Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, st... more Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream—but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.
Our (co-written with Thomas van den Berg) media rich, open access Scalar e-book on the ... more Our (co-written with Thomas van den Berg) media rich, open access Scalar e-book on the Audiovisual Essay practice is available online: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-studies-in-motion
Audiovisual essaying should be more than an appropriation of traditional video artistry, or a mere audiovisually upgraded extension of our analytical practice. What we expect from it is a form of expression that is autonomous and self-sufficient, that would both maintain and refine traditional academic values, and ultimately could lead to a ‘true’ audiovisual turn in communicative discourse by as well as about films.
The leading question for this book is ‘How can the traits and rhetoric of a traditionally text-based scholarly work, characterized by academic lucidity and traceability of information and argumentation, be optimally incorporated and streamlined into an autonomous, audiovisual container?’
Using a cognitive film studies framework, this book explores how our minds engage with complex st... more Using a cognitive film studies framework, this book explores how our minds engage with complex storytelling
Narrative complexity is a trend in contemporary cinema. Since the late 1990s there has been a palpable increase in complex storytelling in movies. But how and why do complex movies create perplexity and confusion? How do we engage with these challenges? And what makes complex stories so attractive? By blending film studies, narrative theory and cognitive sciences, Kiss and Willemsen look into the relation between complex storytelling and the mind. Analysing the effects that different complex narratives have on viewers, the book addresses how films like Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive or Primer strategically create complexity and confusion, and, by using the specific category of the ‘impossible puzzle film’, it examines movies that use baffling paradoxes, impossible loops, and unresolved ambiguities in their stories and storytelling. By looking at how these films play on our mind’s blind spots, this innovative book explains their viewing effects in terms of the mental state of cognitive dissonance that they evoke.
Key Features:
* Analyses the effects of complex narratives on viewers, including the psychological experience of puzzlement and perplexity
* Explores impossible puzzle films as a specific set of highly complex popular films
* Introduces cognitive dissonance as a key feature of these films
* Brings together literary theory, cognitive narratology and film studies
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar & Barend van Heusden (eds.) Narrative Values, the Value of Narrative. De Gruyter’s Narratologica Series. 93-116, 2024
Frame theory provides a useful conceptual tool to get a grip on viewers’ interpretive operations.... more Frame theory provides a useful conceptual tool to get a grip on viewers’ interpretive operations. Frames are ‘cognitive shortcuts’ that help to set expectations, steer attention, recognize patterns, detect novelties, determine salience, evaluate available information and choose further actions. Framing then refers to the activity of selecting the clusters of knowledge and interpretive stances deemed the most appropriate in response to a given situation. Certain textual, audio, and audiovisual narratives resist the routines of framing, or better, they don’t allow for routinely settling on a single frame. Providing challenges that test and play on readers’, listeners’, or viewers’ reliance on their available knowledge clusters, they problematize, perpetuate or even foreground these basic processes. The present contribution will theorize the use and values of frame switching across media, building on the analysis of three different case studies: complexity in film, ambiguous irony in music, and dark humor in literature and cartoons.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies , 2024
Historically 3D effect in film has been used as a relatively superficial aesthetic attraction. He... more Historically 3D effect in film has been used as a relatively superficial aesthetic attraction. Here we consider and test the idea that 3D can be used to guide viewer attention and narrative interpretation in film. The current study used self-report measures in conjunction with eye-tracking technology to record attention, memory and narrative interpretation of 32 participants (25 female). Eye-gaze behaviour was recorded while half of the participants were randomly assigned to watch Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet (2011) in 3D and the other half watched the same film in 2D. We concentrated on a particular moment where the use of 3D technology brings some aspects of the image to the forefront, such as a prop that might have narrative significance for the story as it unfolds. We were unable to confirm that 3D effect in Gondry’s film is effectively used to direct viewers’ visual attention towards narratively relevant information. Also, we found no evidence that the 3D version of Gondry’s film contributes to better memory or narrative interpretation of this particular scene. In discussing our findings, beyond the technical conditions of our eye-tracking research, we consider the role of film genre, narrative mode, viewers’ expectations and media literacy in shaping such visual attention and narrative interpretation.
Paul Taberham & Catalina Iricinschi (eds.) Introduction to Screen Narratives: Perspectives on Story Production and Comprehension. London – New York: Routledge, 71-91., 2024
Documentary filmmakers are gradually embracing immersive media to create novel Virtual Reality No... more Documentary filmmakers are gradually embracing immersive media to create novel Virtual Reality Nonfiction (VRNF) content. Over the past twenty years initial experimentation in this new medium has brought forward numerous linearly structured 360° documentaries that maintain a close link to traditional documentary modes. More recently, we have observed a shift from the relatively passive 360° cinema towards more open-world, non-linear, game-like interactive experiences that challenge traditional definitions of the documentary genre. Volumetric world-building techniques provide nonfiction creators with additional tools that afford ‘viewer-users’ spatial and interactive agency, leading to a heightened autopoietic realisation of the storyworld. VRNF creators have the potential to allow their viewer-users enhanced control over framing, temporal ordering of the plot and spatial unfolding of the diegetic world, thus inviting them to become actual co-creators of a deeply personal and personalized experience. This article addresses how VRNF may go beyond the mere ‘documentation’ of people, places or past events that existed in a pre-filmic reality and provide viewer-users through augmented agency a unique present-tense autopoietic experience that pushes the boundaries of traditional 2D documentary.
This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation in the creative space of science... more This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation in the creative space of science fiction film, concerning its uncanny, new and fantastic places, and otherworldly encounters within fictional, but possible worlds. The aim is to consider the function and potential of the audible-to examine how sound is used in the filmic exploration of the boundaries between the human and the alien (the unknown). More particularly, we are interested in the role that human voice-like and human vocal sounds can play in this divide, as we believe manipulations with such audible qualities contribute greatly to the emotional dimension of cinematic stories of otherworldly encounters. For that purpose, we concentrate on Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016) and its soundtrack composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who resorts to different singing practices and vocal techniques to accompany a story charting the territories between the human and the alien.
