. In this fashion, the defamiliarization of Memento takes us beyond the normal and successful operations of human cognition. Insofar as it is ‘difficult to keep its stimuli distinct from our mental construction’ (Ghislotti 2009, 98), the actual experience facilitated by Memento is marked by cognitive dissonances and (temporal) confusion. From the perspective of the embodied fabula, such dissonances come with a productive and creative potential to open up for an awareness of the deeper-lying non-conscious processes that constitute linear cinematic perception. Consider the following three viewer reactions that Ghislotti (2003) accentuates in an earlier text on the film: Viewer 1: I’ve seen the movie three times now and may have to watch it ten more times until I get it all straightened out. Viewer 2: This movie was brilliant because it totally got me dizzy... never before can I recall concentrating so hard on what was going on... eventually, I hit a mind warp and got totally lost forgetting how things ended thus making the facts in the beginning a dizzying of feelings and a distortion of my OWN memory. Viewer 3: I loved this movie because it made me feel as if I had a short-term memory deficit. These comments illustrate the interrelation between aspects of the cinematic experience that are cognitive-analytical (the ‘straightening out’ of the narrative), affective-embodied (a ‘dizzying of feelings and a distortion

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of my OWN memory’), or induce film-philosophical reflections about the cinematic experience (as if ‘I had a short-term memory deficit’).10 Although the comments stem from three different viewers, I believe each alludes to the same interrelated experience. Yet, the first describes the experience from the perspective of the analytical fabula, while the latter two describe their experience from the perspective of the embodied fabula (cf. Chapter V). For the cognitively and analytically detached viewer the important task is to straighten out and solve the cinematic narrative, whereas the latter two perceive the cognitive difficulties as part of the unique cinematic experience that the film propounds. Following the Deleuzian differentiation of Riemannian and Cartesian space, it can be argued that spectators further reflect upon their cinematic experience from different spatio-temporal registers. Brown (2013) explains the differences between these as follows: While consciously I perceive movement and ‘automatically’ infer where the moving figures will go, and/or work out how they got from point A to B in space, nonconsciously I am aware of the whole flux of becoming which lies ‘between’ geometrical ‘points in space’ that consciously are apprehended only ‘after the fact’ (Riemannian, as opposed to Cartesian, space), or which, in the case of predicting where figures are headed and/ or what they will do, allow me to project causality into the movement in order to arrive at its effect [...] This nonconscious perception is not of point-to-point geometric space, then; nor is it of figures changed and/or presumed states of change that will result from the present conscious perception. This nonconscious perception is instead of time itself, which lies outside of classical cause and effect. (133-134)

Memento allows us to grasp how the cinematic experience is constituted in constant feedback loops between these layers of experience. In this fashion, the film opens up our senses to – and thus defamiliarizes – the underlying processes that traditionally ensure our experience of causalchronological cinematic perception as ‘natural’. This process does not differ fundamentally from that whereby Stage Fright defamiliarizes the classical flashback that over time had come to appear natural (cf. Chapter III). In the context of how Leonard’s voice-over ‘mirrors what constructivists call the endless autobiographical dialogue we hold with ourselves’ (Ferenz 2009, 274), the film renders visible the automatic cognitive processes that constitute linear cinematic perception. These give direction to time by automatically extending the past into the future making the narrative continuum appear

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unified and continuous. Yet, they also ascribe meaning to our experiences in a manner that accommodates our ongoing autobiographical or ‘autopoietic’ narratives (cf. Bruner 1991, 2004; Young & Saver 2001). Thus, it can further be argued that Memento in constructing an allegiance between Leonard and the spectators defamiliarizes the autobiographical processes that structure perception according to the ongoing narrative of the individual. The alignment between Leonard and the spectator’s narrative construction is further facilitated through the film’s extensive use of voice-over. This technique causes the main character’s efforts to restore spatio-temporal coherence to mirror those of the spectators trying to navigate the narrative universe unfolding before them. The repetition in a variety of scenes where Leonard – presumably in synchrony with the audience – asks: ‘So where are you?’ marks the manner in which his voice-over runs parallel with the spectator’s cognitive efforts to construct narrative sense (cf. Bianco 2004). The voice-over thus connects with, reflects upon, and eventually obstructs the spectator’s own ‘autobiographical dialogue’. To capture the deeper-lying strata of the cinematic experience, defamiliarization must be able to go beyond the cognitive-formalist separation of ‘habitual’ from ‘aesthetic’ perception. Kristin Thompson (1988) renders this separation explicit, when she contends: Because everyday perception is habitual and strives for a maximum of efficiency and ease, aesthetic perception does the opposite. Films seek to defamiliarize conventional devices of narrative, ideology, style, and genre. Since everyday perception is efficient and easy, the aesthetic film seeks to prolong and roughen experience – to induce us to concentrate on the processes of perception and cognition in and of themselves, rather than for some practical end. (36)

The problem with this differentiation is that it presumes the formal aspects of a film to be determinant of the range of (cognitive) responses available to the audience. Having strongly positioned her theory as one of active spectatorship, it is noteworthy that Thompson assumes that the viewer can only ‘respond to a film in the way that the film wants her to, i.e. passively’ (Brown 2013, 134). This separation harbours a reductive conception of perception as being generally automatic, linear, and efficient-prone. Given the constant feedback loops in our cognitive-perceptual registers, we nevertheless do not always experience our environment in an automatic manner. Changes in our habitual environment should therefore be accepted as being – in principle at least – capable of defamiliarization to the same degree as art.

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In this context, defamiliarization is understood in a more complex, entangled, and dynamic manner than in the cognitive application of the term. In my use, the term thus operates where the borders between ‘life’ and ‘art’ constantly overlap. As Jerome Bruner (2004) has argued: The mimesis between life so-called and narrative is a two-way affair: that is to say, just as art imitates life in Aristotle’s sense, so, in Oscar Wilde’s, life imitates art. Narrative imitates life, life imitates narrative. ‘Life’ in this sense is the same kind of construction of the human imagination as ‘a narrative’ is. It is constructed by human beings through active ratiocination, by the same kind of ratiocination through which we construct narratives. (692)

From this perspective, it no longer makes sense to talk about a strict distinction between the spectator and the medium, the object or the subject, the body or the mind. Instead, narratives and cinema have entered the domain of perception ‘proper’, and become active players in structuring perception, also beyond the ‘proper’ cinematic situation. As Elsaesser (2004a) has remarked: In making much of human life and history ‘visible,’ the cinema has also created new domains of the ‘invisible.’ Key elements of cinematic perception have become internalised as our modes of cognition and embodied experience, such that the ‘cinema effect’ may be most present where its apparatus and technologies are least perceptible. (76)

In rendering difficult the automatisms of temporal integration and autobiographical narration, Memento does not simply defamiliarize the analytical fabula as a coherent entity; it defamiliarizes how this concept structures experience as a mode of perception. The film thereby demonstrates that the fabula is ill-conceived as an inherent feature of the narrative itself and instead reflects how cinema is capable of producing its own subjectivity.11 From the perspective of the embodied fabula, the narrative is thus not constituted when a detached cognisor masters the film to impose upon it a ‘true’ representation of its inherent story. Instead, the subject is formed out of the cinematic experience itself. According to Damasio (1995): Perceiving the environment [...] is not just a matter of having the brain receive direct signals from a given stimulus, let alone receiving direct pictures. The organism actively modifies itself so that the interfacing can take place as well as possible. The body proper is not passive. Perhaps no less important, the reason why most of the interactions with the

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environment ever take place is that the organism requires their occurrence in order to maintain homeostasis, the state of functional balance. The organism continuously acts on the environment (actions and exploration did come first), so that it can propitiate the interactions necessary for survival. But if it is to succeed in avoiding danger [...] appropriate actions can be taken in response to what is sensed. Perceiving is as much about acting on the environment as it is about receiving signals from it. (225)

The circuits and linkages of the brain do not pre-exist the stimuli, corpuscles, and particles that trace them, as Deleuze (2000) has argued, and thus cinema ‘makes bodies out of grains’ (366). In comprehending Memento, spectators initially utilize the analytical fabula, but in doing so our attempt to induce the film with causal-linear order turns back on itself, and in this manner, we are enfolded or embedded into the narrative universe. In this fashion, the film restructures our perception in terms of the embodied fabula as a corporal-mental tool that guides the immediate interaction with the narrative according to a Möbius strip logic such that our cognitive inferences and visceral affectedness form a feedback loop. It is in this loop, rather than by cognitive inferences alone, that spectators are able to construct and embody the narrative universe or ‘film world’ (cf. Yacavone 2015). Following this logic, the narrative is no longer something we merely impose on the film as analytically detached spectators from the outside (‘narrative is not in us’), but something which is created in the encounter with the film (‘we are in a Being-narrative’). Ultimately, narrative comprehension can no longer be detached from our bodily, affective, or emotional responses to the film. Simultaneously, the cinematic experience emerges as something more than just a ‘machine for generating affect’ (cf. Shaviro 2010, 3). In the theory proposed here, the fabula transforms into an embodied, operational, and structuring tool that guides the spectator’s exploration of the narrative environment cognitively, emotionally, and affectively. This provides us with a new narratological approach to the aesthetic and beauty of Memento as something not primarily a function of the film’s narrative puzzle (cf. Buckland 2009b), but rather something that pertains to how viewers become absorbed into the temporalities, narrative rhythms, and the sensational flows of what asks to be conceptualized as an embodied cinematic experience.

VIII. Conclusions So we can follow this movement, from beauty to the world to everything that is behind the world. All of it enters through our eyes and our ears, vibrating directly on us. What this says is: there is a world out there and it is huge and I am in it. Leviathan [Castaing-Taylor & Paravel 2012] doesn’t ask us to bring anything to it; it doesn’t need our stories, our knowledge, our prejudices. In its indifference to our presence it’s a nice reminder of why the movies can be so affecting in the first place, of what it feels like to be confronted with something that is truly outside of everything our experiences have taught us. ‒ Coldiron 2012, par. 12

The aim of this book has been to offer a framework for comprehending the transformative nature of cinematic spectatorship, especially as it has recently been altered by the fluid boundaries of contemporary media culture (cf. Pisters 2012, 11). Contemporary complex cinema forces us to rethink and reconfigure the linear-non-linear dichotomy of film studies that harks back to the opposition of classical cinema and the tradition of (European) art cinema. As a consequence, complex cinema is no longer well accounted for by the overarching Deleuzian categories of the movement-image and the time-image. Instead of emphasizing the difference between the classical and the modern, contemporary cinema explores their mutual inextricability. Required is thus an approach that emphasizes the interrelation of what has traditionally been kept isolated, such as the linear and non-linear; the affective, emotional, and cognitive investment of the audiences; the contingent from the causaldetermined; the body from the mind; etc. In their experiments with different modes to invoke a unique narrative experience, complex films render the limitations of reducing the spectator’s narrative engagement to the cognitive processes involved in organizing the narrative events causal-linearly visible. Similarly, once confronted with the ‘will to complexity’ that defines contemporary cinema, several prevalent concepts (e.g. the fabula, background, or defamiliarization) have begun to reveal their explanatory limitations. Following the main argument raised by this book, contemporary cinema demands a reformulation of cinematic spectatorship by revealing the limitations of the classical narratological fabula insofar as this concept 1) insulates spectators’ cognitive responses from their emotional and affective responses to the film and 2) conflates the multilayered cinematic temporality to its causal-linear predispositions. Although the fabula as

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a f ilm-narratological concept is mostly associated with the cognitive formalism of Bordwell et al., the core assumptions and the analytical procedure that inevitably accompany this concept rehearse an influence on Deleuzian approaches in their lack of a more suitable theory of narration, too. In the case of the latter, however, the fabula is mostly used implicitly along the linear-non-linear dichotomy to demonstrate how a given film either adheres to an underlying linear logic (and thus allows for the construction of a coherent fabula) or completely refutes such logic (and thus no unambiguous account of the fabula can be constructed). In this fashion, the complexity of contemporary cinema is reduced to the complex telling of a more or less complex story. Therefore, I have argued that cognitive-formalist and Deleuzian film-philosophy could both profit from a notion of the fabula not founded on the philosophical principles of computation and representation. I have proposed the amalgamation of embodied cognition, Deleuzian (film)philosophy, and complexity theory as the basis of my embodied reconceptualization of the fabula. This book has drawn the outlines of this new narratological concept, which nonetheless still remains to be further explicated and its value to a broader embodied re-examination of cinematic narration needs to be proven. The embodied fabula has been film-philosophically formulated with reference to a series of complex narratives. It has thus initially been conceived as a tool for cutting across the ‘classical-modern divide’ in cinema (cf. Kovács 2007, 33-48) and as a means for exploring cinema beyond the linear-nonlinear dichotomy. In relation to this task, complex narratives have been granted a formative role insofar as they reinvigorate cinematic complexity by seeking to combine elements that have traditionally been kept apart and in doing so call for a reconceptualization of basic narratological concepts. This counters the onto-epistemological roots of our preferred interpretative procedures, according to which the prototypical task of the analyst is a ‘straightening out’ or a ‘decomplexification’ of the narrative continuum. Instead, the embodied fabula has been designed to explore cinema between the lines of traditional cinematic binaries. As a temporally dynamic concept based on the idea of feedback loops in our affective, emotional, and cognitive circuits, the embodied fabula will hopefully uncover new venues of cinematic spectatorship. It aims to do so by drawing attention to the actual (temporal, spatial, and cinematic) experience of the viewers that has been neglected in the era of the cognitive-formalist fabula. In their clear separation of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, cognitive-formalist explanations obscure the feedback loops according to which the ‘naturalness’ of Hollywood continuity and the broader manner in which humans

