Narrative Time in Complex Films: Temporal Cognition and Cinematic Time

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Universiteit van Amsterdam

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Narrative Time in Complex Films:

Temporal Cognition and Cinematic Time

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List of Figur

Figure 1 a: Run Lola Run’s ‘Syuzhet’...5

Figure 1 b: Bordwell’s Timeline of Run Lola Run...5

Figure 1 c: Run Lola Run’s ‘Fabula’...6

Y Figure 2 a: A Linear Organisation of Narrative...19

Figure 2 b: A Possible Configuration of Narrative...19

Figure 3: The Internal Structure of an Event Module...21

Y Figure 4 a: L'Année derniére á Marienbad (1961)...38

Figure 4 b: L'Année derniére á Marienbad (1961)...3

Figure 5 a: Mirror (1975)...40

Figure 5 b: Mirror (1975)...41

Y Figure 6 a: Tree of Life (2011)...41

Figure 6 b: Tree of Life (2011)...42

Figure 7: Ten Canoes (2006)...42

Figure 8 b: Melancholia (2011)...44

Figure 8 a: Melancholia (2011)...44

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Introduction

In recent years film scholars have noticed a tendency, across a wide variety of genres, to move towards greater narrative complexity. Keen to rein this tendency in – to categorize it, name it - they have begun a bold attempt to define complex narrative films. What makes them complex? How do they differ from other (more straightforward) narratives? Do they even differ at all? Their task is difficult. It is by its nature complex and intricate. Although these scholars attempt to begin a new dialogue, they stumble at the first hurdle and cannot seemingly agree on a corpus. Their corpora, it turns out, is more a Venn diagram of overlapping parts than a distinct category. Some films enjoy regular overlap, such as Blind Chance (Kieślowski, 1987), 21 Grams (Iñárritu, 2003), Memento (Nolan, 2000) and Donnie Darko (Kelly, 2001) but by all means they are not unanimously included. So, how can we even begin when this quasi-genre cannot be demarcated? The attempt to delineate this tendency is not even in agreement over the moniker of the category; they call them ‘forking-path narratives’, ‘multiple draft narratives’, ‘modular narratives’, ‘mind game narratives’, or simply ‘complex narratives’. These theorists seem to talk over each other rather deepen the discussion.

This confusion is symptomatic of a common operation; the reduction of complex to simple. Thus, paradoxically, what falls out of these theorists discussion is complexity itself. Each theorist attempts to explain complexity with regards to something simpler; whether it is a simpler narrative structure or an ad hoc explanatory force. What, then, do we need to address in order to understand the complexity without subsuming it? The answer is an exploration of narrative time. For time forms the basis of any narrative construction. Time is both its foundations and its building blocks; together with space it forms the narrative. Time can be understood in intricate and complex formations. Further, narrative time need not be simplified. By explicating time in narrative formation we can throw light on the issue of complexity without destroying its defining qualities.

From the early stirrings of film theory, cinematic time has been a very crucial point of interest. In his 1932 book Rudolf Arnheim defended the artistic qualities of the cinematic medium, claiming that film’s status as art was due to its ability to deviate from reality. With regards to time, he noted that cinema deviates from the space-time continuum of everyday experiences. He noted that in “real life every experience or chain of experience is enacted for every observer in an uninterrupted spatial and temporal sequence” (Arnheim, 1957, 20). Whereas in cinema:

The period of time [in a film] may be interrupted at any point. One scene may be immediately followed by another that takes place at a totally different time…To be sure, in practice this freedom is usually restricted in that [a] certain logical unity of time and space must be observed [in cinema]. For time especially

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Although Arnheim locates the artistic qualities of cinema in its ability to digress from reality, he lays out rules in order to retain the logical unity of time and space. For example, he claims that a film cannot show the same event from two different angles in subsequent shots; “to do so would be to make a sequence of events that were in fact simultaneous” (Arnheim, 1957, 22). Arnheim explains that, if such an ordering of shots is used, then the film must make use of inter-titles or an image of a clock to avoid confusion. However, in contemporary films, filmic digressions in time are not always so blatantly indicated. Overly obvious techniques – such as a warped dissolve with a string overture – can seem cliché (unless it is used with a certain degree of tongue-in-cheek humour). This is because the more we play with time, the more complex instantiations of it we are able to grasp. And cinema inherently plays with time. Thus these cinematic ‘rules’ are ever changing. They continue to push back the boundary of both complexity and incomprehensibility (the latter being what lies beyond complexity). New temporal configurations in narrative are (usually) new ways to be complex.