"Miklós Kiss studies desktop documentaries and emphasises their singular potential to convey an a... more "Miklós Kiss studies desktop documentaries and emphasises their singular potential to convey an argument by simulating the maker’s process of exploring and tinkering in insightful ways. The piece makes an important contribution to the study of a relatively new audiovisual form and its particular affordances for persuasion." (NECSUS journal)
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of desktop documentaries is their affordance of making and presenting a video at the same time: i.e., collapsing boundaries between revealing their thinking and tinkering research process (as unfolding, step-by-step, in front of our eyes) and the presentation of the outcomes of such ‘t(h)inkering’ (arriving at results and, thereby, justifying the presented research methods). They are ‘exploratory’ and ‘explanatorily argumentative’ in one. There is a particular effect that emerges from such transparent, credible, and effortless performativity – a relaxed and seemingly spontaneous presentation of an unfolding argument in an environment (software on desktop) and through methods (typing, dragging, opening files) that is familiar and rather natural to all viewers. In this paper, I aim to take a closer look at these fundamental qualities – ‘transparency’, ‘credibility’, ‘effortlessness’, and ‘performativity’ – respectively, and reveal their distinct as well as joint effects, ultimately resulting in what I will call, ‘artist(ic) emotions’.
Since the advent of consumer-friendly digital technologies-friendly in terms of their computation... more Since the advent of consumer-friendly digital technologies-friendly in terms of their computational power, operational ease and pricing-tinkering with the digital materiality of audiovisual media as part of its study has become a widely embraced research exercise. There is currently no doubt about videographic criticism's contribution to the study of audiovisual arts as a novel and useful method, but answering the question "how to legitimize videographic criticism as a valid means of scholarly communication" has remained somewhat challenging (hence the present issue of The Cine-Files and its dedication to this very question). Academic recognition and validation of an "ontologically new" approach to scholarly work is usually a slow and bumpy process-a development I have been particularly interested in for a while. Written evidence of this interest includes, among other things, my brief outlining of an idea for a "scholarly sound video" as an alternative to the tradition of textual scholarship in [in]Transition, a co-authored multimedia e-book on the history, theory and practice of the "academic research video," and introductions to the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn issues of NECSUS, in which I attempted to sketch a thin (if at all existent) line between "scholarly valid" and "scholarly illegitimate" modes of audiovisual expression-a task that self-claimed "academic" journals and "scholarly" platforms of videographic criticism should have taken up in the first place. Having not learned from the troubles these attempts have caused, I accepted The Cine-Files editors’ kind invitation and will hereby aim at addressing the question above through: (I) some general theoretical reflections on the framing of current videographic practice, and (II) by a specific illustration based on my experiences with the Videographic Criticism class I designed (and keep designing), which I teach at the University of Groningen—a course that attempts to implement the conclusions of these general theoretical reflections within an educational practice.
What allows an audience to make sense of stories with complex nonlinear time structures that are ... more What allows an audience to make sense of stories with complex nonlinear time structures that are radically different from everyday experience? To address this question , we distinguish between two types of narrative nonlinearity: Nonlinear Storytelling (a non-chronological presentation of events in the narration) and Nonlinear Storyworlds (non-linearity as a feature of the narrated world, for instance by way of time-travel or temporal loops). With most scholarly attention focusing on the former, here we focus on the latter , as the question of what allows audiences to make sense of strange and impossible storyworld temporalities has remained somewhat overlooked. Drawing on the available research on text comprehension, we first discuss how both strategies of nonlinearity affect narrative comprehension differently. We then ask what cognitive abilities allow spectators to engage with nonlinear storyworlds. Drawing on insights from conceptual metaphor theory and mental timeline theory, we propose that the comprehension of nonlinear storyworlds is facilitated by the cognitive ability to mentally represent time in terms of space. By metaphorically blending spatial and embodied concepts into narrative timelines, strategies of spatial mental representation allow spectators to conceive and comprehend various forms of phenomenologically non-experienceable time structures a hypothesis we seek to demonstrate through several cases of nonlinear story-worlds from contemporary complex cinema.
Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2019
This article proposes a cognitive-narratological perspective on David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' ... more This article proposes a cognitive-narratological perspective on David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' (2001) and the numerous contrasting interpretations that this film has generated. Rather than offering an(other) interpretation of the film, we aim to investigate why Lynch's highly complex narrative has gained a cult -if not classic- status in recent film history. To explain the striking variety of often conflicting interpretations and responses that the film has evoked, we analyse its complex narrative in terms of its cognitive effects.
The hypothesis is that part of Mulholland Drive's attractiveness arises from a cognitive oscillation that the film allows between profoundly differing, but potentially equally valid interpretive framings of its enigmatic story: as a perplexing but enticing puzzle, sustained by (post-)classical cues in its narration, and as an art-cinematic experience that builds on elements from experimental, surrealist, or other film-and art-historical traditions. The urge to narrativize Mulholland Drive, we argue, is driven by a distinct cognitive hesitation between these conflicting arrays of meaning making. As such, the film has been trailblazing with regards to contemporary cinema, setting stage for the current trend of what critics and scholars have called complex cinema or puzzle films.
In contemporary documentary practice, we witness a dominant trend of films that abandon the longs... more In contemporary documentary practice, we witness a dominant trend of films that abandon the longstanding ideal of objectivity in favor of more diverse and subjective perspectives on reality. Blurring the boundaries between subject and filmmaker, first person documentaries invite us to critically reflect on the processes by which viewers distinguish nonfiction from fiction. This chapter posits that such assessments depend on the cognitive principle of framing, with viewers drawing on a wide array of textual, contextual, and real-world cues to construe a film as documentary or otherwise. First person films could be understood as a sub-frame of documentary that comes with its own set of expectations and unique emotional affects. This is demonstrated through a case study of Kirsten Johnson’s 2016 Cameraperson.
As guest editor, my focus for the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn 2018 issues ... more As guest editor, my focus for the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn 2018 issues of NECSUS is original scene analyses as examples of autonomous and explanatorily argumentative videographic criticism. I aimed to inspire the making of videographic works that provide ‘straightforward close analyses of specific scenes of movies – […] focused, analytical, exploratory, and explanatory analyses that take advantage of the novel affordances of the audiovisual medium to clearly present, prove, and argue for their observations on a particular – perhaps key – moment of a film’. In this second part of the introduction, I delve into the components of my curating idea that have proven to be more problematic in providing clear guidelines to the invited contributors. These are the requirements of producing ‘autonomous’ and ‘scholarly’ videos.