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organize their experiences according to a causal-linear onto-epistemology constantly reaffirm each other. However, I have insisted that the filmphilosophical alternative, the valorization of the non-linear dimension of cinema, risks reversing the dichotomy in foregrounding a non-semantic, autonomous, virtual, singular, and unpredictable dimension of cinema, which maintains to be disconnected from any fixed or conventional meanings (cf. Leys 2011, 449; cf. Chapter II & Chapter IV). In doing so, I have expanded on the arguments that can be found in the growing body of research that has embraced the challenge of contemporary cinema to think beyond the prevalent binaries of film studies (Brown 2013; Pisters 2012; Shaviro 2010; Yacavone 2015); an important task as the linear-non-linear dichotomy is rooted and implemented in our conceptual, narratological, and theoretical frameworks. In this and other respects, I hope to have proposed an alternative to the dominant narratological adherence to classical scientific principles designed for the reduction of complexity. Classical narratological tools such as the fabula, however, should not simply be abandoned in favour of a turn to affect as that which ‘eludes form, cognition, and meaning’ (Leys 2011, 450; cf. Chapter II). To dispute the claim that our bodily connection to the world can be separated from our cognitive comprehension of it – a tendency within (Deleuzian) ‘affect theory’ (cf. Massumi 2002; Shouse 2005) – I have turned to embodied cognitive neuroscience and complexity theory. Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright and Alain Resnais’s and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour in different manners reveal certain limitations involved in overemphasizing the linear or the non-linear dimension of cinema. In relation to the former, the widespread acceptance of the classical film as ‘linear’ not only stems from a lack of sensitivity towards the inherent ambiguities that reside in the cause-effect dramaturgy of classical cinema, but also to an unawareness of the degree to which this linearity is produced by our own analytical procedures and conceptual tools. On the contrary, Hiroshima mon amour expresses an inherent paradox of Deleuzian film-philosophy: the combination of a non-linear valorization with an uncritical acceptance of classical, linear narratological tools such as the fabula. The critical dissection of the linear-non-linear dichotomy thus needed to be accompanied with a rethinking of core conceptual tools such as the fabula and defamiliarization. 21 Grams, Lola rennt, and Memento have been examined as film-philosophical ‘encounters’ capable of demonstrating how the fabula as an analytical and narratological concept inevitably structures our comprehension of cinema according to the classical scientific aim to ‘search, behind those appearances, the hidden order that is the authentic

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reality of the universe’ (Morin 2007, 6). The result of this process appears to be either a reduction of the complex spatio-temporal experience of the viewers to a linear principle, or the determination of the indeterminate nature of the narrative in question (cf. Chapter VI & Chapter VII). Missing in today’s film theoretical landscape is a theoretical and methodological alternative that emphasizes the cinematic experience in favour of a classical narratological search for a coherent, chronological, and unified narrative. By challenging the representational and computational foundation of the fabula, it has been possible to conjure up a complementary take on this imperative narratological tool; sensible to both the higher cognitive processes and the aesthetic dimension of cinema. In relation to this, it has been incisive to allow the films themselves to take an active part in the reconfiguration of our analytical devices and interpretative strategies. Complex narratives, as I have argued, do not privilege affect over emotion or cognition; however, they do call for a reconfiguration of their relation. To rethink the cinematic experience in terms of the interactions of cognition, emotion, and affect, this study has turned to the emerging research field of embodied cognition (cf. Chapter V). Insofar as such interactions are ill-understood from a context-independent framework designed to separate cognitive difficulties from each other (cf. Morin 2007), I have followed the proposal of John Protevi (2010) to draw upon Deleuzian ontological insights to further strengthen the philosophical claims of embodied cognition and complexity theory. In this manner, cinema has not only been granted a formative role in revealing the limitations of traditional narrative approaches structured around the establishment of a coherent, chronological, and unified fabula, but also provides intriguing film-philosophical ‘encounters’ that enable us to re-explore highly relevant philosophical, psychological, and neurological issues with reference to the cinematic experience. Going beyond the linear-non-linear dichotomy thus also entails a move beyond the usual limitations of the sphere of cinema. Consequently, debates concerning the temporal and narrative complexity of contemporary cinema are not merely of film-theoretical relevance, since cinema’s mode of engaging the spectator grants us with a renewed perspective on human perception, cognition, and affect. This is especially evident in relation to the growing neurological interest in cinema that allows us to frame questions concerning the human brain differently. Nowhere are the ties between cinema, philosophy, and science, as well as current societal, political, and moral questions, as tightly woven together as in the questions that contemporary complex cinema raises. As Pisters (2012) has suggested,

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in contemporary media culture the brain and the images converge (and become ‘neuro-images’). Antonio Damasio (2011) presents a kindred idea from a neurological perspective, when he argues that ‘[m]ovies are the closest external representation of the prevailing storytelling that goes on in our minds’ (188). In extension, Gallese and Guerra (2012) have argued that ‘[f]ilm is a possible target of investigation for cognitive neuroscience, and for a variety of good reasons’ (183). While cinema and neuroscience may shed valuable light on each other, it is, however, vital not to reduce the cinematic experience to the evolutionary hardwired biological machinery of the brain according to a moderate interpretation of embodiment (cf. Chapter V). The risk is that we forget the actual films and the cinematic experience that we opted to explain in the first place. Before turning to neuroscience and related fields, we should thus turn to the films themselves. One possibility is to turn to the fragmented opening of 21 Grams to examine how it provokes a reconfiguration of the ‘affective-emotionalcognitive’ circuitry of the spectator, since the affective ‘incipience to act’ (cf. Massumi 2002) invoked by the images can find neither emotional nor cognitive discharge. Another possibility is to examine how Lola rennt does something comparable by tying us affectively and cognitively to the kinaesthetic of its main protagonist, to its energetic soundscape, and to its dynamic, narrative rhythm (cf. Chapter VI). We could also turn to the backward narrative structure of Memento, which arguably does not so much dissolve (Cartesian) subjectivity as it reconfigures and alters its foundations to demonstrate its connection to a constant ongoing process of defamiliarization (cf. Chapter VII). The point being that cinema contains an endless cabinet of examples that could be used to rehearse film-philosophical ‘encounters’ allowing the complexity of the films to challenge the monopoly of classical narratological concepts. In this fashion, the temporally complex cinematic experience offered by Memento has been incisive for the formulation of the embodied fabula as a concept operating in the interstices of the linear/cognitive and non-linear/ affective dimensions of cinema. As a corporeal-mental tool, whose mode of communication is bidirectional and dynamic (due to feedback loops in the circuits of cognition, emotion, and affect), this concept has in turn enabled me to study how Memento restructures cinematic perception by taking advantage of our attempts to ‘linearize’ the narrative in order to fold us into the narrative according to a logic, which can be carved out in reference to the feedback loops of the Möbius strip (cf. Chapter V & Chapter VII). Here narrative is no longer something we impose on the film from the outside (‘narrative is not in us’), but something which is created in the encounter

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with the film (‘we are in a Being-narrative’). One of the main advantages of the embodied fabula is that it offers a conceptualization of the narrative experience that does not insulate our cognitive efforts from the affective or emotional manner in which we ‘inhabit’ the narrative. This perspective also reconfigures the traditional notion of the fabula, which I have attempted to capture with the notion of the analytical fabula. It is incisive, however, to note that the analytical fabula should not be understood as a ‘representation’ of the ‘actual’ story of the film (as is often implied in the classical narratological use of the fabula). It instead designates a prominent mode of structuring cinematic perception described by Bordwell (1985a) as a strive for the construction of a chronological, unified, and coherent story (i.e., linear cinematic perception). Consequently, the embodied fabula cannot simply be incorporated into a cognitive-formalist framework; it actively demands a reconfiguration of the cinematic experience, because it no longer assumes that narrative comprehension can be adequately explained from the perspective of a detached spectator who cognitively masters the film in order to impose upon it a ‘true’ representation of its inherent story. Hence, the embodied fabula no longer places as essential for the narrative experience the possibility of the construction of a coherent and unified story; neither does it presuppose an analytical and temporal displacement between the analyst and the cinematic experience (cf. Chapter II). Being an embodied cognitive tool that guides the spectator’s immediate interaction with the narrative, the embodied fabula allows us to explore the complex temporal layers of a given film from the perspective of the actual cinematic experience.

The Embodied Fabula and Beyond As the concept of the embodied fabula has been developed from a filmphilosophical encounter with contemporary cinema and how it deals with questions of complexity, this concept should be seen in the broader context of a more comprehensive reconceptualization of cinematic spectatorship. While the embodied fabula, as it has been formulated here, is intimately associated with complex narratives, I believe it could also contribute to our understanding of how cinema is currently undergoing a transformation driven by a ‘will to immersion’ supported by the technological inventions of digital imagery and 3D cinema. I will briefly refer to Alfonso Cuarón’s box-office success Gravity (2013) and the experimental documentary Leviathan (CastaingTaylor & Paravel 2012) to elucidate two interesting developments within the

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cinematic medium, whose novel mode of engaging spectators may be usefully excavated with the concept of the embodied fabula. A product of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), Leviathan presents a fascinating new take on the documentary that leaves us ‘with only our senses to follow in the dark’ (Coldiron 2012, par. 2). In doing so, the film becomes an audiovisual expression of the declared aim of SEL to ‘support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, with original nonfiction media practices that explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence’ (Sensory Ethnography Lab: Harvard University 2010). With its extended use of GoPro cameras that have been tied to the fishermen’s bodies, thrown into the waves, and caught like the fish in the nets, the film literally embodies the naval existence off the coast of New Bedford – the ‘Whaling City’ of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Due to its creative use of GoPro cameras, Leviathan is an expression of the innovative powers of digital cinema and has been described as ‘less surreal than hyperreal, flooding the senses, and fashioning an almost nightmarish environment with an assault of digital information’ (Goldsmith 2013, par. 2). The film expresses the desire of digital cinema to be both immediate and hypermediate (cf. Bolter & Grusin 2000), ‘marked both by the capacity to create new worlds through motion-capture and 3-D rendering, and by its intimacy with the real world, its physical proximity to our bodies and our experience’ (Goldsmith 2013, par. 3). In a much more radical manner than complex narratives, Leviathan defamiliarizes linear cinematic perception as structured around the analytical fabula. Consequently, film critic Scott MacDonald (2012) comes to the conclusion that ‘[c]ritical detachment will remain difficult at least for a few more screenings’ (par. 7). Leviathan thereby overthrows the rational cognition associated with the analytical fabula to provide MacDonald with an experience he describes as being ‘as overwhelming, thoroughly immersive, and unpredictable as the ocean itself’ (par. 7). Leviathan is a vivid example of a cinematic exploration of ‘haptic visuality’ in which the ‘eyes themselves function like organs of touch’ (Marks 2000, 162; cf. Deleuze 2005a, 2005b; Marks 2002; Beugnet 2007; Elena del Rio 2008). In relation to this, the embodied fabula could contribute to explain more concisely how in watching films like Leviathan ‘we are certainly not in the film, but we are not entirely outside it, either. We exist and move and feel in that space of contact where our surfaces mingle and our musculatures entangle’ (Barker 2009, 12, emphases in original). Understanding the cinematic experience as embodied does not suggest that cinema gives rise to an entirely affective or bodily modality that can be (theoretically) disengaged

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from our cognitive and intellectual capacities. To better comprehend how Leviathan replaces the linear narrative movement of the analytical fabula with an immersive and bodily sensation of temporality, a conception of narration and cognition that is not predisposed to linearity is thus required. In having explored the theoretical and methodological foundation of such a framework – most evidently with the development of the embodied fabula – this book has paved a potential way of studying the immersive spectatorship of films like Leviathan, too. The embodied cinematic experience is also the central magnetic force in the 3D blockbuster-adventure Gravity. Yet, in this case the film’s capability of allowing the spectator to ‘embody’ its cinematic universe cannot be separated from its 3D technology. In this sense, the film is not just an exploration of the sensation of loss of gravity in outer space; it is also an exploration of the potentials of 3D cinema as a newly rediscovered medium. As Stanley Cavell (1979) has argued, ‘[o]nly the art itself can discover its possibilities, and the discovery of a new possibility is the discovery of a new medium’ (32). The film-philosophical task in relation to the rediscovery of 3D cinema is to excavate productive concepts capable of shedding light on how this type of cinema structures our sense of time and space: the two dimensions of which the sensation of weightlessness imposed by Gravity allows a potentially novel experience. The loss of connection to Earth and the endless slip out into the vastness of space can be taken as a gesture towards the ultimate paradox of spatio-temporality: its limitlessness. I believe the embodied fabula could prove a productive tool for thinking about Gravity’s bodily gesture towards this infinitude. As Deleuze (2005b) writes, ‘[t]he attitude of the body relates thought to time as to that outside which is infinitively further than the outside world’ (182-183). At the same time as the film disconnects, it also stages the limitations of mainstream narration as Ryan Stone’s (Sandra Bullock) attempt to re-establish connection with Earth could be said to mirror the spectator’s attempt to reconnect with the classical, Euclidean spatio-temporal coordinates of the narrative experience. As such, the floating in space and constantly failing endeavours to return safely back to the world we know become an expression of how the cinematic experience facilitated by the film progressively unties itself from the Euclidean space-time of the analytical fabula to provide instead a cinematic sensation of a universe devoid of (narrative, spatio-temporal) gravity. As William Brown (2013) has argued, analogue cinema, insofar as it is dependent on the cut, operates by spatial fragmentation. Following Brown, this strengthens the alignment between quotidian human perception and analogue cinema, since space in both

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marks clear limitations. The ‘virtual’ camera of digital cinema, however, is capable of entering brain-spaces, far away galaxies, it can move through walls or buildings, and can provide us with perspectives not available to the human eye (42-50). Although the same could be claimed for analogue cinema, I believe this cinematic potential is particularly accentuated and embraced by digital cinema. In this context, Brown regards digital cinema to be ‘an inhuman or posthuman form, which posits a world in which we can pass through solid objects as easily as we do through empty spaces’ (47). Leaving aside the discussion of whether or not digital cinema definitely poses an ‘inhuman’ form, it does appear to have left behind the classical cinematic anchoring in quotidian human perception. Following this line of reasoning, Gravity is a reflection upon how digital cinema is gradually losing its foundation in the Euclidean spatio-temporal coordinates of classical cinema and quotidian perception. Its use of 3D technology to induce in the viewers an experience of weightlessness reflects how digital cinema ‘allows us to transcend our limited human perception, which must fragment and divide’ (47). Throughout this book, I have argued that the cognitive-formalist fabula is committed to linear temporality and Euclidean space. Both Leviathan and Gravity support the claim that digital and 3D imagery are untying the traditional cinematic foundation in the quotidian human experience. The spectator’s narrative comprehension can, therefore, no longer be thought of in terms of a disengaged cognisor involved with ‘problem-solution’ models. Nor can we think narrative comprehension as something that can be theoretically isolated from the emotional and affective responses of the spectator. One promising way of understanding the current transformations in cinematic spectatorship is by developing new tools apt for the challenges of contemporary cinema. This book has attempted to do so by challenging the classical scientif ic assumption of the cognitive-formalist fabula to propose the far more dynamic concept of the embodied fabula.