Andre Bazin claimed that with cinema a strange paradox arises, it “makes a moulding of the object as it exists in time and, furthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of the object” (Bazin, 2005, 111). Both a record of something past and the depiction of movement like an object in the present, the cinematic image holds within it a new understanding of time. Bazin is often categorised under the so-called ‘realist’ domain of film theory, as one who is focused on cinema’s ability to record the physical world (Singer, 2000, 1). However, as the previous quote from Bazin indicates, he understood something of the complex relation that cinema had to what it represented; it is not simply the pure depiction of an object. Mary Anne Doane develops this point, claiming that “[t]he representation of time in cinema (its ‘recording’) is also and simultaneously the production of temporalities for the spectator” (Doane, 2002, 24). Film, by its nature, warps what it means for something to be present or past. It plays with time and incites new meaning for temporality. Film is an essentially temporal medium, from its emergence as a new technology it has encapsulated the idea of a ‘mechanical representability of time’ (Doane, 2002, 1). For these reasons, cinematic time was a hot topic during cinema’s emergence as a new medium and technology.

Time may well be important to film in general. It may be complex in its formation. However, does that make time integral to this new ‘tendency’ towards filmic complexity? Narrative time not only provides the tools of analysis for complex films (without subsumption), it also what makes these films complex. These films play with the temporality of the narrative. In this way, these ‘complex’ films are a return to time; they emphasise the importance of time in the formation of filmic narrative.

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So, if narrative time is the key to the riddle of filmic complexity, then where do we begin? The film scholars who try to explain complex narratives by subsuming them into something simpler seem to be equating complexity with incomprehension. However, such an assumption is an insult to our cognitive abilities. Temporal cognition is crucial to narrative formation; this must necessarily be separated from time simpliciter, for the way we organise and interpret time may have nothing to do with ontological status of time. The way we think about time is essentially narrative based. A narrative contains events that are linked-in-time; it is what differentiates it from a string of unconnected events. However, narrative time does not presuppose one particular variant of ordering over another. Temporal cognition allows for the ability to comprehend time in multiple formations. This thesis aims to uncover the foundations of narrative time in film by exploring certain psychology, narratology and filmic presentations of time. To this end, it aims to uncover, not only why there appears to be a new tendency towards filmic complexity, but also why it has been so hard to definitively categorise these films.

The first chapter focuses on contemporary film theorists who have addressed complex narratives in film. It will attempt to demonstrate the various ways in which the foundations of their narrative assumptions are problematic. Some of them appeal to a linear reordering of narrative events which does not adequately attend to the intricacies of the films they address. Others reject this assumption of linearity but then sidestep the problem of temporality altogether. By not addressing the temporal aspect of their corpus their attempts to clarify this tendency become muddied. Although temporal reordering is too simplistic for analysis, the importance of time to the medium cannot be overlooked. Temporality is an irreducible part of complex narration. Therefore, if we want to understand the inherent complexity in these narratives we must first comprehend the basics of their temporal endeavours.

To that end, the second chapter will address approaches to narrative time in cognitive psychology and its relevance to film, narrative, and cognition. Recent research in cognitive psychology has indicated that temporal cognition in narratives and real-life events have a lot in common (Zwann 1996, Magliano et al. 2001, Speer and Zacks 2005, Speer et al. 2007, Weingartner and Myers 2013). These studies suggest that narrative time is not first and foremost understood as linear but involves parsing narratives into event ‘segments’. Thus how temporal events are committed to memory is a process of segmentation that does not foreclose non-linear ordering. These studies suggest that this narrative comprehension technique (or event segmentation) is also used to organize events that happen in day-to-day life. Thus the mental organisation of time is an integral aspect of narrative comprehension.