As guest editor, my focus for the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn 2018 issues ... more As guest editor, my focus for the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn 2018 issues of NECSUS is original scene analyses as examples of autonomous and explanatorily argumentative videographic criticism.
Stories: Screen Narrative in the Digital Era, 2018
There has been no shortage of attention in film studies for the current trend of complex stories ... more There has been no shortage of attention in film studies for the current trend of complex stories and storytelling. Discussing the increasing prominence of perplexing narrative forms across both popular cinema and serialized television, which appears to have emerged from the mid-1990s onwards, scholars have spoken of ‘complex narratives’ (e.g., Staiger 2006; Simons 2008; Mittell 2015), ‘puzzle films’ (Panek 2006; Buckland 2009, 2014a), ‘mind-game films’ (Elsaesser 2009, 2017) and ‘modular’ (Cameron 2008), ‘mind-tricking’ (Klecker 2013) or ‘multiform’ narratives (Campora 2014). These diverse labels have been used to cover not only a wide range of films (from cult hits and mainstream blockbusters to international and historical art cinemas), but have also been accompanied by a variety of approaches. Scholars have used narratological approaches to provide typologies and taxonomies of various complex films, have examined the (film-)philosophical implications of these new narratives, or have focused on the cultural, sociological, industrial, technological, or media-archaeological contexts from which the trend has emerged. In our monograph, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema, we proposed yet another angle, aiming for an in-depth understanding of the effects and experiences of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. We offered a ‘cognitive reconceptualisation’ of story and storytelling complexity in film by analysing how different types of complex movies evoke different kinds and degrees of cognitive puzzlement in their viewers, leading to various viewing effects and experiences. Our inquiry led us to further questions, such as what kinds of interpretive responses complex film narratives evoke and encourage, and how different films have used different modes and degrees of complexity (from moderately complex ‘puzzle’ and ‘twist’ films to highly disruptive and excessively complex story structures, in both popular film and art cinema). This approach singled out a distinct set of movies that we labelled ‘impossible puzzle films’: popular films that evoke pervasively confusing viewing experiences, undermining narrative comprehension by means of various complicating storytelling techniques and the eliciting of dissonant cognitions. Films like Mulholland Drive (2001), Primer (2004), Triangle (2009) or Arrival (2016), we argued, feature notable degrees of narrative confusion, but also employ (counter-)strategies by which they strive to keep viewers interested and immersed in their stories’ challenges and mysteries.
When trying to understand the nature of the viewing experiences that complex narratives like impossible puzzle films provide, one question constantly lurks around the corner: Why would anyone be interested in confusing stories? After all, why would viewers spend hours attempting to solve potentially unsolvable puzzles? What pleasure could we take in fictional stories that are manifestly designed to be excessively complex? In the following, excerpted from the final chapter of our book, we would like to freely ponder this question: what makes highly complex stories attractive or at least engaging for (some) viewers?
Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, st... more Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream—but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.
Our (co-written with Thomas van den Berg) media rich, open access Scalar e-book on the ... more Our (co-written with Thomas van den Berg) media rich, open access Scalar e-book on the Audiovisual Essay practice is available online: http://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-studies-in-motion
Audiovisual essaying should be more than an appropriation of traditional video artistry, or a mere audiovisually upgraded extension of our analytical practice. What we expect from it is a form of expression that is autonomous and self-sufficient, that would both maintain and refine traditional academic values, and ultimately could lead to a ‘true’ audiovisual turn in communicative discourse by as well as about films.
The leading question for this book is ‘How can the traits and rhetoric of a traditionally text-based scholarly work, characterized by academic lucidity and traceability of information and argumentation, be optimally incorporated and streamlined into an autonomous, audiovisual container?’
Using a cognitive film studies framework, this book explores how our minds engage with complex st... more Using a cognitive film studies framework, this book explores how our minds engage with complex storytelling
Narrative complexity is a trend in contemporary cinema. Since the late 1990s there has been a palpable increase in complex storytelling in movies. But how and why do complex movies create perplexity and confusion? How do we engage with these challenges? And what makes complex stories so attractive? By blending film studies, narrative theory and cognitive sciences, Kiss and Willemsen look into the relation between complex storytelling and the mind. Analysing the effects that different complex narratives have on viewers, the book addresses how films like Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive or Primer strategically create complexity and confusion, and, by using the specific category of the ‘impossible puzzle film’, it examines movies that use baffling paradoxes, impossible loops, and unresolved ambiguities in their stories and storytelling. By looking at how these films play on our mind’s blind spots, this innovative book explains their viewing effects in terms of the mental state of cognitive dissonance that they evoke.
Key Features:
* Analyses the effects of complex narratives on viewers, including the psychological experience of puzzlement and perplexity
* Explores impossible puzzle films as a specific set of highly complex popular films
* Introduces cognitive dissonance as a key feature of these films
* Brings together literary theory, cognitive narratology and film studies
Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar & Barend van Heusden (eds.) Narrative Values, the Value of Narrative. De Gruyter’s Narratologica Series. 93-116, 2024
Frame theory provides a useful conceptual tool to get a grip on viewers’ interpretive operations.... more Frame theory provides a useful conceptual tool to get a grip on viewers’ interpretive operations. Frames are ‘cognitive shortcuts’ that help to set expectations, steer attention, recognize patterns, detect novelties, determine salience, evaluate available information and choose further actions. Framing then refers to the activity of selecting the clusters of knowledge and interpretive stances deemed the most appropriate in response to a given situation. Certain textual, audio, and audiovisual narratives resist the routines of framing, or better, they don’t allow for routinely settling on a single frame. Providing challenges that test and play on readers’, listeners’, or viewers’ reliance on their available knowledge clusters, they problematize, perpetuate or even foreground these basic processes. The present contribution will theorize the use and values of frame switching across media, building on the analysis of three different case studies: complexity in film, ambiguous irony in music, and dark humor in literature and cartoons.