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Notes I. Introduction 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

‘Complex narratives’ are far from alone in exploring the interstice between classical and modernist forms. Another favoured example of this is the New Hollywood (or American New Wave) cinema that ‘had been raised on Old Hollywood and 1960s art movies’ (Bordwell 2006, 74). In his introduction to New Hollywood, Geoff King (2002) sums up the two main claims that has been used to define New Hollywood. The first identifies New Hollywood with a particular style of filmmaking that is markedly different from the classical style that preceded it. Another take has been to identify New Hollywood with a set of industrial changes and thus place it in a broader societal, political, ideological, and economic context (1–11; cf. Berliner 2010; Elsaesser, Horwath, & King 2004; Thompson 1999). It should be mentioned that TV series have also experienced an increased surge of narrational complexity. The Sopranos (Chase 1999-2007), Lost (Abrams, Lieber, & Lindelof 2004-2010), Breaking Bad (Giligan 2008-2013), FlashForward (Braga & Goyer 2009-2010), and True Detective (Pizzollatto 2014-present) are but a few examples of this (cf. Mittell 2015). Modern, modernist, or ‘art cinema’ are the most common terms used to describe the cinematic movement that developed as an alternative to Hollywood filmmaking and is associated with European post-war auteurs. However, there is no agreement as to whether these films constitute an institutional practice (cf. Neale 1981), a narrational paradigm (cf. Bordwell 1985a), or even if they are best understood as ‘modern’ in the sense of the most mature, artistic and refined form of cinema (cf. Deleuze 2005a, 2005b). Depending on how modern cinema is defined, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), for instance, can be seen as both a classical and a modern(ist) film. Within the framework of this study, I have decided on the term ‘modern(ist)’. For the present purpose both the term ‘modern’ and ‘art cinema’ have their disadvantages. Whereas the term ‘modern’ risks confusing contemporary cinema with modernist cinema, Bordwell’s choice of ‘art cinema’ as contrast to classical Hollywood cinema comes with the unfortunate and unintended connotation that classical cinema – indeed anything but ‘art cinema’ – is less ‘artistic’. Ultimately, the term ‘modern(ist)’ has been chosen since it denotes the primary modernist adherence of the time-image, while simultaneously acknowledging that Deleuze never intended to restrict the time-image to modernist cinema. For more elaborate discussions of the concept of ‘affect’ in the tradition of Spinoza and Deleuze, see Massumi (2002), Shouse (2005), Clough & Halley (2007), and Gregg & Seigworth (2010). John Mullarkey (2009) argues that ‘reality itself is processual or divergent. As such, film’s power is always based on a missed encounter, a convergence with divergence [...] Commensurately, there is no essential or “Ideal” film

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wherein either a particular technology or aesthetic form would render it absolutely Real (“great or true” film art). Rather, at any one time, there is only a provisional selection of film examples (and film scenes) that converge on one point – what film “really is” – from a certain frame of reference’ (xv, emphases in original). In this sense, the embodied fabula should be seen as a ‘processual’ term that does not claim to capture the essence of the cinematic experience or to answer the question of what ‘cinema really is’, but enables us to better understand cinema and the cinematic experience from a certain frame of reference at a particular moment in time. The actual word Aristotle (1996) uses for complex is peplegmenos, which translates into interwoven. See Buckland (2009a) for a more comprehensive account of Aristotle’s idea of the complex plot, and its relation to Bordwell’s conception of the ‘forking-path’ narrative. As encapsulated in the famous passage from A Philosophical Essay on Probability (1951) in which Pierre-Simon Laplace entertains the thought experiment of an intellect (known as Laplace’s demon) that knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe. Laplace writes: ‘We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes’ (4). An example of a restricted form of complexity is statistics, in which, following Mary Ann Doane (2002), ‘[c]hance was granted its own power, but that power was ultimately superseded by general laws of order and regularity’ (18). For a critical discussion of the cognitive position, see Mullarkey (2009, 29-57). While the movement-image and the time-image are Deleuze’s two major categories for cinematic images, it is worth pointing out that these do not directly correspond to the opposition of ‘classical’ and modern(ist) cinema. The movement-image is Deleuze’s broad description of a type of cinema dominant in the pre-war era and defined by an empirical representation of time as a chronological and linear succession in space. ‘Movementimages’ come in various shapes such as ‘perception-images’ (e.g. Vertov) and ‘affection-images’ (e.g. Dreyer), however this category is most often associated with the ‘action-image’. The latter corresponds to the ‘classical’ film as described in cognitive film theory. In Deleuze’s other major image-regime, the time-image, the linkages that subordinated time to movement in the movement-image are loosened or break to reveal a direct image of time (as opposed to the indirect image of time in the movement-image). Deleuze (2005b) writes about the ‘crystal-image’, which is the most important subcategory of the time-image: ‘What constitutes the crystal-image is the most fundamental operation of time: since the past is constituted not after

Notes

11.

12.

the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past, which differ from each other in nature, or, what amounts to the same thing, it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past. Time has to split at the same time as it sets itself out or unrolls itself: it splits in two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past. Time consists of this split, and it is this, it is time that we see in the crystal. The crystal-image was not time, but we see time in the crystal’ (79, emphasis in original). Although this study does not examine the role of sound in cinema, I believe that the embodied fabula could be a useful tool for understanding the impact of cinematic sound and the way it enfolds or embeds the spectator in the narrative in a manner that cannot be meaningfully accounted for by the Bordwellian cognitive-analytical perspective. In relation to this, I believe that it would be a both appealing and pertinent future task to connect the concept of the embodied fabula to the growing body of work that connects the logic of contemporary capitalist labour culture and consumerism with the foregrounding of affect, the accentuation of non-linearity, and the transformations in spectatorial address witnessed in contemporary media culture (Shaviro 2010; see also Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004).

II. Cinema in the Interstices 1.

2.

3.

231

With a nod to an argument presented in the work of Tom Gunning (1986), Doane (2002) observes that the ‘overwhelming hegemony of narrative in the later Hollywood cinema of the classical era led earlier film historians to construct a teleology that organized silent films and hierarchized them according to their ability to anticipate the dominant narrative function and to ‘invent,’ or ‘discover,’ its most salient signifying strategies’ (141). Consider, for instance, Aleksandr Sokurov’s stunning Russian Ark ([Russkiy kovcheg] 2002), which is shot in one entire take. The film is bathed in the irreversible time of the camera. A documentary about the making of the film stresses that it took Sokurov and his team an entire six months to practise and rehearse to get the shot right on the one day that the Hermitage was reserved for them. Thus, the film as it unrolls in one take glimmers with the tension and anxiety stemming from the knowledge that one unpredicted event could either create a magic moment or ruin the entire take. Consequently, despite the digital nature of the film – one scene contains digitally crafted snowflakes – the film incorporates the analogue implications as a reminder and reflection of the archival nature of images, history, and art. Speaking about ‘post-continuity’ in Spring Breakers (Korine 2012) at a conference at the Freie Universität Berlin 2013, Shaviro mentioned these criteria with which ‘post-continuity’ can be differentiated from the cinema of continuity (cf. Shaviro 2013).

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6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

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‘SLAB-theories refer to theories within cinema studies that are based on or frequently refer to Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and/or Barthes. With the term ‘second nature’ Nadel (2005) refers to ‘the affirming of nature in the interest of seeing that affirmation return as practice. To second, as a verb, is to affirm, to add to the consensus, to echo. In this sense, to second nature is to echo affirmatively; it is more or less the act of mimesis that film itself has been lauded for performing since its inception, such that many of the theoretical debates about film in the first half of the twentieth century focused on which modes of cinematic representation were best suited to reflect reality. The seconding of nature entailed in responding to cinematic cues thus can be seen as the affirming of cinematic reality, the seconding of film’s kinship to nature’ (430). Other insightful introductions to cognitive science are Boden (2006) and Clark (2000). Wheeler (2005) also points out that this is a kind of cognition with which most other animals do not engage at all (9). In Reconstructing the Cognitive World (2005) Michael Wheeler draws primarily on Heidegger as philosophical inspiration, Evan Thompson expands this to include Husserl in his Mind in Life (2007). In Alva Noë’s Action in Perception (2004) Merleau-Ponty is a frequent reference. Antonio Damasio dismantles the Cartesian assumptions of cognitive (neuro)science in Descartes’ Error (1995), while turning to Spinoza for an alternative to these presumptions in Looking for Spinoza (2003). In this light John Protevi (2010) has suggested that a constructive next step could be found by not only ‘looking for Spinoza’, but also Deleuze. For works examining the core assumptions of cognitive science, see Bickhard and Terveen (1996), Dennett (1991), Dreyfus (1991), Fodor (1983), Lemmen (1997), Gardner (1985), Varela et al. (1992), and Wheeler (2005). According to Wheeler (2005) a ‘creature displays online intelligence, just when it produces a suite of fluid and flexible real-time adaptive responses to incoming sensory stimuli’ (12). Online intelligence is thus opposed to offline intelligence such as ‘wondering what the weather is like in Paris, or weighing up the pros or cons of moving to a new city’ (12). Whereas the cognitive-formalist fabula has mostly been perceived from an ‘offline’ perspective, the embodied fabula is an attempt to accentuate the importance of ‘online’ cognition as describing our immediate encounter with the films. At the end of the second cinema book, Deleuze (2005b) suggests that new powers of the image must go beyond both the movement-image and the time-image as these are described in his books: ‘An original will to art has already been defined by us in the change affecting the content of cinema itself: the substitution of the time-image for the movement-image. So that electronic images [as opposed to analogue, i.e. digital] will have to be based on still another will to art, or on as yet unknown aspects of the time-image’ (255).

Notes

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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In his major work on cinematic modernism Screening Modernism (2007), András Bálint Kovács points to the film-philosophy of Deleuze as containing three aspects of the ‘classical-modern’ dichotomy – Deleuze represents one side of the spectrum, David Bordwell the other. Kovács writes that ‘in the Deleuzian approach to modern cinema one can find all three aspects of the classical-modern dichotomy. He sets out a systematic distinction between classical and modern cinema, whereby modern cinema is seen as a different utilization of moving images. He also sets up a chronological order whereby modern cinema appears as an organic development of classical cinema. Finally, he puts modern cinema on a higher level of evolution where cinema fulfills its potential for expressing abstract thoughts. According to Deleuze, modern cinema is the most developed structural variation of classical cinema, which articulates the actual world better and in a deeper sense than classical cinema. “Classical” does not mean for Deleuze an “everlasting”, eternal model of aesthetic value. Not that he does not respect and admire classical auteurs, but he considers classical film form to be outmoded, passé, invalid, discredited. Although Deleuze designates a certain historical moment for the appearance of modern cinema, he does not treat modernism as an art-historical phenomenon in the sense of an art movement, trend, or school. Modern film is the result of the evolution of cinema’s inherent power of articulating time’ (41). An inspiring analysis that places Adaptation in the vacuum between Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image as an example of the ‘Kino der Replikation’ [cinema of replication] can be found in Engell (2005). Richard Smith’s main example is the work of Billy Wilder, who is ‘one example of a director who worked within the classical system of montage (is there really such a thing?) but who has “time” as an absolutely central component of his thought’ (2001). Another obvious example is Alfred Hitchcock, whose films are widely referred to as classical, yet for Deleuze often fall into the category of ‘relation-images’ that belong in the interstice of movement-image and timeimage. The cinema of Hitchcock thus enables an ideal position to perform a critical reflection upon the classical film and our comprehension of it. See Fahle & Engell (1997) for a lengthy and multifaceted discussion on the role of history in the cinema of Deleuze. The fact that the cinema entailed both linear and non-linear elements from its very birth is consistent with the arguments proposed by Doane (2002) and Gunning (1986). At times Deleuze writes ‘narration’ to refer to classical linear narration, and at other times to refer to all conceivable types of narration, including ‘dysnarration’. For Deleuze and the horror film, see Anna Powell’s Deleuze and Horror Film (2006), for Deleuze and national cinema see David-Martin Jones’ Deleuze, Cinema, and National Identity (2006), and his book on ‘world cinema’, Deleuze and World Cinemas (2011), for Deleuze and feminism see the collection Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Buchanan & Colebrook 2000), and

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Laura Marks (2000, 2002) for an embodied Deleuzian approach. Granted most of these studies touch upon questions of narration, however, when the immensity that the topic of narration in the field of cinema is considered, works that focus primarily on narration appear startlingly modest. Perhaps, the reason is that Deleuzian scholars often feel that studies of narration have traditionally been overrepresented. While this may be a fair point, the rise of complex narratives does call for attempts to develop a Deleuzian or film-philosophical approach to cinematic narration. The close relation between ‘intensity’ and ‘affect’ in Massumi (2002) is evident, when he argues ‘emotion and affect – if affect is intensity – follow different logics and pertain to different orders’ (27).

