Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema

Abstract

Chapter 2 focuses on a cognitive approach as a pertinent method to address complex narratives’ ‘difficult’ viewing experiences. As it argues, complexity does not only lie in a story’s formal composition itself, but is best understood in terms of how the narrative hinders viewers’ comprehension and meaning-making routines. Noticing that some films pose more conspicuous impediments to sense-making efforts than others, this chapter differentiates movies in regard to their relative complexity in cognitive terms – that is, their ability to cause various states of cognitive puzzlement and trigger diverse mental responses in their viewers. The cognitive approach will lead to reconsider the classificatory accuracy of existing concepts, such as the umbrella term of puzzle film. From there on, the chapter proposes more refined categories within the overarching division of narrative complexity, aiming to discern between different types of film that offer various degrees of complexity.

Interpretation

“…and that the first generation of cognitive approaches focused too much on universalizing knowledge about the mechanisms of textual processing. Moreover, there is obviously much potential for collaborative exchange, for example in detailed exploration of the specific interpretive processes activated by distinctly unnatural narratives (which is already happening, from both the unnatural and cognitive directions; e.g., Alber 2016;Caracciolo 2016b;and Kiss & Willemsen 2017).…”

Last Year at Mulholland Drive: Ambiguous Framings and Framing Ambiguities

“…Effects of complexity -that is, a sense of temporary or permanent cognitive confusion regarding comprehension and meaning making -can be achieved through various formal-structural manipulations across most key parameters of film narration (see also Kiss and Willemsen 2017). Looking at the popular complex films that emerged from the mid-1990s onwards, one can observe experimentations in time (e.g., non-chronological arrangements of events, reversed or inversed telling, multiple timelines, spatiotemporal fragmentation), in narration (e.g., notable information gaps or overloads, incongruities, ambiguities), in focalization (e.g., unreliability, internal focalization, hidden focalization shifts and unmarked subjective realism), in character continuity (e.g., split personalities, duplications, Doppelgängers) or in complex spaces and storyworlds (e.g., multiple, multi-dimensional or parallel universes, impossible storyworlds, ontological metalepses).…”

“…After all, viewers do not just respond to textual cues -such as style or narration -when making sense of a complex narrative, but also work with contextual, paratextual and intertextual inferences -such as knowledge about a film's context of production, its relation to other films, genres and film-historical traditions, or earlier meaning-making that they found successful with comparable films -in order to choose pertinent interpretive pathways. We propose that the experience of narrative complexity emerges from this contextually situated, dynamic interaction between spectators and a work of narrative art (see also Kiss and Willemsen 2017).…”

Contingency, causality, complexity: distributed agency in the mind-game film

“…In 'Philip K. Dick, the Mind-Game Film, and Retroactive Causality' (Elsaesser 2014a), I discuss Minority Report's affinity with mind-game films more broadly, and I extend the scope of typical features beyond the narrative's convoluted, mutually imbricated forms of agency. And while Spielberg's film may not be the most typical example, Minority Report can stand, with respect to agency, for several of the films which, over the past two decades, have come under intense scrutiny by critics and scholars (see Berg 2006;Bordwell 2002;Branigan 2002;Buckland 2009Buckland , 2014Cameron 2008;Campora 2009;Eckel et al 2013;Hven 2017;Kiss and Willemsen 2016;Panek 2006;Schmerheim 2015;Simons 2008;Wilson 2006). These films have given rise to very different definitions, points of interest and explanations, along with a bewildering variety of names and headings.…”