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies , 2024
Historically 3D effect in film has been used as a relatively superficial aesthetic attraction. He... more Historically 3D effect in film has been used as a relatively superficial aesthetic attraction. Here we consider and test the idea that 3D can be used to guide viewer attention and narrative interpretation in film. The current study used self-report measures in conjunction with eye-tracking technology to record attention, memory and narrative interpretation of 32 participants (25 female). Eye-gaze behaviour was recorded while half of the participants were randomly assigned to watch Michel Gondry’s The Green Hornet (2011) in 3D and the other half watched the same film in 2D. We concentrated on a particular moment where the use of 3D technology brings some aspects of the image to the forefront, such as a prop that might have narrative significance for the story as it unfolds. We were unable to confirm that 3D effect in Gondry’s film is effectively used to direct viewers’ visual attention towards narratively relevant information. Also, we found no evidence that the 3D version of Gondry’s film contributes to better memory or narrative interpretation of this particular scene. In discussing our findings, beyond the technical conditions of our eye-tracking research, we consider the role of film genre, narrative mode, viewers’ expectations and media literacy in shaping such visual attention and narrative interpretation.
Paul Taberham & Catalina Iricinschi (eds.) Introduction to Screen Narratives: Perspectives on Story Production and Comprehension. London – New York: Routledge, 71-91., 2024
Documentary filmmakers are gradually embracing immersive media to create novel Virtual Reality No... more Documentary filmmakers are gradually embracing immersive media to create novel Virtual Reality Nonfiction (VRNF) content. Over the past twenty years initial experimentation in this new medium has brought forward numerous linearly structured 360° documentaries that maintain a close link to traditional documentary modes. More recently, we have observed a shift from the relatively passive 360° cinema towards more open-world, non-linear, game-like interactive experiences that challenge traditional definitions of the documentary genre. Volumetric world-building techniques provide nonfiction creators with additional tools that afford ‘viewer-users’ spatial and interactive agency, leading to a heightened autopoietic realisation of the storyworld. VRNF creators have the potential to allow their viewer-users enhanced control over framing, temporal ordering of the plot and spatial unfolding of the diegetic world, thus inviting them to become actual co-creators of a deeply personal and personalized experience. This article addresses how VRNF may go beyond the mere ‘documentation’ of people, places or past events that existed in a pre-filmic reality and provide viewer-users through augmented agency a unique present-tense autopoietic experience that pushes the boundaries of traditional 2D documentary.
This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation in the creative space of science... more This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation in the creative space of science fiction film, concerning its uncanny, new and fantastic places, and otherworldly encounters within fictional, but possible worlds. The aim is to consider the function and potential of the audible-to examine how sound is used in the filmic exploration of the boundaries between the human and the alien (the unknown). More particularly, we are interested in the role that human voice-like and human vocal sounds can play in this divide, as we believe manipulations with such audible qualities contribute greatly to the emotional dimension of cinematic stories of otherworldly encounters. For that purpose, we concentrate on Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016) and its soundtrack composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who resorts to different singing practices and vocal techniques to accompany a story charting the territories between the human and the alien.
"Miklós Kiss studies desktop documentaries and emphasises their singular potential to convey an a... more "Miklós Kiss studies desktop documentaries and emphasises their singular potential to convey an argument by simulating the maker’s process of exploring and tinkering in insightful ways. The piece makes an important contribution to the study of a relatively new audiovisual form and its particular affordances for persuasion." (NECSUS journal)
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of desktop documentaries is their affordance of making and presenting a video at the same time: i.e., collapsing boundaries between revealing their thinking and tinkering research process (as unfolding, step-by-step, in front of our eyes) and the presentation of the outcomes of such ‘t(h)inkering’ (arriving at results and, thereby, justifying the presented research methods). They are ‘exploratory’ and ‘explanatorily argumentative’ in one. There is a particular effect that emerges from such transparent, credible, and effortless performativity – a relaxed and seemingly spontaneous presentation of an unfolding argument in an environment (software on desktop) and through methods (typing, dragging, opening files) that is familiar and rather natural to all viewers. In this paper, I aim to take a closer look at these fundamental qualities – ‘transparency’, ‘credibility’, ‘effortlessness’, and ‘performativity’ – respectively, and reveal their distinct as well as joint effects, ultimately resulting in what I will call, ‘artist(ic) emotions’.
Since the advent of consumer-friendly digital technologies-friendly in terms of their computation... more Since the advent of consumer-friendly digital technologies-friendly in terms of their computational power, operational ease and pricing-tinkering with the digital materiality of audiovisual media as part of its study has become a widely embraced research exercise. There is currently no doubt about videographic criticism's contribution to the study of audiovisual arts as a novel and useful method, but answering the question "how to legitimize videographic criticism as a valid means of scholarly communication" has remained somewhat challenging (hence the present issue of The Cine-Files and its dedication to this very question). Academic recognition and validation of an "ontologically new" approach to scholarly work is usually a slow and bumpy process-a development I have been particularly interested in for a while. Written evidence of this interest includes, among other things, my brief outlining of an idea for a "scholarly sound video" as an alternative to the tradition of textual scholarship in [in]Transition, a co-authored multimedia e-book on the history, theory and practice of the "academic research video," and introductions to the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn issues of NECSUS, in which I attempted to sketch a thin (if at all existent) line between "scholarly valid" and "scholarly illegitimate" modes of audiovisual expression-a task that self-claimed "academic" journals and "scholarly" platforms of videographic criticism should have taken up in the first place. Having not learned from the troubles these attempts have caused, I accepted The Cine-Files editors’ kind invitation and will hereby aim at addressing the question above through: (I) some general theoretical reflections on the framing of current videographic practice, and (II) by a specific illustration based on my experiences with the Videographic Criticism class I designed (and keep designing), which I teach at the University of Groningen—a course that attempts to implement the conclusions of these general theoretical reflections within an educational practice.