III. Narrative Ambiguity in the Classical Cinema 1.

2.

3.

While Stage Fright is arguably situated within the classical paradigm it simultaneously points towards both the time-image and the complex narrative. Consequently, Deleuze (2005a) holds the cinema of Hitchcock to be representative of the ‘relation-image’ situated in the post-war gap between movementimage and time-image (201-209). Furthermore, Elsaesser (2009) perceives the film as a precursor to the complex storytelling mode found in contemporary cinema due to its unreliable narration invoked by its ‘lying’ flashback (20). The point being that the history of cinema – if allowed to show – is full of examples that challenge what cognitivists perceive to be the ‘ordinary’ linear cinematic perception. Some examples are the ‘cinema of attraction’, avantgarde cinema, surrealist cinema, various forms of experimental cinema, the films of D.W. Griffith, ‘Russian montage’, but also, and this is my point, films that otherwise seem to adhere to a linear onto-epistemology. Yet, cognitive film theory has demonstrated a predilection for the classical Hollywood film, presumably because it is most apt in laying bare the relation between innate cognitive dispositions and how we watch cinema. Malcom Turvey (2014) has criticized how the universal claims occasionally made by cognitive scholars such as Murray Smith, David Bordwell, Torben Grodal, and Joseph Anderson, often rely upon films from the industrialized West. Surely, he writes, ‘an analysis of a much wider sample of both visual and oral children’s narrative fiction from Western and non-Western cultures, from the past and the present (including from contemporary hunter-gatherer populations), is necessary before one can so confidently state that children’s stories about empowerment and bonding are universal’ (54). Stage Fright here serves as an example of how the supposed naturalness of cinematic linearity is often a product of the bias inherent in our analytical tools, rather than being the undisputed universal condition or mode of sense-making. The Independent, for instance, wrote in their review, ‘[t]he film’s coup de grace is as elegant as it is unexpected. The whole movie plays back in your mind in perfect clarity – and turns out to be a completely different movie to the one you’ve been watching’ (Q. Curtis 1995).

Notes

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

Bordwell develops his theory of cinematic spectatorship on the example of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). In the film, the wheelchair-bound Jeff (James Stewart) solves a murder that happened in the opposite building. Jeff’s attempt to solve the mystery by carefully observing his neighbours from his window, mirrors the spectator’s cognitive attempts to solve the puzzle of the film (cf. Bordwell 1985a, 40-47). Making the audience re-aware of internalized cinematic conventions is arguably one of the main defining aspects of contemporary complex narration. Yet, the film does not challenge linear reasoning per se but automatic schemata application. It is thus worth keeping in mind that the theatrical metaphors do not ensure cinematic non-linearity in the Deleuzian sense and the film ultimately expresses a belief in the classical, linear onto-epistemology. See Thompson (1988) for a more thorough examination of how the characters are at once acting, directing, and auditing in Stage Fright. The correct spelling of the word is actually ostrannenie. However, owing to a curious spelling mistake made by Shklovsky the word has entered the dictionaries with the spelling ostranenie, which I here follow (cf. van den Oever 2010). In the following, I use the term ‘cognitive formalism’ to refer to the conjunction of cognitive psychology and Russian formalism found in the work of Bordwell, Thompson, and others. It should be noted that Thompson prefers the term ‘neoformalism’ to stress that her main reference point is Russian formalism.

IV. Modern(ist) Cinema: Logic of the Encounter 1.

2.

235

It was probably Jacques Rivette who first pointed out the similarities between the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges and the narrative forks of Hiroshima mon amour. Rivette observes, ‘Hiroshima [mon amour] is a circular film. At the end of the last reel you can easily move back to the first, and so on. Hiroshima is a parenthesis in time. It is a film about reflection, on the past and on the present. Now, in reflection, the passage of time is effaced because it is a parenthesis within duration. And it is within this duration that Hiroshima is inserted. In this sense Resnais is close to a writer like Borges, who has always tried to write stories in such a way that on reaching the last line the reader has to turn back and reread the story right from the first line to understand what it is about – and so it goes on, relentlessly. With Resnais it is the same notion of the infinitesimal achieved by material means, mirrors face to face, series of labyrinths. It is an idea of the infinite but contained within a very short interval, since ultimately the “time” of Hiroshima can just as well last twenty-four hours as a second’ (Rivette in Domarchi et al. 1985, 69). At least this was the case in 1959. It can be argued that the genre of documentary in recent years has undergone an exciting development in which directors have experimented with many innovative approaches to the format of documentary. These new documentaries have abandoned the classical ‘flyon-the-wall’ documentary style, and use acts of intrusion that would be un-

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imaginable in traditional documentary. An example is The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer 2012), a film that has profited from the renewed understanding of ‘representation’ and ‘reality’ promoted in the modern(ist) paradigm. One example is the case of Henry Molaison (also known as ‘Patient HM’), who, following a brain operation that was intended to cure him of his epilepsy, lost the ability to form new long-term memories (anterograde amnesia). Molaison, who died in 2008, is recognized as one of the most important cases in the history of cognitive neuroscience, and his case counts among the main sources of inspiration for Memento. In the time-image, Deleuze (2005b) argues that montage has become ‘montrage’ – a term he borrows from Robert Lapoujade. Deleuze writes: ‘[M]ontage has changed its meaning, it takes on a new function: instead of being concerned with movement-images from which it extracts an indirect image of time, it is concerned with the time-image, and extracts from it the relations of time on which aberrant movement must now depend’ (40). Consequently, the function of montage is no longer to link a series of events into a horizontal line. Deleuze (2005b) writes: ‘It is only when movement becomes automatic that the artistic essence of the image is realized: producing a shock to thought, communicating vibrations to the cortex, touching the nervous and cerebral system directly. [...] The spiritual automaton no longer designates – as it does in classical philosophy – the logical or abstract possibility of formally deducing thoughts from each other, but the circuit into which they enter with the movementimage, the shared power of what forces thinking and what thinks under the shock; a nooshock. [...] It is this capacity, this power, and not the simple logical possibility, that cinema claims to give us in communicating the shock. It is as if cinema were telling us: with me, with the movement-image, you can’t escape the shock which arouses the thinker in you’ (151-152, emphasis in original). I find this example to be illustrative of Bergson’s thesis of the enfolding of memories and perception: ‘Accondirg to a resecrah at Camirbdge Univsreity, it dosen’t mettar in waht oredr the lertets in a wrod are. The olny itpormant thnig is taht the frist and lsat letter be in the rgiht plcae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wihtout plobrem. Tihs is becuase the huamn mnid deos not raed eevry lteter by ilsetf, but the wrod as a wohle’ (Stone 2015). It should, however, be noted that the classical flashback is not always a representation of a subjective memory. Stage Fright proves an example of the borderland, where it is not immediately clear whether it is the film’s leap back in story time or the film’s representation of a subjective or falsified ‘memory’ (cf. Chapter III). Deleuze (2005b) explains the cone as follows: ‘The point S is clearly the actual present; but this is not strictly speaking a point, since it already includes the past of this present, the virtual image which doubles the actual image. As for AB, A’ B’... sections of the cone, they are not psychological circuits to which recollection-images would correspond; they are purely

Notes

9. 10.

11.

12.

V. 1.

2.

3.

4.

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virtual circuits, each of which contains all our past as this is preserved in itself (pure recollection). Bergson is unequivocal in this respect. Psychological circuits of recollection-images or dream-images are produced only when we “leap” from S to one of these sections, to actualize some virtuality of it which must then move down into a new present S’’ (284, n. 22). ‘Pure’ memory is to be understood as the totality of memory (Deleuze 1991, 27), and it is in principle independent of perception (Moulard-Leonard 2008, 65) and thus the opposite of ‘pure’ perception. The very different experience of the atomic event is a constant theme in the dialogue of the lovers. He, for instance, asks if it was true that it was a beautiful summer day in Paris, and she recollects that the bombings were associated with the definite end of the war. When the woman asks ‘why speak of him’ the man answers: 1) ‘Because of Nevers. I’m only just beginning to know you, and from the many thousands of things in your life, I chose Nevers’.; 2) ‘I somehow understand that it was there that you were so young that you didn’t yet belong to anyone in particular, and I like that’; 3) ‘I somehow understand that it was there that I almost lost you and ran the risk of never, ever meeting you’; 4) ‘I somehow understand it was there that you began to be who you are today.’ When asked ‘what did Hiroshima mean to you in France?’ the French woman replies: ‘The end of the war. I mean completely. Astonishment that they dared to do it, astonishment they succeeded. And the beginning of an unknown fear for us as well. And then indifference. And fear of indifference as well.’

Towards the Embodied Fabula

This humorous approach to the separation of body and mind first appeared in Punch Magazine in 1855. This editing technique – a subcategory of fast cutting – has also been practised in films such as Boogie Nights (Anderson 1997) and Snatch (Ritchie 2000) and was coined the ‘hip-hop montage’ following an interview in which Aronofsky (2001) has explained: ‘I grew up in Brooklyn during the eighties and the golden age of hip-hop; before Eminem. As a kid I was a really bad graffiti artist and a really bad breakdancer but I still wanted to take some hip-hop ideas and apply them to narrative filmmaking. So that’s where all the fast cutting came from. It just happened to work really well with the idea of obsession and addiction’. ‘Illusions’ here are not to be understood as ‘unreal’, but rather in the technical sense as a distortion of the senses capable of revealing the underlying organizational and perceptual workings of the brain. Understood like this, illusions are closely related to Deleuze’s concept of the virtual. However, it would be possible to argue that cognitivists tend to understand the affective (or ‘irrational’) aspects of cinema within the fold of rational agency. Daniel Frampton (2006), for instance, makes this claim, when he asserts that cognitive film theory explains cinema going in terms of ‘problem-

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9.

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solution’ models according to which the ‘filmgoer’s main emotional engagement with the narrative film is that of “interest”’ (108). Remember that Bordwell’s theory of style is partly naturalistically justified, which, according to cognitive formalism, explains why certain norms are experienced as being more natural than others (cf. Chapter II & Chapter III). Richard Allen (2001) makes a similar point when he argues that within cognitive film theory, ‘[p]erception is erroneously conceived as a process that takes place inside the mind’ (185). Like Noë (2004), Allen (2001) maintains that perception is not a container of things but an ability manifested in behaviour (186). The researchers attributed with the discovery of mirror neurons are Vittorio Gallese, Giacomi Rizzolatti, Giuseppe Pellegrino, and Leonardo Fogassi. It is worth noting that the actual phenomena or experience that would arise from the firing of mirror neurons is already known to film scholars – one only needs to think about the audience’s inner arousal when watching a car about to crash. Therefore, what is central is that these provide scientific support to those claiming that cinema’s ability to arouse such reactions – even when the spectator on a purely cognitive level is consciously aware that the images are fictional (and thus in a sense fictitious) – demonstrate a deeper underlying bond between the images and the audience. It is, nevertheless, crucial to note the difference between the brain as envisioned by Deleuze and the evolutionarily ‘hardwired’ machinery implied in embodied neurobiological takes on cinema, narrative, and emotion as exemplified in the work of Grodal. Whether mirror neuron mechanisms confirm the evolutionary ‘hardwired’ brain of Grodal or the ‘film-spectatorworld’ (cf. Brown 2013) assemblage of Deleuzian film-philosophy remains a disputed topic. In any case, the mirroring mechanism in the brain constitutes a further challenge to the cognitive-formalist conception of narrative comprehension and thus evidences the need for a reconceptualization of the fabula as a non-representational tool for comprehending the immediate encounter between spectator and film. Michael Wheeler (2005) explains that this specific mode of causation involves multiple simultaneous interactions and complex dynamic feedback loops. This has two consequences: first that the ‘causal contribution of each systemic component partially determines, and is partially determined by, the causal contributions of large numbers of other systemic components’ (260). Secondly, that these contributions are suspect to radical change over time (cf. Clark 1998; Wheeler 2005). Such a view on cognition means that the classical cognitive methodology becomes problematic, since it attempts to specify ‘distinct and robust causal-functional role played by reliably reidentifiable parts of the system, and to explain interesting system-level behavior in terms of the properties of a small number of subsystems’ (Wheeler 2005, 260-261). A few examples of complex narratives that can be said to have a non-linear starting point are the bifurcations of Lola rennt (1998) or The Butterfly

Notes

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

Effect (2004), the fractal structure of Thirteen Conversations about One Thing (Sprecher 2001) or 21 Grams (2003), the reverse chronological storytelling of Memento (2000) or the narrative loops of Lost Highway (1997). For an exploration of complex system theory and complex narratives see (Poulaki 2011, 2014a, 2014b). In contrasting ‘grass’ to ‘tree’ Elliott (2010) refers to the rhizomatic (grass) versus the classical logical (tree) structures of thinking as found in Deleuze and Guattari (1987). For a more comprehensive account of Lost Highway, see Hven (2010). Breaking Bad (Gilligan 2008-2013), Mad Men (Weiner 2007-2015), and Dexter (Manos 2006-2013) are but a few examples of how contemporary television series experiment with simultaneously aligning and misaligning its spectators from its main characters’ actions. For Deleuze (2000) this immediately becomes a normative issue as ‘[b]ad cinema always travels through circuits created by the lower brain: violence and sexuality in what is represented – a mix of gratuitous cruelty and organized ineptitude. Real cinema achieves another violence, another sexuality, molecular rather than localized’ (367). This is not to deny the possibility that some viewers simply root for Norman, yet in such cases the cognitive dissonances that are of interest here will not occur. In the concepts of hodological and pre-hodological spaces, one senses the contours of the movement-image (hodological) and time-image (pre-hodological). I have chosen to demonstrate this with an example taken from Psycho exactly to avoid this dichotomy, showing that their existence does not necessarily cancel each other out. Here it is important to note that Psycho is itself a film that disobeys the dichotomy of classical and modern(ist) cinema. See Holtmeier (2014) for an illuminating exploration of pre-hodological spaces in the cinema of Jia Zhangke.