The third chapter will approach time in literary narratology and elaborate how this can be effectively applied to film analysis. The classical narratological distinction between the fabula and

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syuzhet is often appropriated as binary concepts that are definitive of the narrative temporality. The fabula is the raw temporal events of a narrative and the syuzhet is the organizational structure of the story. Separating narration into this binary, however, produces a hierarchical structure which assumes that the narrative story can be understood and unravelled in terms of the ‘raw’ temporal ordering. Narrative time is seldom so simply understood. As Gerard Genette claims “a description is necessarily sketchy and even misleading if other elements of narrative temporality such as duration and frequency are not also taken into account.” (Genette, 2002, 28). Genette suggests that the fabula and syuzhet – or order of the narrative – is part of a triad of categories that make up narrative time. Other narratologists dismiss the fabula/syuzhet distinction altogether suggesting that narrative time is inextricably linked to spatial setting and narrative patterns of a particular epoch (Bakhtin), or that the narrative is a successive whole that is future oriented and envisioned through past experience (Ricoeur). These theorists are encountering narrative time from the perspective of literary theory. In turning our attention towards film, these theories should not be taken and applied verbatim, though nor should they be ignored completely. What has been thrashed out over years of literary narratology can be contemplated and even adapted for careful use in the cinematic domain. In weaving together temporal cognition with film theory and narratology, a thorough account of the multiplicity of narrative time that allows for complexity can begin to take shape.

It is through explicating these crucial aspects of narrative time that this thesis will avoid the common confusion that is symptomatic of the aforementioned film scholars. Temporal cognition elaborates on the formation of narrative understanding without simplification; from there I can illustrate the multiplicity of temporal possibilities in narrative. Thus, this thesis explores the fundamental role of time in complex films, as well as time used as an artistic tool in film more generally. By elucidating complexity without reduction, I will illustrate why the exploration of time continues to be so essential to the cinematic medium.

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Chapter 1: Complex Narratives in Film Theory

The current spate of film-theoretical writing on complex narratives seem to place this tendency as emerging from the early 90s (or even late 80s) and expanding right up to the present day. They notice the growing filmic interest in puzzles, mind-games, and non-linear plots. They each try to take a unique angle in order to embrace this new foray into complexity. However, they end up dealing with complexity in predominantly two distinct ways. Some want to affirm it but do so with extraneous explanations derived from other disciplines. Others wish to illustrate that the narratives are not that complex after all, so try to subsume the narrative into the supposedly primary organization of the linear timeline.

1.1 Three Reductionist Theories: Bordwell, Branigan and Cameron

David Bordwell falls under the second approach; he tries to illustrate that ‘forking-path’ narratives are not that complex when we take into account the basic tenets of narration. These forking-paths narratives depict multiple parallel possibilities (or branches) which furcate from a particular event or decision. His corpus consists of films such as

Sliding Doors (Howitt, 1998), Blind Chance (1987) and Run Lola Run (1998) which – despite their apparent structure of parallel timelines – Bordwell suggests are actually structured by a linear arrangement of time. He tries to subsume

these narratives into a linear composition and he bolsters his argument with an appeal to folk-psychology1_{. Bordwell begins his discussion with an extract from a very complex narrative in literature,}

although he quickly pushes it aside and turns to much more simplistic presentations in film. The films that he addresses use only two or three bifurcating branches. This suits his endeavour well, as trying to explain these films in terms of a linear trajectory is then relatively undemanding. In Run Lola Run in particular, Bordwell seems to actually appeal to two different linear structures. The first and perhaps most obvious linear structure is that of the syuzhet, or the events in the order as shown to the audience (see figure 1a). Bordwell notes that Lola, like the audience, appears to have ‘lived through’ all the possible paths shown. Yet he also claims there is one path that is the least

1 Bordwell’s allusion to folk-psychology is meant to emphasise the importance of a cognitively manageable plotlines. However his use of the term and assumptions around it are problematic. I will return to this in greater detail in the epigraph to chapter two.

Figure 1 a

Run Lola Run: the syuzhet of the narrative.

