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, among 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 analyzing 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.