VI. The Complexity of Complex Narratives 1.

2. 3.

239

Remember that Wheeler (2005) counts a dynamical system perspective as the fourth claim for embodied cognition. He states that this amounts to a rejection of the idea that all cognitive processes are computational, favouring instead to regard cognition as a matter of state space evolution in particular kinds of dynamic systems (13-14). Another example of this is Zeno’s paradox with Achilles and the turtle through which Henri Bergson (1998, 1991) developed his criticism of science. Cilliers (2002) differentiates complex from complicated systems. It is interesting to note that a computer is a complicated system, but not a complex system. This is the case, since in a complex system ‘the interaction among constituents of the system, and the interaction between the system and its environment, are of such a nature that the system as a whole cannot be fully understood simply by analysing its components. Moreover, these relation-

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ships are not fixed, but shift and change, often as a result of self-organisation [...] The brain, natural language and social systems are complex’ (iix-ix). The unusual circumstances of their love affair are explicitly remarked upon as Cristina ensures Paul that she knows he ‘has a good heart’. Remember that here, as elsewhere, emotion is understood as being both affectively and cognitively informed responses to the environment (therefore often the cinematic material). While emotions can be distinguished from pre-subjective affects and ‘higher-functioning’ cognition they remain deeply dependent on both. For Newman, however, we are not given sufficient cognitive information to conjure up strong emotions. Instead, the film overloads our cognitive system with difficult computational tasks. I believe that it is Newman’s mistake – in fact the mistake of most cognitivists – that he completely ignores the role of affect (since it is preconscious) in our experience of the narrative. Similarly, I believe that the new affect theories largely ignore the role of cognition and emotion, when they address cinematic affect. It is quite likely that the popularity of certain non-linear twist films – categorized as ‘psychological puzzle films’ (cf. Panek 2006) – partly depends on the joy experienced once a narrative order emerges from the initial state of chaos. In certain ways, 21 Grams resembles ‘psychological puzzle films’ insofar as they, too, deal extensively with ambiguity and dispend with the clarity of classical cinema in favour of sudden narrative fluctuations over brief isolated fluctuations and clarity of classical narration. Yet, ‘psychological puzzle films’ typically employ the narrative structure of the detective plot to deal with unreliable narration, surprise or twist endings, narrative ambiguity, and/or characters suffering from mental illness (cf. Panek 2006). Contrarily, it has been argued that 21 Grams due to its imploding and dysfunctional families, suffering women, broken and disoriented men, its intense and expressive forms of realism together with its emphasis on affect and human desire is closer related to the genre of the melodrama (cf. Stewart 2007; Azcona 2010). Unlike the detective film, the melodrama assumes the spectator primarily to be emotionally and affectively involved with the narrative. The issue for Keating (2006) is exactly that of leaving behind the predominantly linear understanding of the manner in which Hollywood cinema elicits emotion: ‘If narrative is seen as a rational system of organization and containment while the attraction is seen as a momentary appeal to the senses, then it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that the systems are locked in struggle. However, if narrative and attractions are both theorized as systems for strong emotions, then it seems much more reasonable to conclude that they can coexist peacefully. Indeed, they might even be able to mutually intensify one another’ (9). Note that this view is resonant with Deleuze’s theory of the sensory-motor linkages that produce the sense of continuity in the movement-image that are suspended or ruptured in the time-image (cf. Deleuze 2005a, 2005b).

Notes

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

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The ‘mosaic’ or ‘network’ narrative is a subcategory of complex narratives in which the perhaps most prominent factor is the lack of narrative centre or unification. Yet, the mosaic form is not entirely new to cinema. D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) is probably one of the earliest examples of a ‘mosaic’ narrative structure since the film cross-cuts between four parallel stories separated in both time and place. In recent years, the ‘mosaic’ style has been associated with the work of the director Robert Altman, and in particular his film Short Cuts (1993), still it is only within the last decades that scholars have started to regard the ‘mosaic’ or ‘multiprotagonist’ film in generic terms (cf. Azcona 2010). Short Cuts displays many of the characteristics of the ‘mosaic’ film since it has a large set of subplots and characters, whose daily existence we follow in a manner that eschews the protagonist-centred forward-movement typical of the classical narrative. The characters and the events are never truly connected, yet the film still facilitates a sense of interconnectedness since they are all more or less affected by an earthquake occurring in Los Angeles. For a more comprehensive account of the ‘mosaic’ narrative see Tröhler (2006), Azcona (2010), or Pisters (2011b). Apart from Lola rennt and 21 Grams the following – by no means exhaustive – list of films has made explicit reference to complexity theory: Butterfly Effect (Bress & Gruber 2004), Thirteen Conversations about One Thing (Sprecher 2001), Chaos Theory (Siega 2008), and Chaos (Giglio 2005). Within the cognitive sciences the term ‘modularity’ refers to Jerry Fodor’s (1983) thesis that the mind operates according to informationally encapsulated ‘modules’. This influential theory has been criticized by embodied cognition, as here exemplified by Chemero (2009): ‘Because perception is informationally encapsulated, theories (not handled by perceptual modules) do not change perceptual mechanisms or the output of perceptual modules. Therefore, Fodor argues, perception is not theory laden. Furthermore, because perceptual modules are innately structured, they’re the same in all (normal) humans. There is, then, no sense in which humans who believe different theories perceive a different world. Their perceptual mechanisms produce the same output given the same input. Although they may hold different theories about what they perceive, they perceive the same thing. So, Fodor holds, the modularity of perceptual and cognitive systems makes perception a neutral basis for theoretical disputes and this can form the basis for objectivity and scientific realism’ (189). This pun on the traditional altruism that seeing is believing, describes the manner in which our mindset actually affects our perception (cf. Dennett 1991). Borges (2000) writes: ‘In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of the almost inextricable Ts’ui Pȇn, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork [...] In the work of Ts’ui Pȇn, all pos-

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sible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings’ (Borges 2000, 51, emphasis in original). It could be noted that some ‘complex narratives’, such as Timecode (Figgis 2000), have employed a split screen to ensure simultaneity of its storylines. In relation to Lola’s scream, Martin-Jones (2006), too, argues that she in this manner manipulates the outcome, since the scream can be perceived as a skill she has acquired over the course of the two first runs, and, therefore, not a manner of sheer contingency. However, if the successful ending of Lola’s third run is not completely a matter of sheer contingency, it can also not be skill alone, and must instead be seen as a mixture of luck and skill. As Deleuze (2004b) has remarked about chance and fixity in games: ‘In games with which we are familiar, chance is fixed at certain points. These are the points at which independent causal series encounter one another (for example, the rotation of the roulette and the rolling ball). Once the encounter is made, the mixed series follow a single track, protected from any new interference. If a player suddenly bent over and blew with all his might in order to speed up or to thwart the rolling ball, he would be stopped, thrown out, and the move would be annulled. What would have been accomplished, however, other than breathe a little more chance into the game?’ (71). In relation to this, Lola’s scream does not control or eliminate the contingency of the game as much as it introduces a new bifurcation to the game of chance. It should rightly be pointed out that Martin-Jones naturally does not agree with all aspects of Bordwell’s cognitive formalism. While Martin-Jones finds Bordwell’s argumentation for the persistency of linearity within ‘forkingpath’ narratives compelling, he finds it problematic that Bordwell operates at the level of narrative structure exclusively, and thus ignores the contextspecific aims of the various films, which results in a too homogeneous appreciation of them (cf. Martin-Jones 2006, 87). Here I am especially thinking about the scene in which Tykwer cross-cuts between Manni and Lola, when the latter realizes that the bag is lost. ‘Die Tasche!’ says Lola, and Manni replies, ‘die Tasche!’, the repetition of the word ‘Tasche’ slowly develops into a kind of small musical interlude that parallels the manner in which a narrative rhythm is introduced by means of the repetitions of the film’s form.

VII. Memento and the Embodied Fabula 1. 2.

The origin of this riddle is unknown. To mention but a few examples, Memento has been studied as an expression of Deleuzian film-philosophy (cf. Clarke 2002; Gargett 2002; MartinJones 2006), as a ‘complex narrative’ (Simons 2008), a ‘modular narrative’ (Cameron 2008), as an example of the ‘mind-game’ and ‘post-mortem’ film (Elsaesser 2009, cf. 2004b; Elsaesser & Hagener 2010), as a ‘subjective realist narration’ (Campora 2014), a ‘psychological puzzle film’ (Panek 2006) as

Notes

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

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well as a ‘puzzle film’ (Ghislotti 2009). Claire Molloy (2010) has devoted an entire book to the study of several aspects of the film including production, marketing, and narrative features. Diverse cognitive approaches to the study of the film include those conducted by Stefano Ghislotti (2009) and Karen Renner (2006). The reverse motion scene of Leonard killing Teddy can be seen as a play on the mechanic, analogue, and indexical nature of the cinematic apparatus, and its ability to bring images from the past alive. André Bazin (2005) famously wrote about the cinematic medium: ‘Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were’ (15). Yet, as Melissa Clarke (2002) has observed, spectators ‘will be forced to consider how accurate “normal” is’ (167). It should rightly be noted that Bordwell (2006) does acknowledge the lingering uncertainty surrounding many of the film’s events. He writes: ‘In Memento, it seems to me, we can only suspect that the Sammy Jankis story is Leonard’s projection of his own killing of his wife; the film doesn’t provide enough redundancy to let us ascertain this. Still, many matters, such as Leonard shooting Teddy, don’t seem to be in doubt’ (81). The subliminal image can be found here https://mendozalean.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/lenny-and-sammy.jpg. From this perspective, the film resonates with Deleuze’s (2005b) thesis about indiscernibility in the time-image. Here ‘we no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confusing but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask’ (7). The original poster for the film can be found here: http://news.doddleme. com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/memento-movie-poster.jpg. See Redfern (2005) for a comprehensive account of how Bordwell misinterprets the radical constructivist position. I would like to thank a reviewer for pointing out that the ‘dizzying of feelings’ described by the spectator of Memento is not necessarily to be taken literally but metaphorically, i.e. this viewer is not describing dizziness in the sense of being unable to stand up straight or to focus but metaphorically as a cognitive state of confusion. From this perspective, the use of the word ‘dizzying’ can be seen as an example of how intricately affective and cognitive experience link up to form the ‘metaphors we live by’ (Lakoff & Johnson 2003). According to conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), thought is embodied insofar as ‘the structures used to put together our conceptual systems grow out of bodily experience and make sense in terms of it. From this perspective, ‘the core of our conceptual systems is directly grounded in perception, body movements, and experience of a physical and social character’ (Lakoff 1987, xiv; cf. Johnson 1990; Lakoff & Johnson 1999, 2003). Within the last couple of years, a subfield dedicated to exploring the appli-

244 

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cation value of CMT to cinema has emerged within cognitive media studies (cf. Coëgnarts 2014; Coëgnarts & Kravanja 2012, 2015; Fahlenbrach 2016). Whether and how the concept of the embodied fabula could gain from, and possibly contribute to, this cognitive film theoretical subfield remains to be explored. For interesting theories on cinema’s ability to produce its own subjectivity, see Vivian Sobchack (2004) on the ‘cinesthetic subject’ and for its ability to produce its own corporality, see Christiane Voss (2011, 2014) on the concept of the Leihkörper [‘surrogate body’]. For a more elaborate examination of the relation of these concepts and the embodied fabula, see Hven (2015).