What allows an audience to make sense of stories with complex nonlinear time structures that are ... more What allows an audience to make sense of stories with complex nonlinear time structures that are radically different from everyday experience? To address this question , we distinguish between two types of narrative nonlinearity: Nonlinear Storytelling (a non-chronological presentation of events in the narration) and Nonlinear Storyworlds (non-linearity as a feature of the narrated world, for instance by way of time-travel or temporal loops). With most scholarly attention focusing on the former, here we focus on the latter , as the question of what allows audiences to make sense of strange and impossible storyworld temporalities has remained somewhat overlooked. Drawing on the available research on text comprehension, we first discuss how both strategies of nonlinearity affect narrative comprehension differently. We then ask what cognitive abilities allow spectators to engage with nonlinear storyworlds. Drawing on insights from conceptual metaphor theory and mental timeline theory, we propose that the comprehension of nonlinear storyworlds is facilitated by the cognitive ability to mentally represent time in terms of space. By metaphorically blending spatial and embodied concepts into narrative timelines, strategies of spatial mental representation allow spectators to conceive and comprehend various forms of phenomenologically non-experienceable time structures a hypothesis we seek to demonstrate through several cases of nonlinear story-worlds from contemporary complex cinema.
Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2019
This article proposes a cognitive-narratological perspective on David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' ... more This article proposes a cognitive-narratological perspective on David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' (2001) and the numerous contrasting interpretations that this film has generated. Rather than offering an(other) interpretation of the film, we aim to investigate why Lynch's highly complex narrative has gained a cult -if not classic- status in recent film history. To explain the striking variety of often conflicting interpretations and responses that the film has evoked, we analyse its complex narrative in terms of its cognitive effects.
The hypothesis is that part of Mulholland Drive's attractiveness arises from a cognitive oscillation that the film allows between profoundly differing, but potentially equally valid interpretive framings of its enigmatic story: as a perplexing but enticing puzzle, sustained by (post-)classical cues in its narration, and as an art-cinematic experience that builds on elements from experimental, surrealist, or other film-and art-historical traditions. The urge to narrativize Mulholland Drive, we argue, is driven by a distinct cognitive hesitation between these conflicting arrays of meaning making. As such, the film has been trailblazing with regards to contemporary cinema, setting stage for the current trend of what critics and scholars have called complex cinema or puzzle films.
In contemporary documentary practice, we witness a dominant trend of films that abandon the longs... more In contemporary documentary practice, we witness a dominant trend of films that abandon the longstanding ideal of objectivity in favor of more diverse and subjective perspectives on reality. Blurring the boundaries between subject and filmmaker, first person documentaries invite us to critically reflect on the processes by which viewers distinguish nonfiction from fiction. This chapter posits that such assessments depend on the cognitive principle of framing, with viewers drawing on a wide array of textual, contextual, and real-world cues to construe a film as documentary or otherwise. First person films could be understood as a sub-frame of documentary that comes with its own set of expectations and unique emotional affects. This is demonstrated through a case study of Kirsten Johnson’s 2016 Cameraperson.
As guest editor, my focus for the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn 2018 issues ... more As guest editor, my focus for the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn 2018 issues of NECSUS is original scene analyses as examples of autonomous and explanatorily argumentative videographic criticism. I aimed to inspire the making of videographic works that provide ‘straightforward close analyses of specific scenes of movies – […] focused, analytical, exploratory, and explanatory analyses that take advantage of the novel affordances of the audiovisual medium to clearly present, prove, and argue for their observations on a particular – perhaps key – moment of a film’. In this second part of the introduction, I delve into the components of my curating idea that have proven to be more problematic in providing clear guidelines to the invited contributors. These are the requirements of producing ‘autonomous’ and ‘scholarly’ videos.
As guest editor, my focus for the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn 2018 issues ... more As guest editor, my focus for the audiovisual essay section of the Spring and Autumn 2018 issues of NECSUS is original scene analyses as examples of autonomous and explanatorily argumentative videographic criticism.
Stories: Screen Narrative in the Digital Era, 2018
There has been no shortage of attention in film studies for the current trend of complex stories ... more There has been no shortage of attention in film studies for the current trend of complex stories and storytelling. Discussing the increasing prominence of perplexing narrative forms across both popular cinema and serialized television, which appears to have emerged from the mid-1990s onwards, scholars have spoken of ‘complex narratives’ (e.g., Staiger 2006; Simons 2008; Mittell 2015), ‘puzzle films’ (Panek 2006; Buckland 2009, 2014a), ‘mind-game films’ (Elsaesser 2009, 2017) and ‘modular’ (Cameron 2008), ‘mind-tricking’ (Klecker 2013) or ‘multiform’ narratives (Campora 2014). These diverse labels have been used to cover not only a wide range of films (from cult hits and mainstream blockbusters to international and historical art cinemas), but have also been accompanied by a variety of approaches. Scholars have used narratological approaches to provide typologies and taxonomies of various complex films, have examined the (film-)philosophical implications of these new narratives, or have focused on the cultural, sociological, industrial, technological, or media-archaeological contexts from which the trend has emerged. In our monograph, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema, we proposed yet another angle, aiming for an in-depth understanding of the effects and experiences of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. We offered a ‘cognitive reconceptualisation’ of story and storytelling complexity in film by analysing how different types of complex movies evoke different kinds and degrees of cognitive puzzlement in their viewers, leading to various viewing effects and experiences. Our inquiry led us to further questions, such as what kinds of interpretive responses complex film narratives evoke and encourage, and how different films have used different modes and degrees of complexity (from moderately complex ‘puzzle’ and ‘twist’ films to highly disruptive and excessively complex story structures, in both popular film and art cinema). This approach singled out a distinct set of movies that we labelled ‘impossible puzzle films’: popular films that evoke pervasively confusing viewing experiences, undermining narrative comprehension by means of various complicating storytelling techniques and the eliciting of dissonant cognitions. Films like Mulholland Drive (2001), Primer (2004), Triangle (2009) or Arrival (2016), we argued, feature notable degrees of narrative confusion, but also employ (counter-)strategies by which they strive to keep viewers interested and immersed in their stories’ challenges and mysteries.
When trying to understand the nature of the viewing experiences that complex narratives like impossible puzzle films provide, one question constantly lurks around the corner: Why would anyone be interested in confusing stories? After all, why would viewers spend hours attempting to solve potentially unsolvable puzzles? What pleasure could we take in fictional stories that are manifestly designed to be excessively complex? In the following, excerpted from the final chapter of our book, we would like to freely ponder this question: what makes highly complex stories attractive or at least engaging for (some) viewers?