Intro 1st Run 2nd Run 3rd Run

Figure 1 b

Run Lola Run: Bordwell’s assumption of the timeline that ‘really happened’.

3rd Run Intro

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hypothetical or that ‘really happened’ (Bordwell, 2002, 100). This suggests, that there are not multiple possible paths, but rather one ‘real’ linear path (see figure 1b). Bordwell confuses a chain of cause and effect with a linear temporal ordering; in

trying to subsume the fabula of a story into a linear syuzhet he has overlooked the prospect that all possibilities can simultaneously run parallel without denying a chain of cause and effect (see figure 1c).

Other theorists have also criticised Bordwell by claiming that he tries to return these films to ‘business as usual’ (Simons 2010, Elsaesser 2009). However this is not something that Bordwell himself would disagree with; he wants to emphasise that these films are not really as complex as they first seem. What is particularly troublesome for Bordwell’s approach, however, is that it makes “one wonder why the writer or director went to such trouble in the first place” (Elsaesser, 2009, 21). Why use multiple timelines if only one is the ‘right one’ or is more important to the characters and the plot? Bordwell’s answer is that these films are interested in depicting folk-psychological processes on the screen; they present a literal depiction of a ‘what-if’ thought experiment.

Although he contemplates these films’ ‘what if’ structure, Bordwell also appeals to a linear trajectory or the ‘final path’ (figure 1b) through the narrative – the one that ‘really happened’ – because he believes this is cognitively more manageable for the audience. However, contrary to Bordwell’s assertion, the way that these three forking paths are depicted plays with the juxtaposition between the syuzhet (figure 1a) and the fabula (figure 1c). For example, in the second run Lola remembers to take the ‘safety’ off her gun despite having to be told how to use the feature in the first run. In addition, there are also plenty of moments in Lola’s branching timelines that she does not learn from, such as the nature of the conversation in her father’s office. She is just as shocked in the second run as in the first when she learns of her father’s infidelity. Each of Lola’s branching timelines plays with the temporality of the narrative whole. This is because the film acknowledges the nature of the medium, thereby playing with the differences between the syuzhet and the fabula. Thus, insisting that these films are ‘what-if’ thought experiments and that the final path is ‘real’ ignores the nuances of the narrative’s temporality. Bordwell’s account does not explicate fully the temporal framework of these films.

Edward Branigan attempts to build on Bordwell’s narrowly defined corpus by casting his net wider. In his attempt to delineate ‘multiple draft’ narratives he includes less easily digestible films, emphasizing their need to be recognized in this categorization of complex films. Branigan clings on to the

Figure 1 c

Run Lola Run: the fabula of narrative event.

1st Run 2nd Run 3rd Run Intro

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coat tails of Bordwell’s theory whilst trying not to dissolve the complexity of the narrative. Unfortunately, generating a list of films (and he lists a lot) and not explicating your argument convincingly does not make a strong statement. Branigan picks up on the concept of ‘multiple drafts’ that Bordwell alludes to in his aforementioned article. The concept of multiple drafts is, at its core, another name for the ‘what really happened’ timeline (figure 1b). Branigan attempts to bolster his argument with an appeal to Dennett’s multiple draft theory of consciousness, a cognitivist theory which treats the mind as an information processing unit. This theory rejects the Cartesian theatre idea of the mind. Dennett’s theory instead suggests that mental activity entails processing large quantities of sensory input and postulates many multiple drafts of the outcomes of situations. However, Branigan merely uses his theory to make the relatively uncontroversial claim that the cinema is well equipped to depict mental experiences. Thus, Branigan’s attempt to retain the complexity of the narrative seems to be, once again, a reductive endeavour.