Acknowledgments My sincere thanks to all those whose encouragements, assistance, or financial aid made this book possible. An earlier version of this book was submitted to the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar under the title Embodying the Fabula: Cinema between the Lines as my dissertation for obtaining the degree of Doctor Philosophiae. I would like to thank the Graduiertenförderung des Freistaates Thüringen for financial support and to express my gratitude to the Bauhaus-Universität for providing such an exciting and stimulating research environment. I am especially grateful to Lorenz Engell, whose continued guidance I could not overestimate, and to Christian Kassung for his equally superb supervision of this project. A special mention also to Christiane Voss, whose support and influence especially in the later stage of this project have been marvellous. My gratitude also goes out to my fellow students in Weimar, Berlin, Aarhus, and Istanbul for your comments and critical remarks. I would also like to express my gratitude to Amsterdam University Press, and in particular the editors of the series ‘Film Culture in Transition’, Jeroen Sondervan and Thomas Elsaesser, for their professional, careful, dedicated, and efficient work with the manuscript. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for thought-provoking comments and criticisms that have helped to strengthen the argument of the book. Its weaknesses rest upon my shoulders alone. Several other people have contributed to the final shape of this book with useful comments, critical remarks, and suggestions for improvements or readings, or for their good cheer. I wish to thank Jeppe Graugaard, Tyler Parks, Rebecca Sheehan, Kate Rennebohm, Blandine Joret, Bernard Geoghegan, Gert Jan Harkema, Patricia Pisters, Josef Früchtl, Ágnes Pethő, Miklós Kiss, Steven Willemsen, Brendan Rooney, Maria Poulaki, Carl Plantinga, William Brown, Vittorio Gallese, David Bordwell, Torben Grodal, Andreas Gregersen, Birger Langkjær, Ed S. Tan, John Bateman, Maarten Coëgnarts, and all those people I have not mentioned but who have nevertheless inspired me tremendously throughout the years. Small parts of this book have been previously published. I would like to express my gratitude to the editor Ágnes Pethő for allowing me to reuse parts of the article ‘Memento and the Embodied Fabula: Narrative Comprehension Revisited’, which appeared in Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Journal of Film and Media Studies, 11 (2015), 93-110. Thanks also to Maria-Theresa Teixeira and Susana Viegas, the editors of the eProceedings of the International

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Conference on Philosophy and Film, for allowing me to republish parts of the article ‘Narrative is not in us; but it is we who move in a being-narrative, a world-narrative’ that appeared in Volume 1, 260-277. I would also like to thank Howard Gardner and Nick Redfern for their kind permission for using their illustrations, and to Zone Books for allowing me to reprint Bergson’s cone of memory. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude for the support of my family. To my parents Poul Erik and Eva for love, support, and so much more. My gratitude also to my brother Troels, his wife Marianne, and my sister Lisbeth. To Sigurd and Rolf for great cheer. Thanks to Gefion, my wife, for the extraordinary attention and passion you have bestowed upon this project and beyond. Finally, I would not be able to conclude my acknowledgments without remarking upon my gratitude for the work on the manuscript done by you, Karin. At times you invested more time and hard work on the manuscript than I, and for that I am deeply grateful. Steffen Hven, Berlin 2016



Index

21 Grams 7, 19, 22, 137, 140-60, 207, 209, 239n.11, 240n.6, 241n.10 A Beautiful Mind 78 À bout de souffle (Breathless) 86 A History of Violence 132 Act of Killing, The 236n.2 action-image 13, 26, 52, 54, 56-57, 134, 230n.10 Adaptation 42, 233n.13 aesthetic 45, 50, 70, 72, 74-75, 88, 89, 91, 97, 112, 120-21, 126, 146, 167, 169, 197, 202, 204, 208-09, 211, 230n.5, 233n.12 dimension of the image 20, 120, 126, 146, 208 affect 9-10, 14-17, 22, 25-26, 32-34, 38-39, 44, 46-49, 52, 61, 64-74, 91, 95, 99, 104, 10828,133-34, 141-50, 154-57, 167, 169-74, 177, 182, 186, 188-200, 204-13, 229n.4, 230n.10, 231n.12, 232n.11, 234n.19, 237n.4, 240n.5-6, 241n.9 & 12, 243n.10; see also body; corporeal; visceral affect theory 9, 48, 52, 207 affection-image 47, 49, 230n.10 affective narratology see narratology affective neuroscience 10, 52, 113, 116, 121; see also brain; neurobiology; neuroscience cognitive-affective 66-68, 174; see also cognition alignment 129-33, 146, 183, 197-202, 212 Allen, Richard 117, 238n.6, ambiguity 55, 62-64, 68, 80, 84, 89-92, 105, 182, 186, 188, 240n.6 analytical fabula see fabula Anderson, Joseph 13, 70, 98, 234n.2 Andrew, Dudley 23 Aristotle 9-10, 203, 230n.6 Aronofsky, Darren 111, 237n.2 arrow of time (physics concept) 139-40, 151, 176; see also irreversible time art-cinema 61, 80, 87-88; see also modern(ist) art cinema narration 61, 80, 88 assemblage 16, 81, 192, 238n.9 world-spectator-film assemblage 81, 238n.9 Azcona, Maria del Mar 148, 240n.6, 241 n9 background (as formalist concept) 19, 21, 39, 69, 76-81, 87, 89, 92, 193, 205 Barker, Jennifer 15, 189, 211 Barthes, Roland 153, 183, 232n.4 Bazin, André 23, 69, 104, 243n.3 becoming (as Deleuzian concept) 72, 102, 106, 175, 201 Bellour, Raymond 14, 43, 57, 98, 125

Bergson, Henri 13, 27, 44, 71-73, 84, 88, 101-04, 123, 127, 140, 151, 167-70, 189, 195, 236n.5, 237n.9, 239n.2 Bianco, Jamie Skye 17, 49, 52, 62, 111-12, 160, 170, 182, 196-97, 202 Blind Chance (Przypadek) 157, 162 body 7, 8, 15, 17, 35-37, 48-49, 55, 56, 74, 78, 95, 111-12, 114-16, 120-22, 124-26, 133, 137, 164, 172, 203, 205, 207, 212, 231n.12, 237n1, 243n.10, 244n.11; see also affect; brain-body; corporeal; embodiment; visceral body snatchers 115-16 Boogie Nights 237n.2 Boondock Saints, The 132 Bordwell, David 7, 10-16, 20-21, 28-32, 38, 40-41, 44-45, 52, 55-57, 59-63, 66, 70-71, 73-75, 78-80, 83-84, 87-92, 97-99, 114, 116-19, 121-24, 140, 143, 146-50, 158, 160-72, 177-79, 184-88, 192-95, 198, 206, 210, 229n.1&3, 230n.6, 231n.11, 233n.2&12, 235n.4, 238n.5, 242n.16, 243n.5&9 Borges, Jorge Luis 83, 157-58, 161-64, 168, 235n.1, 241n.13 brain 8, 15, 35, 56, 71, 73, 91, 98-100, 111-16, 120, 122-132, 138, 164, 189, 195-96, 203-04, 208-09, 213, 236n.3, 237n.3, 238 n9., 239n.15, 240n.3; see also affective neuroscience; neuroscience; neurobiology brain-body 37, 116, 124; see also body; embodiment brain-spaces 213 cinema-brain-world patterns 132 as screen 99-100, 123, 125, 131-32 Branigan, Edward 10, 12, 15, 55, 114, 119, 129 Brooks, Rodney 35, 187 Brown, William 7, 13, 15, 17, 19, 22-23, 81, 139, 193, 201-02, 207, 212-13, 238n.9 Bruner, Jerome 40-41, 68, 80, 131, 135, 202-03 Buckland, Warren 7-8, 11, 25, 78-79, 191, 204, 230n.6 butterfly effect (physics concept) 138-39, 160 Butterfly Effect, The 195, 241n.10 Cahiers du cinema (film magazine) 86 Camargo, Sandy 147-49 Cameron, Alan 7-8, 25, 150-55, 170, 195, 242n.2 Caracciolo, Marco 113 Carroll, Noël 10, 12-13, 23, 30, 75, 98, 112, 119, 199 Cartesian 14, 36-37, 81, 99, 105, 126, 194, 201, 232n.8; see also Descartes, René principles in cognitive science 36-38 substance dualism 36 causal 8, 11, 13, 15-17, 19, 28, 30-31, 38, 40, 51, 53-60, 70, 75, 81, 83, 91-92, 96-97, 103-05, 112, 114, 119, 123-24, 133-36, 138-45, 152-55, 162-68,

248  177, 186, 190, 192-93, 195-96, 200-01, 205, 207, 238n.10, 242n.15 causal-linear 8, 16-17, 19, 30-31, 40, 51, 57, 70, 75, 81, 91, 96-97, 103-04, 112, 123, 136, 138, 140, 145, 152, 155, 162-68, 177, 190, 192, 196, 200, 204-05, 207; see also chronology; linear structural multicausality 28, 163 Cavell, Stanley 212 Celeste, Reni 107 Chaos 241n.10 Chaos Theory 241n.10 chaos theory see complexity theory Chatman, Seymour 40, 68, 70, 114 Chion, Michel 169, 171, 173 Chomsky, Noam 33, 38 chronology 8, 40-41, 49, 51, 58, 78-79, 91, 99, 105-06, 112, 124, 129, 135, 142, 144-45, 153, 156, 175-78, 183, 191, 192-93, 196-97, 201, 208, 210, 233n.12, 239n.11; see also causal-linear; linear; temporality; time cinesthetic subject 244n.11 Clark, Andy 15, 34, 113, 125, 175, 232n.6, 238n.10 Clarke, Melissa 188-89, 242n.2, 243. 4 classical cinema 11, 13, 20-21, 27-28, 31, 41, 43, 50, 53-81, 83, 85-92, 95-97, 104, 112, 147, 160-63, 172, 194, 205, 207, 213, 229n.3, 233n.12, 234n.1, 240n.6 Hollywood see Hollywood narration 30, 57, 76, 87, 240n.6 narratology 11, 13, 15, 22, 26, 29, 46, 97, 13941, 150-52, 155, 188-90, 196, 205, 207-10 science 10-12, 14, 20, 25, 39-40, 53, 87, 114, 138-40, 143-44, 151-53, 163, 207, 213 cognition 9-17, 19-22, 25-26, 29-41, 46-50, 52, 5459, 61, 65-84, 87, 89-92, 95-101, 108-31, 133-35, 137, 142-50, 154, 156-58, 161, 163-67, 169-77, 180-213, 230n.9-10, 231n.11, 232n.6-10, 234n.2, 235n.4&9, 236n.3, 237n.4, 238n.5-6&8-10, 239n.1&16, 240n.5, 241n.11, 243n.2&10 appraisal theory 112, 130-31 cognitive-analytical 112, 147, 183, 200, 231n.11 cognitive-affective see affect cognitive-emotional see emotion cognitive-formalism 11-12, 16, 21, 38, 41, 52, 54-55, 71, 73, 76-77, 80-81, 87, 109, 112, 114, 117, 128, 137, 154, 166, 177, 180, 189, 193-94, 206, 210, 213, 232n.10, 238n.9 cognitive psychology 29, 235n.9 cognitivism 13-14, 20, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 58, 69-70, 75, 77-79, 87, 90, 97-99, 119, 120-21, 124-26, 145, 149, 177, 195, 234n.2, 237n.4, 240n.5 computational 14-15, 19, 30, 33-37, 48, 75, 91, 114, 117-25, 128, 142, 145-46, 149, 193, 208, 239n.1, 240n.5 connectionist 37

Cinema and Narr ative Complexit y

ecological 32, 70 embedded 115, 204 embodied 10, 14-15, 20-21, 36, 52, 91, 113-15, 121, 138, 206, 208, 239n.1, 241n.11 enactive 16, 20, 38, 113, 122 in film theory/science 13-15, 20, 25, 30-31, 40-41, 46, 52, 55-56, 79-80, 84, 87, 90-91, 98, 101, 112, 116-20, 124, 126, 146, 150, 158, 186, 197, 230n.10, 234n.2, 237n.4, 238n.6, 244n.10 conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) 243n.10 Connolly, William 128 contingency 26-27, 107, 150, 152, 154, 157, 159, 162, 242n.15 contingent universals 30, 80 continuity 26-29, 31, 51, 61, 77, 81, 86, 94, 100, 102, 104, 171-72, 206, 231n.3, 240n.8 editing 26-28, 61, 77, 86, 94, 206 intensified continuity 28 post-continuity 28-29, 171, 231n.3 constructivism 52, 180-86 complex narratives 7-8, 10-22, 25, 28, 42-43, 46, 4952, 54, 109, 111, 113, 121,124, 127-30, 136-37, 141-47, 156-63, 155, 170, 175, 180, 197-98, 206, 208, 211, 229n.1, 234n.18&1, 235n.5, 238-39n.11, 241n.9, 242n.14, 242-43n.2 systems 12, 123-24, 138-39, 239n.3, 11 complexity 7, 9-12, 16-18, 20, 22, 25, 29, 38-40, 45, 50-52, 54, 58, 137-46, 148-53, 155, 160-62, 170, 187, 191-93, 205-10, 241n.10; see also decomplexification generalized 12, 98 restricted 11-12, 39, 53 theory 10, 15, 20, 25, 52, 138-41, 150-52, 155, 160, 162, 170, 206-08, 241n.10 computational 14-15, 19, 30, 33-37, 48, 75, 91, 114, 117-25, 128, 142, 145-46, 149, 193, 208, 239n.1, 240n.5; see also cognition corporal 15-16, 115-16, 133-34, 204, 244n.11; see also affect; body; visceral crystal-image 230-31n.10 Culler, Jonathan 134-35 Currie, Gregory 62, 119 Damasio, Antonio 35-36, 113, 121, 125-26, 131, 200, 203, 209, 232n.8 Dark City 195 decomplexification 9, 12, 124, 142, 145, 206; see also complexity defamiliarization 18-22, 69-81, 193-209; see also ostranenie; refamiliarization Deleuze, Gilles 7, 12-14, 21, 29, 41-57, 61, 65-66, 69-74, 80, 83, 95-109, 123-28, 131-34, 156-58, 166-69, 175, 189-90, 196-97, 204, 211-12, 229n.3-4, 230n.9-10, 231n.12, 232n.8&10, 233n.12-15&17-18, 234n.1, 236n.4-6&8, 237n.3&9, 238n.9, 239n.12&15 Descartes, René 36, 232n.8; see also Cartesian