Over the past two decades, Hollywood cinema has seen the proliferation of disruptive narrative te... more Over the past two decades, Hollywood cinema has seen the proliferation of disruptive narrative techniques that were previously thought to be exclusive to the realms of (post)modern literature and art cinema. Most scholarly contributions on contemporary complex cinema have been classifications, attempting to position these films relative to the “classical” mode of narration. This article sidesteps these efforts at categorization and, by offering a cognitive approach to cinematic narrative complexity, aims to provide an overview of the mental processes that complex films elicit in their viewers. Using Torben Grodal’s PECMA flow model, we theorize how the experience of complexity arises out of a confrontation with plot devices that disrupt the embodied viewing process by breaching or subverting familiar narrative conventions. In conclusion, we suggest five different scenarios—all following from different PECMA flow disruptions—and describe how one of them can affect the experience of complex (post)classical cinema.
Suspense in cinema has often been described to result from either (1) the frustration of the view... more Suspense in cinema has often been described to result from either (1) the frustration of the viewers’ strong desire to know the narrative’s outcome (the uncertainty premise), or (2) the frustration of the viewers’ strong desire to use their knowledge in order to change the narrative’s outcome (the helplessness premise). In order to test the veracity of these assertions, one needs to examine the underlying mechanisms on which these cognitive frustrations (and by that the creation of suspense) rest. This paper aims to take on this task by drawing on the conceptual framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Using the subgenre of the slasher film as an exemplary case study, we show how suspense is grounded in perception in which the spatial constituents of image schemas (e.g. front, back, light, dark) are instantiated cinematically (e.g. by framing, editing, lighting) in order to structure the narrative’s conceptual constituents (e.g. the absence or presence of knowledge concerning the killer’s whereabouts).
Our video departs from an interest in the use of the split screen in Vince Gilligan and Peter Gou... more Our video departs from an interest in the use of the split screen in Vince Gilligan and Peter Goud’s television series Better Call Saul. More specifically, we are interested in the use of the split screen as both a technique featured in the show as well as a hermeneutic tool that can be employed to unveil meaning about the show. In both cases, we argue, the split screen is related to the series’ focus on character development.
WAS HE EVER REALLY HERE? An audiovisual question by Miklós Kiss on Lynne Ramsay's YOU WERE NEVER ... more WAS HE EVER REALLY HERE? An audiovisual question by Miklós Kiss on Lynne Ramsay's YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (2017). Music: Jonny Greenwood: Dark Streets (Reprise) *For research purposes only* 2018
György Pálfi’s FINAL CUT – LADIES & GENTLEMEN (2012) is a movie made out of other movies, literal... more György Pálfi’s FINAL CUT – LADIES & GENTLEMEN (2012) is a movie made out of other movies, literally. It is Vimeo’s and YouTube’s beloved film mashups and supercuts on steroids. Nevertheless, Final Cut does not only offer a genre-, style-, year- or author- and actor-bound fan-made compilation; it is not a mere recap of a single film or an entire season of a TV show, but builds a wholly coherent narrative story made out of hundreds of excerpts of other films. To be precise, the film’s press kit mentions “images from 450 emblematic films from world cinema, from Metropolis to Indiana Jones, via The Godfather, Avatar, Scenes from a Marriage, Psycho or even Modern Times, with a few television series thrown in as well.” My audiovisual essay was originally published as a written article in Senses of Cinema, issue 67 / July 2013. sensesofcinema.com/2013/feature-articles/creativity-beyond-originality-gyorgy-palfis-final-cut-as-narrative-supercut/ This 'videographic adaptation' of a previously published paper is an experiment in devising an autonomous and explanatory argumentative research video.
Ever since I've seen Anton Corbijn's A MOST WANTED MAN (2014), I cannot escape from the last scen... more Ever since I've seen Anton Corbijn's A MOST WANTED MAN (2014), I cannot escape from the last scene of the film. Philip Seymour Hoffman's character parks his car, steps out, slams the door, and walks offscreen. Knowing the bitter fact that PSH didn't make it to the film's release, it's hard to tell whether this ending was part of an original plan or turned out to be a beautiful 'necessity'. Anyhow, I felt that somehow I owe the legacy of one of the best actors of contemporary cinema with a tribute, in the form of a rather conventional audiovisual essay, about his last protagonist performance on the silver screen.
Is this an audiovisual essay or a mere blasphemy? Even though, if nobody else I’m sure Godard wou... more Is this an audiovisual essay or a mere blasphemy? Even though, if nobody else I’m sure Godard would approve this playful approach, I have serious doubts about the value of such ‘poetic’ video essay as ‘serious’ scholarship. It took me about 2 hours to create this clip. The idea was triggered by a quote from Carol Vernallis. According to her “[o]ne can’t just speed up Godard and put music against it" (2013: 4). Well, it seems one can just do that. The result is another thing, of course. I agree, on the one hand, that the clip could have been shorter (after all, within 1 minute everybody gets the idea), but, on the other hand, I couldn’t speed up more the images in order to keep them perceptually comprehensible, furthermore I wanted to ‘quote’ the whole movie and keep its speed synchronized with the theme song of The Benny Hill Show (James Q ‘Spider’ Rich and Homer ‘Boots’ Randolph III’s Yakety Sax from 1963). I looped the music around 2 and a half times to cover the sped up version of Godard’s 1960 À bout de souffle.
Glenn Stillar’s videographic work, Observe-Engage-Adapt: Hulot’s Method, is an analytical thesis ... more Glenn Stillar’s videographic work, Observe-Engage-Adapt: Hulot’s Method, is an analytical thesis video that brings home its research point by combining a supercut scene selection of Jacques Tati’s Playtime with excerpts from two interviews with the director, used as guiding voice-overs and as written quotes between visual examples.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2021
This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation in the creative space of science... more This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation in the creative space of science fiction film, concerning its uncanny, new and fantastic places, and otherworldly encounters within fictional, but possible worlds. The aim is to consider the function and potential of the audible – to examine how sound is used in the filmic exploration of the boundaries between the human and the alien (the unknown). More particularly, we are interested in the role that human voice-like and human vocal sounds can play in this divide, as we believe manipulations with such audible qualities contribute greatly to the emotional dimension of cinematic stories of otherworldly encounters. For that purpose, we concentrate on Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) and its soundtrack composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who resorts to different singing practices and vocal techniques to accompany a story charting the territories between the human and the alien.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies
This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation in the creative space of science... more This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation in the creative space of science fiction film, concerning its uncanny, new and fantastic places, and otherworldly encounters within fictional, but possible worlds. The aim is to consider the function and potential of the audible – to examine how sound is used in the filmic exploration of the boundaries between the human and the alien (the unknown). More particularly, we are interested in the role that human voice-like and human vocal sounds can play in this divide, as we believe manipulations with such audible qualities contribute greatly to the emotional dimension of cinematic stories of otherworldly encounters. For that purpose, we concentrate on Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) and its soundtrack composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who resorts to different singing practices and vocal techniques to accompany a story charting the territories between the human and the alien.