The ‘modular’ narrative is a formulation by Allan Cameron (2006) and another attempt to reduce complex narratives to something simpler, albeit with a little more subtlety. This approach focuses upon selection and combination, thereby breaking up the narrative into smaller parts. By spatialising the narrative in such a way the flow of time appears to be removed; indeed time is merely a by-product of the narrative sequencing of data. This by itself is not completely irreconcilable. However, Cameron takes this further and suggests that “a sense of order emerges from these chaotic events, if only as a temporary effect” (Cameron, 2006, 77). Jan Simons, in a critique of Cameron’s formulation, illustrates the problem that underlies Cameron’s claim. He notes that Cameron’s argument rests on faulty claims regarding determination, predestination, and the order of events (Simons, 2008, 117). Cameron suggests that in reversing the order of the fabula there is a sense in which the overarching narrative is imbued with predestination. However, this does not necessarily follow. Cameron’s approach, then, places too much emphasis on the order of events which is itself focusing or relying too much on the concept of succession. As with Genette’s claim that was mentioned earlier, an account of narrative becomes sketchy at best if we only look at the ordering and do not take into account other aspects of the narrative’s temporality. Too much emphasis on order and the effect of the narrative whole becomes distorted.

1.2 An Appeal to Psychology without Time: Elsaesser

Thomas Elsaesser’s theoretical approach to complex films declines to follow the path of the foregoing theorists. He elucidates some interesting criticisms of their approaches, suggesting that they are merely “reducing these films to business as usual” (Elsaesser, 2009, 21). Elsaesser suggests instead that this movement towards complexity is synonymous with the rise of new technologies. He claims that new

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technologies not only produce new ways of storing data but also new ways of organizing stories. This idea coheres well with the development, changes, and reciprocal relations between not just different artistic mediums but also different influences from daily life in narrative comprehension. However Elsaesser’s account does not bring clarity to the table as it ignores the temporality of the complex narratives it addresses.

Rather than emphasising narrative structure, Elsaesser’s explanation appeals to psychoanalysis and the psychological state of the character. He calls his corpus ‘mind-game’ films, explaining that this is because they often play games on one of two levels. They can play games with the audience (by withholding information or being purposefully deceptive or elliptical) or with the characters themselves (who often do not know who is playing with them). The crux, for Elsaesser, is that mind-game films are examples of productive pathologies. These productive pathologies usually fall into three types: paranoia, schizophrenia and amnesia (Elsaesser, 2009, 24). Elsaesser explains that in these films the illnesses have usually befallen the protagonist, that the film takes their mental state as both a thematic and stylistic driving force, and that judgment is usually suspended (i.e. there is no bias given with regard to the duality of sane/insane). Thus they are supportive of, and projecting from, the perspective of the protagonist’s pathology.

Under the heading of paranoia Elsaesser lists Flightplan (Schwentke, 2005), What Lies Beneath (Zemeckis, 2000), The Village (Shyamalan, 2004), Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940), and The Others (Amenábar, 2001). Noting that most of the protagonists are female, Elsaesser explains that in those films the “women fear for their sanity because of the mixed messages they get from the world around them, or are driven insane by husbands whom they no longer think they can trust, until they are either disabused of their delusions, or in the case that their worst fears are confirmed” (Elsaesser, 2009, 25). However in Flightplan, this stereotype is knowingly reversed, “by making the younger man the villain, not the racial or ethnic other, and the unwittingly colluding therapist is a woman, rather than an instance of paternal authority” (ibid). The ‘productive’ part of this pathology, he claims, is that it is a by-product of a contemporary network society, in that these protagonists are able to discover new connections that are not seen by others. With regards to schizophrenia, Elsaesser lists Spellbound (Hitchcock, 1943), Repulsion (Polanski, 1965), Spider (Cronenberg, 2002) and Donnie Darko (2001). With regards to Donnie Darko Elsaesser emphasises Donnie’s schizophrenia as something the film contrasted to the small-town suburban community and the traditional nuclear family. He adds that the ample clues to the supernatural, string theory, and black holes “almost seem to be planted in the film, in order to divert attention from some of the more ‘unframed’ events that structure the narrative” (Elsaesser, 2009, 28). The third and final category of amnesia is devoted to Memento (2000). Elsaesser explains that “considered as productive

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pathology, Leonard’s amnesia would remind one of the importance of forgetting, rather than remembering” (ibid).