Index

determinism 11, 27, 140, 150-55 predetermined 67, 152-55, 197 dichotomy classical/modern 16-17, 25, 28, 87, 106, 160, 233n.12, 239n.17 cognition/affect 112 linear/non-linear 9, 13-19, 25, 28-29, 47-52, 87, 138, 155, 158, 166, 171, 174, 207 subject/object 39 disembodied 48-49, 113-14, 145, 173; see also embodiment disembodied eye 113 disengagement 38-40, 95 double disengagement 38-40 Doane, Mary Ann 26-28, 95, 140, 176, 191, 230n.8, 231n.1, 233n.14 documentary 18, 84-85, 93-95, 210-11, 231n.2, 235-36n.2 Duras, Marguerite 85-86, 93, 96, 207, durée (Bergsonian concept) 27, 84, 167-70 dynamic 10, 27, 37, 50, 59, 69, 102, 114-15, 124, 128, 130, 132, 137-38, 146-47, 171-72, 183-85, 196, 203, 206, 209, 213, 238n.10, 239n.1 dynamical system theory see ‘complexity theory’ Elliott, Paul 95, 100, 119, 125, 239n.12 Elsaesser, Thomas 7-8, 10, 56, 62, 120, 127, 16465, 179, 196-98, 203, 229n.1, 234n.1, 242n.2 embodiment 16, 37, 44, 113-16, 121, 125, 128, 164, 209; see also body; brain-body; cognition; disembodied; fabula; memory embodied cognition see cognition embodied fabula see fabula embodied simulation 122 emotion 9, 13, 15-19, 22, 26, 38-39, 47-49, 52, 73, 93, 96, 104, 112-35, 142, 145-50, 156-57, 169, 172, 186, 188, 193-94, 197-200, 204-13, 234n.19, 238n.4&9, 240n.5-7; see also affect; cognition cognitive appraisal theory of emotion see cognition cognitive-emotional 9, 131, 146, 149-50, 200 dissonances 127-28, 131, 147, 200 spectator responses 38, 49, 104, 108, 116-17, 119, 134-35, 147, 198-99, 204 encounter (as film-philosophical concept) 7, 17-18, 21, 40-41, 44, 49, 60, 74, 81, 83-109, 187, 190, 193-94, 204, 207-10, 229n.5, 232n.10, 238n.9, 242n.15 Engell, Lorenz 7, 13, 233n.13-14 epistemology 12, 14, 20, 29, 31, 40, 46, 51-53, 57, 77-79, 84, 86-88, 90-92, 95, 97, 108, 136-37, 167, 169, 172, 175, 179, 180-89, 196, 198, 206-07, 234n.2, 235n.6 constructivist epistemology 20, 56, 69, 92, 164, 175, 180-84, 188-92, 201, 243n.9 onto-epistemological 20, 29, 31, 40, 46, 51, 53, 57, 79, 84, 87,92, 97, 136-37, 169, 189,

249 198, 206-07, 234n.2, 235n.6; see also linear onto-epistemology realist epistemology 14, 80, 116, 175, 188-92 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 7, 195 Euclidean 28, 212-13; see also spatio-temporal; temporality; time non-Euclidean 28, 45 evolution 44-45, 69-70, 76, 98, 116, 209, 233n.12, 238n.9, 239n.1 as scientific approach: 98, 116, 209, 238n.9 extended mind (thesis) 175 fabula 10-11, 15-22, 25, 29-30, 37-41, 46, 51, 55, 57, 59, 61-64, 67-70, 74-75, 83-85, 88, 90, 92, 94, 97-101, 105-06, 110, 112-57, 173, 177-213, 230n.5, 231n.11-12&10, 238n.9, 244n.10-11; see also syuzhet analytical fabula 16-17, 20, 119, 128, 154, 156, 181, 190-93, 201-04, 210-12 embodied fabula 10, 16-22, 110-28, 155, 173, 175-77, 181, 188-94, 197, 200-06, 209-13, 230n.5, 231n.11-12, 232n.10, 244n.10 feedback loops 16, 22, 31, 49, 124, 127, 138, 173, 186-87, 200-09, 238n.10 flashback 19, 30, 54-55, 58-70, 79, 84, 100-06, 149, 194, 201, 234n.1, 236n.7 lying flashback 54-55, 58-70 as psychoanalytical concept 100-06 Flashforward 229n.2 flashforward 8, 160, 163, 173 Flaxman, Gregory 36, 57, 189 Fodor, Jerry 33, 232n.9, 241n.11 formalism 11-12, 16, 21, 29, 38, 41, 52, 54-55, 71-73, 76-77, 80-81, 87, 109, 112, 114, 117, 128, 137, 154, 166, 177, 180, 189, 193-94, 206, 210, 213, 232n.10, 235n.9, 238n.9 cognitive formalism see cognitive neoformalism 71-73, 76, 235n.9 Russian formalism 29, 71, 235n.9 Fight Club 7, 111 film-philosophy 10, 13-14, 17-21, 25, 41-46, 50, 52, 70-74, 83-84, 96, 98-99, 105, 109-10, 113, 125-26, 158, 166-69, 188-94, 201, 206-12, 233n.12, 234n.18, 238n.9, 242n.2 Frampton, Daniel 79, 120-121, 237n.4 Gallagher, Shaun 91, 113, 115 Gallese, Vittorio 113, 121-122, 209, 238n.7 Garden of the Forking Paths, The 157 Gardner, Howard 32-37, 119, 232n.9 Ghislotti, Stefano 175, 177, 180, 195, 200, 243n.2 Gillespie, Michael 46, 54-55, 58, 66 Glasersfeld, Ernst von 180, 184 grand theory 78 Gravity 18, 210-13 Grodal, Torben 13, 113, 116, 119, 125, 234n.2, 238n.9

250  Groundhog Day 157 Gunning, Tom 76-77, 231n.1, 233n.16 hardwired 35, 38, 116, 209, 238n.9 haptic 15-16, 112, 211 Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) 211 Hayles, Kathrine 138, 163, 197 Hiroshima mon amour 19-21, 83-86, 92-109, 159-60, 207, 235n.1 Hitchcock, Alfred 17-18, 20, 43, 45, 54, 58-63, 67-68, 132-34, 147, 207, 233n.14, 234n.1, 235n.4 Hogan, Patrick Colm 114, 116 Hollywood 7-8, 14, 27-28, 30-31, 42, 45, 53-58, 65, 77-78, 87, 89, 140, 158, 168, 194, 206, 229n.1&3, 231n.1, 234n.2, 240n.7; see also classical cinema classical Hollywood 7, 27, 30-31, 45, 53-56, 140, 158, 168, 174, 229n.3, 234n.2 hodological space 133-34, 239n.17 prehodological space 133-34, 239n.17 Hurley, Susan 22, 117, 121 hybrid films 7, 50, 166 Iñárritu, Alejandro Gonzales 7, 22, 137, 141, 148, 156 Inception 7, 195, 232n.5 information-processing 13, 37, 74, 115, 120, 123-24, 145; see also cognition Ingold, Tim 38-39 Intolerance 241n.9 Irréversible 51 irreversible time 27, 51, 139-40, 151-55, 164, 170, 231n.2; see also arrow of time reversible time 139-40, 151-55, 164, 170, 190 It’s a Wonderful Life 162 Johnson, Mark 113, 116, 243n.10 Jullier, Laurent 69-70 Kantian 83 Keating, Patrick 55, 147, 240n.7 Kessler, Frank 69, 77, 87, 89 Kinder, Marsha 25 Kiss, Miklós 79 Klein, Andy 176-77, 181, 191 Kovács, András Bálint 7, 27, 42, 45-46, 84, 86, 165, 206, 233n.12 La guerre est finie (The War is Over) 87, 90-92 Lakoff, George 113, 116, 243n.10 L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) 85, 167 Laplace, Pierre Simon 11, 153, 230n.7 L’avventura 86 Lazarus, Richard 112 Lefebvre, Henri 170-74 Leihkörper see surrogate body

Cinema and Narr ative Complexit y

Leviathan 18, 205, 210-13 Lewin, Kurt 132 Leys, Ruth 47-48, 109, 112, 207 linear 7-31, 40-58, 61-62, 65-71, 75-84, 87, 90-92, 96-110, 112. 114, 119, 123-31, 135-75, 177, 179, 181, 183, 186, 189-213, 230n.10, 231n.12, 233n.16&17, 234n.2, 235n.6, 238n.11, 240n.5&7, 242n.16; see also causal-linear; chronology; non-linear; temporality; time interpretative methods 20, 54, 62, 66, 91, 98, 155, 167, 179, 186 linear-nonlinear dichotomy see dichotomy onto-epistemology 29, 31, 40, 46, 52-53, 79, 92, 97, 137, 169, 189, 198, 207, 234n.2, 235n.6; see also epistemology paradigm of thought 84 reasoning 54, 56-57, 66-67, 81, 194, 235n.6 Lola rennt (Run, Lola Run) 7, 19, 22, 137, 157-74, 207, 209, 238n.11, 241n.10 Lorenz, Edward 138-39 Lost Highway 78-79, 126-27, 239n.11&13 Marks, Laura 15-16, 113, 189, 211, 234n.18 Martin-Jones, David 7, 50, 158, 166-73, 242n.15-16 Massumi, Brian 47-52, 123, 156, 197, 200, 207, 209, 229n.4, 234n.19 Matrix, The 175 McLuhan, Marshall 174 Memento 7, 19, 22, 124, 175-204, 207, 209, 236n.3, 239n.11, 242n.2, 243n.5,8&10 memory 7, 21, 38, 40, 44, 80, 84-86, 90, 93, 96-109, 118, 127-31, 177-83, 191, 195-201, 236n.7, 237n.9; see also recollection Bergson’s theory of memory 44, 99, 101-04, 195, 237n.9 container theory of memory 195-96 embodied theory of memory 195-201; see also embodiment narrative memory 108 Proustian memory 127 ‘pure’ memory 44, 195, 237n.9 mental 8, 13-20, 25, 32-33, 38, 54, 57, 66, 71, 73-74, 78, 81, 83-84, 90, 99, 104-06, 108, 111-12, 118-19, 122, 127, 141, 177, 179, 180-81, 185-86, 195-96, 200, 204, 209, 243n.7 mental operation 112, 118 mental representation 13, 16, 25, 32, 81, 118, 127, 180; see also representation mental schema 108, 180, 195 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 198, 232n.8 mind 12-15, 17, 32-36, 41, 47-51, 57-59, 63, 66, 91, 99, 109, 111-17, 120, 122, 125-27, 130-32, 137, 141, 149, 181-85, 192, 199-200, 203, 205, 209, 234n.3, 237n.1, 238n.6, 241n.11-12 closed state of mind (closed-minded) 57-58, 65-68, 119, 139, 151, 154, 185-86, 199 computational model of mind 48, 114, 125, 149

Index

extended mind thesis see extended mind mind-game films 7-8, 127, 198, 242n.2 mind-reading theories 122-23 mirror neuron 121-22, 125, 131, 238n.7-9 modern(ist) 8, 10, 19, 21, 25-28, 42-45, 54, 80-81, 83-109, 127, 147, 159-60, 167-68, 180, 197, 229n.3, 230n.10, 236n.2, 239n.17; see also art-cinema modularity 117, 130, 151, 241n.11 modular narratives see narrative movement-image 8, 13, 21, 29, 42-44, 50-52, 54, 56, 72, 83, 99, 104, 111, 158, 166-67, 188-90, 205, 230n.10, 232n.11, 233n.13-14, 234n.1, 236n.4-5, 239n.17, 240n.8 Möbius strip 126-28, 132, 204, 209 Mulhall, Stephen 10 Mullarkey, John 10, 13, 43-44, 80, 120, 167-68, 230n.9 music 19, 48, 169, 171-73, 199, 242n.17; see also sound; techno music Nadel, Alan 29, 31, 41, 80, 232n.5 narrative 7-23, 25-81, 84-213, 242-43n.2, 229n.1, 230n.6, 231n.1&11, 233-34n.18, 234n.1-2, 237n.2, 237-38n.4, 238n.9&11, 240n.5-7, 241n.9, 242n.14&16, 242-43n.2. complex narratives see complex forking path narratives 7, 22, 137, 157-58, 161-69, 172, 230n.6, 242n.13 modular narratives 7-8, 150-51, 155, 241n.11 mosaic narratives 22, 137, 141-42, 147-49, 154, 241n.9 narrative complexity 9-10, 22, 39, 58, 142-45, 208 network narratives 140-41, 241n.9 narratology 22, 26, 46, 55, 97, 116, 139-41, 150-55, 167 affective narratology 116 classical narratology see classical cognitive-formalist narratology 41, 55 database narratology 153 narration 8, 11, 16-17, 29, 30, 38-41, 46-47, 57, 61-63, 68, 70, 76, 80, 84, 87-92, 97, 104-08, 114, 118, 128, 130, 137, 143-45, 151, 157, 160, 168-69, 175, 179, 181, 191-93, 197, 203, 206, 212, 229n.2-3, 233n.17, 234n.1&18, 235n.5, 240n.6, 242n.2 art-cinema narration see art-cinema classical narration 30, 57, 76, 87, 240n.6 contemporary narration 137 dysnarration 105-06, 130, 233n.17 falsifying narration 105 unreliable narration 63, 68-69, 88, 105, 178, 181, 234n.1, 240n.6 naturalizing 29, 41, 54, 70, 77 denaturalizing 28, 59, 62, 65, 69-70, 77, 81 neurobiology 114, 116, 131, 238n.9; see also affective neuroscience; brain; neuroscience neuro-image 7-8, 21, 111, 113, 209

