The Cinema of Converging Lives: Complex Films and Intersecting Stories in an Isolated World

What happens when strangers meet in film? The Cinema of Converging Lives explores a group of films within an important category of complex film, a genre that critics have hailed as proliferating worldwide in the 1980s and 1990s and continuing today. Lucy Fischer examines a recurring trope within this category which portrays disparate characters, mostly unacquainted and introduced separately, who eventually and often unexpectedly cross paths.
The book focuses on underlying causes in each movie that drive the intersection of characters forward. It looks to 23 films by a diverse and international group of directors to consider how chance, coincidence, accident, history, geography, and the supernatural, as well as formal structures like metafiction and the circulation of possessions, drive these narratives. The book also highlights the irony of our clear interest in stories of converging lives on screen in an age of increasing isolation and loneliness. Finally, it offers a new look at complex film as a genre, including a discussion of the wide variety of plot patterns beyond those defined in this book. Providing in-depth case studies of this vital form of contemporary movie, a new conceptual approach to the investigation of the complex film, a summary of prior academic work on the topic, and important socio-cultural insight into the opposing notions of convergence and isolation, The Cinema of Converging Lives will appeal to students and experienced film scholars alike.

Lucy Fischer is a Distinguished Professor, Emerita, of Film and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of fifteen books, including Cinema by Design: Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Film History (2017), Cinemagritte: René Magritte Within the Frame of Film History, Theory and Practice (2019), Emotion Pictures: Cinema and Feelings (2023), and Recollecting Collecting: Film and Media Perspectives (2023).