In sum, Elsaesser sees the salient feature of all of these films as related to problems of (un)reliability. With a view to playing mind-games with the audience or between the characters, we are presented with unreliable narrators or protagonist whose unreliability is at the root of their pathology. Their pathology is also something that is productive because, it not only can be interpreted as socially productive but also as a narrative production in the film-world that produces perspectives and false images. Perhaps then we could understand the unreliability of a character as a ‘complex intention’ that creates a notion of complexity in the narrative (cf. Currie, 1995). However, it is not (or perhaps not only) unreliability that is the source of complex narration.

A discussion on the unreliability of the protagonists is undoubtedly relevant to the aforementioned films however it does not explain the complexity inherent in the narrative composition. Elsaesser’s flippant comment about allusions to ‘the supernatural, string theory, and black holes’ in Donnie Darko is emblematic in this sense. Time, or more precisely time-travel, are not just unusual allusions in the film but rather are part of the content and structure of the film itself. Donnie Darko follows two main themes – time-travel and schizophrenia - and it is not exactly subtle about either. Just as Memento is about a man with amnesia, Donnie Darko is a film about time-travel and schizophrenia. Elsaesser’s avoidance of the temporal aspect of narrative becomes heavy-handed when applied to film that takes time [-travel] as its main thematic content.

Although Elsaesser’s commentary on mental or ‘productive’ pathologies provides some interesting analysis of unreliability, he completely ignores the temporality of the narrative. He rightly critiques Bordwell and others for approaching complex storytelling in a way that attempts to restore the narratives to their ‘proper’ function (Elsaesser, 2009, 21). He suggests that they go awry by “simply extending classical narratology to include some of the recent work in cognitive psychology, about how the mind organises visual cues, how perception, identification, and mental schema function” (ibid). Yet, as mentioned in the foregoing, Bordwell, Cameron and Branigan reduce and over simplify the temporal aspect of the films they address. Thus it is not that they extend their explanation, but rather, contract it. Their attempts to simplify complexity do away with what they originally intended to address. Elsaesser, on the other hand, attempts to retain some notion of complexity but arbitrarily limits his corpus. His account gives no insight into the complexity of these films. Elsaesser claims that “complex narratives are only one of the games [that these films] play with our minds” (Elsaesser, 2009, 40). However, I would go as far as to say the converse: that ‘mind-games’ are only one of the types of films that have complex

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narratives. Elsaesser has an interesting account of ‘mind-game’ films but does not explicate the issue at hand. Thus, in order to broaden comprehension we need to step back to and get our grips on narrative time.

1.3 Attempting to Retain the Flow of Time: Simons

Jan Simons’ discussion of complex narratives approaches the topic more broadly and attempts to reconcile complex storytelling with narratology, scientific theories, and time. In his 2008 article Simons sees this loosely defined category of films as proposing new “ways of audience address and spectator engagement” (Simons, 2008, 111). He sees these films as borrowing ideas from recent developments in the sciences “and propagated in modern culture by technologies like Virtual Realities and computer games” (Simons, 2008, 112). Although Simons discusses game theory and causality, it is clear that the main explanatory force of his account comes from chaos theory (or as he calls it, complexity theory). Chaos theory describes complex systems. It does not entail the absence of order but rather a large quantity of very complex information: “chaotic behaviour in the contemporary scientific sense is manifestly intelligible” (Kellert, 1992, 33). That is, they are intelligible if the initial conditions of a system are known fully. “The central insight of chaos theory is that complex and unpredictable behaviour can occur in systems governed by mathematically simple equations” (ibid). In his article, Simons describes complexity theory as a way of comprehending a certain probabilistic path through branches of forking possibilities. He claims that the complexity of chaos theory can be worked out through reasoning backwards and that this is analogous to narratological endeavours, he goes on:

Time in stories, games, and complex systems is irreversible: the a-temporal models of narratology, game theory, and the sciences of complexity are only intellectual tools to chart the ‘state spaces’, that is, the set of all possible configurations stories, games, and complex dynamical systems can take (Simons, 2008, 120).

