Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula

Since the mid-1990s, a number of films from international filmmakers have experimented with increasingly complicated narrative strategies-including such hits as Run, Lola, Run, 21 Grams, and Memento. This book sets those films and others in context with earlier works that tried new narrative approaches, including Stage Fright and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, to show how they reveal the limitations of most of our usual tools for analysing film. In light of that, Steffen Hven argues for the deployment of an ’embodied’ reconfiguration of the cinematic experience, one that allows us to rethink such core constituents of narrative understanding as cognition, emotion, and affect.This book considers films that have experimented with new, increasingly complicated narrative approaches, including Stage Fright and Hiroshima, Mon Amour, to show how they reveal the limitations of most of our usual tools for analysing film.

Steffen Hven is a post-doc at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He has published frequently in the journal 16:9 and has presented papers at numerous international conferences. His research interests include film-philosophy, cognitive film science, ’complex narratives’, ’embodied cognition’, and (affective) neuroscience.