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2019
This article proposes a cognitive-narratological perspective on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2... more This article proposes a cognitive-narratological perspective on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and the numerous contrasting interpretations that this film has generated. Rather than offering an(other) interpretation of the film, we aim to investigate some of the reasons why Lynch’s highly complex narrative has gained a cult – if not classic – status in recent film history. To explain the striking variety of (often conflicting) interpretations and responses that the film has evoked, we analyse its complex narrative in terms of its cognitive effects. Our hypothesis is that part of Mulholland Drive’s attractiveness arises from a cognitive oscillation that the film allows between profoundly differing, but potentially equally valid interpretive framings of its enigmatic story: as a perplexing but enticing puzzle, sustained by (post-)classical cues in its narration, and as an artcinematic experience that builds on elements from experimental, surrealist, or other film- and art-historical traditions. The urge to narrativize Mulholland Drive, we argue, is driven by a distinct cognitive hesitation between these conflicting arrays of meaning making. As such, the film has been trailblazing with regards to contemporary cinema, setting stage for the current trend of what critics and scholars have called complex cinema or puzzle films.
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Books by Miklos Kiss
Audiovisual essaying should be more than an appropriation of traditional video artistry, or a mere audiovisually upgraded extension of our analytical practice. What we expect from it is a form of expression that is autonomous and self-sufficient, that would both maintain and refine traditional academic values, and ultimately could lead to a ‘true’ audiovisual turn in communicative discourse by as well as about films.
The leading question for this book is ‘How can the traits and rhetoric of a traditionally text-based scholarly work, characterized by academic lucidity and traceability of information and argumentation, be optimally incorporated and streamlined into an autonomous, audiovisual container?’
Narrative complexity is a trend in contemporary cinema. Since the late 1990s there has been a palpable increase in complex storytelling in movies. But how and why do complex movies create perplexity and confusion? How do we engage with these challenges? And what makes complex stories so attractive? By blending film studies, narrative theory and cognitive sciences, Kiss and Willemsen look into the relation between complex storytelling and the mind. Analysing the effects that different complex narratives have on viewers, the book addresses how films like Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive or Primer strategically create complexity and confusion, and, by using the specific category of the ‘impossible puzzle film’, it examines movies that use baffling paradoxes, impossible loops, and unresolved ambiguities in their stories and storytelling. By looking at how these films play on our mind’s blind spots, this innovative book explains their viewing effects in terms of the mental state of cognitive dissonance that they evoke.
Key Features:
* Analyses the effects of complex narratives on viewers, including the psychological experience of puzzlement and perplexity
* Explores impossible puzzle films as a specific set of highly complex popular films
* Introduces cognitive dissonance as a key feature of these films
* Brings together literary theory, cognitive narratology and film studies
Articles by Miklos Kiss
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of desktop documentaries is their affordance of making and presenting a video at the same time: i.e., collapsing boundaries between revealing their thinking and tinkering research process (as unfolding, step-by-step, in front of our eyes) and the presentation of the outcomes of such ‘t(h)inkering’ (arriving at results and, thereby, justifying the presented research methods). They are ‘exploratory’ and ‘explanatorily argumentative’ in one. There is a particular effect that emerges from such transparent, credible, and effortless performativity – a relaxed and seemingly spontaneous presentation of an unfolding argument in an environment (software on desktop) and through methods (typing, dragging, opening files) that is familiar and rather natural to all viewers. In this paper, I aim to take a closer look at these fundamental qualities – ‘transparency’, ‘credibility’, ‘effortlessness’, and ‘performativity’ – respectively, and reveal their distinct as well as joint effects, ultimately resulting in what I will call, ‘artist(ic) emotions’.
The hypothesis is that part of Mulholland Drive's attractiveness arises from a cognitive oscillation that the film allows between profoundly differing, but potentially equally valid interpretive framings of its enigmatic story: as a perplexing but enticing puzzle, sustained by (post-)classical cues in its narration, and as an art-cinematic experience that builds on elements from experimental, surrealist, or other film-and art-historical traditions. The urge to narrativize Mulholland Drive, we argue, is driven by a distinct cognitive hesitation between these conflicting arrays of meaning making. As such, the film has been trailblazing with regards to contemporary cinema, setting stage for the current trend of what critics and scholars have called complex cinema or puzzle films.
In our monograph, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema, we proposed yet another angle, aiming for an in-depth understanding of the effects and experiences of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. We offered a ‘cognitive reconceptualisation’ of story and storytelling complexity in film by analysing how different types of complex movies evoke different kinds and degrees of cognitive puzzlement in their viewers, leading to various viewing effects and experiences. Our inquiry led us to further questions, such as what kinds of interpretive responses complex film narratives evoke and encourage, and how different films have used different modes and degrees of complexity (from moderately complex ‘puzzle’ and ‘twist’ films to highly disruptive and excessively complex story structures, in both popular film and art cinema). This approach singled out a distinct set of movies that we labelled ‘impossible puzzle films’: popular films that evoke pervasively confusing viewing experiences, undermining narrative comprehension by means of various complicating storytelling techniques and the eliciting of dissonant cognitions. Films like Mulholland Drive (2001), Primer (2004), Triangle (2009) or Arrival (2016), we argued, feature notable degrees of narrative confusion, but also employ (counter-)strategies by which they strive to keep viewers interested and immersed in their stories’ challenges and mysteries.
