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