251 neuroscience 10, 15, 21, 33-35, 52, 91, 110, 113-14, 116, 125, 130, 207, 209, 236n.3; see also affective neuroscience; brain; neurobiology Newtonian 81, 88, 138, 150 Noë, Alva 15, 113, 121, 232n.8, 238n.6 Nolan, Christopher 7, 22, 175, 183, 191-95 non-linear 7-9, 12-16, 19-22, 25-27, 29, 41-52, 54-55, 61, 66-67, 79-84, 87, 91, 96-101, 104-06, 109-10, 124, 127, 129, 135, 137-44, 149-74, 189-92, 205-09, 231n.12, 233n.16, 235n.6, 238n.10, 240n.6; see also linear linear-non-linear dichotomy see dichotomy non-linear dynamics see complexity theory non-linear temporality 8, 150-51; see also temporality Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) 85 Oever, Anna van den 235n.8 onto-epistemological see epistemology optional thinking 57-58, 65-66, 153-54 ostranenie 69, 71, 235n.8; see also defamiliarization; refamiliarization Passion Fish 143-44 perception 7 ,9, 16-19, 22, 26-32, 37-38, 44, 54-56, 61, 68-74, 77, 79-81, 95, 100-04, 115, 117, 119-24, 128, 140, 156, 167, 169, 175-77, 180, 182, 191, 193, 196-204, 208-13, 230n.10, 234n.2, 236n.6, 237n.7, 238n.6, 241n.11, 243n.10 classical sandwich of perception 22, 35, 117, 121-28, 150 embodied perception 7, 38, 149, 198 linear cinematic perception 17, 55, 68, 70-71, 79, 81, 119, 128, 156, 175, 193-94, 197, 200-01, 210-11, 234n.2 ‘natural’ perception 27-28, 72, 77 ‘pure’ perception (Bergsonian concept) 44, 237n.9 snapshot logic of perception 140, 163 phenomenology 15, 69, 110, 113, 189 Pierrot le fou 79 Pisters, Patricia 7-8, 13, 17, 19, 21, 44, 83, 99, 11, 113, 125, 148, 192, 205, 207-08, 241n.9 Plantinga, Carl 9, 13, 31, 112,119, 128, 130, 146 post-mortem film 164, 196, 242n.2 post-theory 13, 175 Poulaki, Maria 8-9, 139-41, 180, 239n.11 Powell, Anna 12, 47, 49, 156, 189, 233n.18 problem/solution model 74-75, 90, 92, 97, 181, 213; see also question/answer model Protevi, John 19, 21, 123-26, 192, 208, 232n.8 Psycho 132-34, 239n.17 psychoanalysis 30, 107, 131 Pulp Fiction 7, 129 puzzle 7, 8, 11, 60, 75,78-79, 89-90, 118, 146, 186, 188, 191, 204, 235n.4, 240n.6 puzzle films 7, 8, 11, 240n.6 puzzle solving 146, 186

252  question/answer model 75, 181; see also problem/solution model Rancière, Jacques 43-44, 109, 190 Rashômon 67, 175 Rear Window 43, 235n.4 recollection 101-07, 151, 194-95, 236-37n.8, 237n.10; see also memory Redfern, Nick 92, 184-87, 243n.9 refamiliarization 21, 79, 194; see also defamilizariation; ostranenie relation-image 233n.14, 234n.1 Renner, Karen 198-99, 243n.2 Requiem for a Dream 111, 124 representation 13-16, 20, 25, 30-33, 37-39, 44, 48, 54, 73, 81, 83-91, 94-99, 104-08, 111, 114-15, 117-18, 120-28, 135, 145, 154, 160, 167-69, 177, 180-81, 187, 203, 206, 208-10, 230n.10, 232n.5, 236n.2&7, 238n.9; see also mental representation anti-representational 14, 84, 106 non-representational 14-15, 91, 96, 115, 238n.9 Resnais, Alain 17-19, 83-87, 91-99, 102, 105, 159, 167, 207, 235n.1 reversible see irreversible time rhythm 111, 120, 159, 166, 169-75, 197, 204, 209, 242n.17 rhythmanalysis 170-71, 174 Ricœur, Paul 151 Rodowick, David Norman 12, 17, 23, 27, 42, 44, 50, 54, 167 Ropars, Marie-Claire 103 Rushton, Richard 99 Russian Ark 231n.2 screen 16, 21, 94, 99-100, 106, 113, 119, 123, 125, 131, 145, 168, 173, 176, 188 brain as screen see brain off-screen 94, 106 screen culture 21, 113, 131 split screen 159, 168, 173, 242n.14 Searle, John 112 sensory-motor (also: sensorimotor) 13, 29, 35,38, 43, 46, 53, 56-57, 72, 83, 91, 98-101, 104-05, 108-09, 115, 122, 124, 133-35, 147, 194, 197, 240n.8 sensory-motor capacities 13, 115 sensory-motor contingencies 91, 115 sensory-motor linkages 13, 29, 72, 83, 99-100, 109, 133-35, 147, 240n.8 sensory-motor schema 57, 101, 104, 108 sensory-motor system 43, 46, 56, 104-05, 108, 194, 197 sensuous 112, 120, 126 Shapiro, Lawrence 15, 113-14 Shaviro, Steven 8, 15, 17, 28-29, 50, 81, 113, 156, 163, 169-71, 204, 207, 231n.12&3 sheets of the past 101-03, 106-07

Cinema and Narr ative Complexit y

Short Cuts 241n.9 Simons, Jan 7-8, 11, 62, 137, 150, 153-56, 183, 242n.2 Sinnerbrink, Robert 75, 120-21, 146, 175-77, 186, 189 Sixth Sense, The 129 Sliding Doors 162, 166 Smith, Greg 13, 112, 119, 146, 199 Smith, Murray 13, 15, 112, 119, 122, 129-32, 146-50, 198, 234n.2 Snatch 237n.2 Sobchack, Vivian Carol 15-16, 113, 189, 244n.11 sound 86, 158, 170-74, 209, 231n.11; see also music; techno music soundtrack 171-73 spatio-temporal 7, 20, 31, 45, 173, 201-02, 208, 212-13; see also Euclidean; temporality; time Stage Fright 18, 20, 54-55, 58-81, 105, 194, 201, 207, 234n.1, 235n.7, 236n.7 suppressed gaps 143 surrogate body 244n.11 synchresis 173-74 syuzhet 9, 11, 22 ,29-31, 38, 40, 79, 88-89, 105, 124, 135, 140, 142-46, 152; see also fabula Tan, Ed 13, 119-20, 130 techno 49, 158, 171-74, 197 music 158, 171-74; see also music; sound techno-cinematic event 49, 197 temporality 7-8, 10, 12, 15, 20, 25-27, 29-31, 37, 40-41, 45, 50-51, 55, 61, 81, 83-86, 99-104, 107, 111, 114, 127, 134, 138-40, 142, 144-45, 151-53, 155, 159, 163, 167-75, 189-93, 195, 200-06, 208-10, 212-13; see also Euclidean; spatio-temporal; time Thirteen Conversations about One Thing 239n.11, 241n.10 Thompson, Evan 15, 111, 114-15, 232n.8-9 Thompson, Kristin 12, 53, 59, 62-76, 202, 229n.1, 235n.7, 9 time 7-8, 13-14, 21, 26-29, 31-37, 42-43, 45, 50-63, 67, 69, 72, 74-75, 81, 83, 86, 94, 98, 100-06, 109, 111, 114, 121, 126, 128, 132, 138-42, 148, 150-53, 157-76, 181-201, 205, 212, 229-30n.3,230-31n.10, 231n.2, 233n.12-14 & 17, 234n.1, 236n.4&7, 238n.10, 241n.9&13 see also chronology; Euclidean; linear; spatio-temporal, temporality Borgesian labyrinth of time 83, 158, 161-62, 168 clock time 170-73 in-between time 83, 103, 159 Timecode 242n.14 time-image 8, 13, 21, 26, 28-29, 43-45, 50-52, 57, 72, 83, 98, 102, 104-05, 109, 111, 128, 158, 16667, 188-90, 194, 197, 205, 229n.3, 230n.9-10, 232n.11, 233n.13-14, 234n.1, 236n.4, 239n.17, 240n.8, 243n.7 trauma 7, 93-94, 96, 102, 106-09, 129, 196

253

Index

Tröhler, Margit 148, 241n.9 Truffaut, François 58-59 Unanswered Question, The 171 unreliable narration see narration Varela, Francisco Javier 15, 36, 111, 114-15, 232n.9 virtual 19, 21, 27, 47, 49, 51, 67, 83, 95, 109, 117, 123, 126, 153-57, 160, 162, 170-71, 188, 190, 195, 207, 213, 236n.8, 237n.3 virtual history 155-56 virtual narrative pathways 49, 83, 154-56, 162

visceral 49, 112, 117, 128-29, 189, 204; see also affect; body; corporal Voss, Christiane 244n.11 Wedel, Michael 159, 163, 170-74 What a Difference a Day Makes 171 Wheeler, Michael 15, 32-37, 113-4, 121, 232n.7-10, 238n.10, 239n.1 White, Hayden 107 Yacavone, Daniel 120-21, 207 Žižek, Slavoj 169



Film Culture in Transition General Editor: Thomas Elsaesser

Thomas Elsaesser, Robert Kievit and Jan Simons (eds.) Double Trouble: Chiem van Houweninge on Writing and Filming, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 025 9 Thomas Elsaesser, Jan Simons and Lucette Bronk (eds.) Writing for the Medium: Television in Transition, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 054 9 Karel Dibbets and Bert Hogenkamp (eds.) Film and the First World War, 1994 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 064 8 Warren Buckland (ed.) The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, 1995 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 131 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 170 6 Egil Törnqvist Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 137 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 171 3 Thomas Elsaesser (ed.) A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 172 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 183 6 Thomas Elsaesser Fassbinder’s Germany: History Identity Subject, 1996 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 059 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 184 3 Thomas Elsaesser and Kay Hoffmann (eds.) Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, 1998 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 282 6; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 312 0 Siegfried Zielinski Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’Actes in History, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 313 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 303 8

Kees Bakker (ed.) Joris Ivens and the Documentary Context, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 389 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 425 7 Egil Törnqvist Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation, 1999 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 350 2; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 371 7 Michael Temple and James S. Williams (eds.) The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard 1985-2000, 2000 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 455 4; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 456 1 Patricia Pisters and Catherine M. Lord (eds.) Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, 2001 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 472 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 473 8 William van der Heide Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cultures, 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 519 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 580 3 Bernadette Kester Film Front Weimar: Representations of the First World War in German Films of the Weimar Period (1919-1933), 2002 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 597 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 598 8 Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (eds.) Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 494 3 Ivo Blom Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 463 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 570 4 Alastair Phillips City of Darkness, City of Light: Émigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939, 2003 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 634 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 633 6

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Malte Hagener Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 960 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 961 0 Tim Bergfelder, Sue Harris and Sarah Street Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 984 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 980 1 Jan Simons Playing the Waves: Lars von Trier’s Game Cinema, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 991 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 979 5 Marijke de Valck Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia, 2007 isbn paperback 978 90 5356 192 8; isbn hardcover 978 90 5356 216 1 Asbjørn Grønstad Transfigurations: Violence, Death, and Masculinity in American Cinema, 2008 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 010 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 030 7 Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.) Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, 2009 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 013 0; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 012 3 François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cinema beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 083 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 084 0 Pasi Väliaho Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900, 2010 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 140 3; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 141 0 Pietsie Feenstra New Mythological Figures in Spanish Cinema: Dissident Bodies under Franco, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 304 9; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 303 2

Eivind Røssaak (ed.) Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 212 7; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 213 4 Tara Forrest Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, 2011 isbn paperback 978 90 8964 272 1; isbn hardcover 978 90 8964 273 8 Belén Vidal Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 282 0 Bo Florin Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood 1923-1930, 2012 isbn 978 90 8964 504 3 Erika Balsom Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 471 8 Gilles Mouëllic Improvising Cinema, 2013 isbn 978 90 8964 4551 7 Christian Jungen Hollywood in Canne$: The History of a Love-Hate Relationship, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 566 1 Michael Cowan Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde Film ‒ Advertising ‒ Modernity, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 585 2 Temenuga Trifonova Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 632 3 Christine N. Brinckmann Color and Empathy: Essays on Two Aspects of Film, 2014 isbn 978 90 8964 656 9

François Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.) Cine-Dispositives: Essays in Epistemology Across Media, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 666 8 Volker Pantenburg Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 891 4 Paul Cuff A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance’s Napoléon, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 734 4 Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann (eds.) Melodrama After the Tears: New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood, 2015 isbn 978 90 8964 673 6 Steve Choe Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 638 5 Melis Behlil Hollywood is Everywhere: Global Directors in the Blockbuster Era, 2016 isbn 978 90 8964 739 9 Thomas Elsaesser Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema, 2016 isbn 978 94 6298 057 0 Michael Walker Modern Ghost Melodramas: ‘What Lies Beneath’, 2017 isbn 978 94 6298 016 7