Simons relies heavily on Ilya Prigogine to support his discussion of chaos theory and its application in the discussion of narrative time. Although Prigogine was a physical chemist who worked on chaos theory, the book that Simons quotes from, The End of Certainty (1997) is not part of Prigogine’s work that earned him a Noble Prize in 1977. The End of Certainty is an attempt to use the principles of chaos theory to prove that time has an irreversible directionality. However, chaos theory “is like Euclidean geometry: it is not a scientific theory; it is, rather, a set of mathematical statements” (Ekeland, 1998, 137). It describes a closed system where the initial conditions are known and it describes the systems tendency towards complexity, unpredictability, and high sensitivity to initial conditions. Chaos theory has been modified to apply to so many disciplines by those who seek to exaggerate the conclusions for their own ends. The core concept so frequently stolen and moulded to fit various disciplines – from

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business administration to social anthropology – is that chaos theory seeks to illustrate the roots of simplicity in complex phenomena. The colloquially know ‘butterfly effect’ has its roots in one of chaos theory’s principles which claims that the slightest changes to initial conditions can cause largely different outcomes. This said, it is important to note that “scientific theory tells us something about the world, while mathematics tells us something about mathematics” (ibid). Chaos theory is a set of mathematical formulations, not a theory that tells us something about the world. Prigogine is trying to prove that time flows irreversibly in one direction because he feels that most scientific theories seem to deny this. They treat time as a fourth spatial dimension which, Prigogine believes, forecloses an irreversible directionality of time. As Huw Price rightly points out in a review of Prigogine’s book:

Prigogine paints with a broad brush. For example, he seems to equate explaining the thermodynamic asymmetry with finding a physical basis for the apparent flow of time. But these are different issues. Someone who treats time on a par with space, denying that there is objective flow, will still acknowledge that the Universe is asymmetric along its temporal axis, in the way described by the second law of thermodynamics. If Prigogine's methods do explain thermodynamic irreversibility, they simply account for this asymmetry — they do not give us objective flow [of time] (Price, 1997, online access).

Mathematical equations are ill placed to describe concepts outside of the systems they were intended describe. If it cannot be used to explain the directionality of time, then it is even more ill-placed in a discussion of narrative time in film theory. Furthermore, chaos theory asks for integral aspects to known such as the initial conditions of a system in order to explain the simple mathematical equations at its core. If we were to superimpose chaos theory onto narrative this would need to be accounted for. Asking for the initial conditions or basic equations of narratives would give an incredibly abstracted reduction of the narrative.

Simons also links ‘reasoning backwards through possible forks’ to game theory. The model he describes, or at least the point he is trying to get across, fits slightly better with game theory. Game theory accounts for (rational) human players and tries to tell us something about their possible future actions, thereby telling us something about the world. Human agents are not accounted for in chaos theory and they inevitably turn up in narratives (or at the very least anthropomorphized non-human agents). Further, game theory also can account for this reasoning through branches of possibilities which he sees as integral to our understanding of narrative. However there is still a simple underlying idea that has been over exaggerated here. New technologies, advancements in science and mathematics, and fictional narrative mediums have a reciprocal relation to one another. Chaos theory becomes a popular theory and when understood narratively it influences storytelling devices. We cannot explain our understanding of narratives by using chaos theory but rather that it influences the narrative content. Let me return to Run Lola Run as an example. In each of her timelines Lola brushes-past, bumps-into,

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and runs-by the same characters repeatedly. Her interaction with them sends their futures spinning drastically into different directions in each run. The film illustrates this with fast inter-cutting snapshots of each person’s future. This is the narrative depiction of the ‘butterfly effect’. However it does not explain how we understand and cognitively manage the complexity in the narrative. Seeking explanations in chaos theory and game theory can lead us awry in this respect.

Simons’ discussion of complex narratives shows a strong effort to retain the flow of time in these films. Although his attempt to find explanatory force in scientific and mathematical theories leads his endeavour astray. Simons does bring up strong criticisms against other theorists that reduce the narratives they address, although he can’t save his own theory from a similar fate. Time is an integral and unique part of the filmic medium. Simons suggests that “contingency, probability, and change over time have always been the raw material of stories” (Simons, 2008, 124). This is an interesting point that deserves to be explored but reducing narratives to simpler structures or using misplaced theories to explain them does not bring any clarity to the discussion.