When trying to understand the nature of the viewing experiences that complex narratives like impossible puzzle films provide, one question constantly lurks around the corner: Why would anyone be interested in confusing stories? After all, why would viewers spend hours attempting to solve potentially unsolvable puzzles? What pleasure could we take in fictional stories that are manifestly designed to be excessively complex?
In the following, excerpted from the final chapter of our book, we would like to freely ponder this question: what makes highly complex stories attractive or at least engaging for (some) viewers?
Audiovisual essaying should be more than an appropriation of traditional video artistry, or a mere audiovisually upgraded extension of our analytical practice. What we expect from it is a form of expression that is autonomous and self-sufficient, that would both maintain and refine traditional academic values, and ultimately could lead to a ‘true’ audiovisual turn in communicative discourse by as well as about films.
The leading question for this book is ‘How can the traits and rhetoric of a traditionally text-based scholarly work, characterized by academic lucidity and traceability of information and argumentation, be optimally incorporated and streamlined into an autonomous, audiovisual container?’
Narrative complexity is a trend in contemporary cinema. Since the late 1990s there has been a palpable increase in complex storytelling in movies. But how and why do complex movies create perplexity and confusion? How do we engage with these challenges? And what makes complex stories so attractive? By blending film studies, narrative theory and cognitive sciences, Kiss and Willemsen look into the relation between complex storytelling and the mind. Analysing the effects that different complex narratives have on viewers, the book addresses how films like Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive or Primer strategically create complexity and confusion, and, by using the specific category of the ‘impossible puzzle film’, it examines movies that use baffling paradoxes, impossible loops, and unresolved ambiguities in their stories and storytelling. By looking at how these films play on our mind’s blind spots, this innovative book explains their viewing effects in terms of the mental state of cognitive dissonance that they evoke.
Key Features:
* Analyses the effects of complex narratives on viewers, including the psychological experience of puzzlement and perplexity
* Explores impossible puzzle films as a specific set of highly complex popular films
* Introduces cognitive dissonance as a key feature of these films
* Brings together literary theory, cognitive narratology and film studies
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of desktop documentaries is their affordance of making and presenting a video at the same time: i.e., collapsing boundaries between revealing their thinking and tinkering research process (as unfolding, step-by-step, in front of our eyes) and the presentation of the outcomes of such ‘t(h)inkering’ (arriving at results and, thereby, justifying the presented research methods). They are ‘exploratory’ and ‘explanatorily argumentative’ in one. There is a particular effect that emerges from such transparent, credible, and effortless performativity – a relaxed and seemingly spontaneous presentation of an unfolding argument in an environment (software on desktop) and through methods (typing, dragging, opening files) that is familiar and rather natural to all viewers. In this paper, I aim to take a closer look at these fundamental qualities – ‘transparency’, ‘credibility’, ‘effortlessness’, and ‘performativity’ – respectively, and reveal their distinct as well as joint effects, ultimately resulting in what I will call, ‘artist(ic) emotions’.
The hypothesis is that part of Mulholland Drive's attractiveness arises from a cognitive oscillation that the film allows between profoundly differing, but potentially equally valid interpretive framings of its enigmatic story: as a perplexing but enticing puzzle, sustained by (post-)classical cues in its narration, and as an art-cinematic experience that builds on elements from experimental, surrealist, or other film-and art-historical traditions. The urge to narrativize Mulholland Drive, we argue, is driven by a distinct cognitive hesitation between these conflicting arrays of meaning making. As such, the film has been trailblazing with regards to contemporary cinema, setting stage for the current trend of what critics and scholars have called complex cinema or puzzle films.
In our monograph, Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema, we proposed yet another angle, aiming for an in-depth understanding of the effects and experiences of narrative complexity in contemporary cinema. We offered a ‘cognitive reconceptualisation’ of story and storytelling complexity in film by analysing how different types of complex movies evoke different kinds and degrees of cognitive puzzlement in their viewers, leading to various viewing effects and experiences. Our inquiry led us to further questions, such as what kinds of interpretive responses complex film narratives evoke and encourage, and how different films have used different modes and degrees of complexity (from moderately complex ‘puzzle’ and ‘twist’ films to highly disruptive and excessively complex story structures, in both popular film and art cinema). This approach singled out a distinct set of movies that we labelled ‘impossible puzzle films’: popular films that evoke pervasively confusing viewing experiences, undermining narrative comprehension by means of various complicating storytelling techniques and the eliciting of dissonant cognitions. Films like Mulholland Drive (2001), Primer (2004), Triangle (2009) or Arrival (2016), we argued, feature notable degrees of narrative confusion, but also employ (counter-)strategies by which they strive to keep viewers interested and immersed in their stories’ challenges and mysteries.
When trying to understand the nature of the viewing experiences that complex narratives like impossible puzzle films provide, one question constantly lurks around the corner: Why would anyone be interested in confusing stories? After all, why would viewers spend hours attempting to solve potentially unsolvable puzzles? What pleasure could we take in fictional stories that are manifestly designed to be excessively complex?
In the following, excerpted from the final chapter of our book, we would like to freely ponder this question: what makes highly complex stories attractive or at least engaging for (some) viewers?
Music: Jonny Greenwood: Dark Streets (Reprise)
*For research purposes only*
2018
My audiovisual essay was originally published as a written article in Senses of Cinema, issue 67 / July 2013.
sensesofcinema.com/2013/feature-articles/creativity-beyond-originality-gyorgy-palfis-final-cut-as-narrative-supercut/
This 'videographic adaptation' of a previously published paper is an experiment in devising an autonomous and explanatory argumentative research video.
It took me about 2 hours to create this clip. The idea was triggered by a quote from Carol Vernallis. According to her “[o]ne can’t just speed up Godard and put music against it" (2013: 4). Well, it seems one can just do that.
The result is another thing, of course. I agree, on the one hand, that the clip could have been shorter (after all, within 1 minute everybody gets the idea), but, on the other hand, I couldn’t speed up more the images in order to keep them perceptually comprehensible, furthermore I wanted to ‘quote’ the whole movie and keep its speed synchronized with the theme song of The Benny Hill Show (James Q ‘Spider’ Rich and Homer ‘Boots’ Randolph III’s Yakety Sax from 1963). I looped the music around 2 and a half times to cover the sped up version of Godard’s 1960 À bout de souffle.