As the forgoing has shown, these contemporary theorists have tried to explain a tendency towards narrative complexity in film narration but have only resulted in explaining away the complexity itself. For this reason I will spend the second chapter explaining in detail cognitive psychological understanding of narrative time or, more precisely, our comprehension of changes in narrative time. This is because once we elucidate how narrative is comprehended we can situate complexity within that. Furthermore, it will give us the tools to build an account of the narrative temporality from the ground up.

Before chapter two, it is worth our while to take some time to explicate further two key concepts here. Firstly I wish to pause for a moment on what it means for something to be complex. As Simons’ discussion of chaos theory illuminated, this idea of understanding what it means to be complex is very easy to get lost win. Secondly, I am going to explicate the fundamental aspects of what makes something a narrative and not just a string of events. Thus we will have the foundations of what makes a narrative comprehensible. This is crucial because there may be many things that we can see as overly complex but that are also not understood as a narrative.

1.4 Breaking-Down Complexity and Narrative to their Basic Components

In the attempt to bring clarity to what we mean by complexity, it is useful to separate two different types of complexity that can be associated with narrative. Firstly, there are those that are daedal, as in something skilfully created. The workings of a chime clock are daedal, their function

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is simple to understand but on first inspection there are multiple complex parts. Once the principles are understood the complexity is less apparent, though their intricate arrangement is something that can be admired. On the other hand, there are those that are labyrinthine. They are also complex yet on closer inspection there appears to be no singular clear explanation and many ways of getting lost. However that does not entail that there is no purpose to the overall composition or no meaning to be found. Both accounts seem to resist explanation but do not resist understanding, we can remark on the paths in the maze or describe the cogs of a clock but we can’t separate this endeavour completely from their overall impact of the whole object. We can look at complex narratives in the same way. Time, then, is the cogs or the winding-paths but the narrative whole cannot be left by the wayside either. They are important aspects that need to be considered in unison.

In order to understand how a narrative becomes complex, we must first consider what makes a basic narrative. As Bordwell and Thompson suggest, “we can consider narrative to be a chain of events linked by cause and effect and occurring in time and space” (original italics, Bordwell and Thompson, 2013, 73). This seems to be very intuitive and as good a place to start as any. This will be our working definition of narrative. There are two parts to this definition. Firstly, a chain of events linked by cause and effect implies that the absence of causality indicates the absence of narrative. Bordwell, in his explication of narrative, mentions that “a random string of events is hard to understand as a story…we have trouble grasping [a random string of events] as a narrative because we are unable to determine how the events are connected by causality or time or space” (ibid). Although it is hard for the spectator to discern the causality in a seemingly random sequence, it is important to note that even very disparate images can still create meaning in the spectator’s mind. Firstly we can think of the Kuleshov Effect, a technique in montage, whereby an image of a face shown in quick succession with another unrelated image is imbued with meaning in the spectator’s mind. The meaning that the spectator infers depends on the subsequent image (a bowl of soup and the face seems hungry, a coffin and the face is sad, and so on). The relation between images is generated in the spectator’s mind. Even though the editor may have chosen to put the images together to induce such a connection it is still the spectator who creates meaning. This is exactly where David Hume, a prominent philosopher on the concept of causality, places the connection between cause and effect: in the mind of the person observing the events. Causal connections between events are associations in the mind. As Hume points out when we observe one billiard ball strike another we infer that the second ball will move due to our past experiences. He states:

The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it (Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1772, online access).

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There is nothing, according to Hume, in the objects or events themselves - nothing that we could empirically point to - that can be said to be ‘causation’. Thus, it is by associations in the mind that cause and effect is comprehended. Thus the first part of our definition of narrative, ‘a chain of events linked by cause and effect’, depends on the spectator’s comprehension. Following on from this I take complex narratives to be something that stretches the link between cause and effect to almost (but not quite) disassociation. Thus a complex narrative is something that plays with our ability to connect cause and effect, be it through reversal2_{or increasingly disparate images and thus more difficult connections. This}

complexity is then a measure or difficulty rating of our attempts to connect cause and effect. From this it follows that when cause and effect are not perceived there is an absence of narrative. This also entails that narrative causality is made possible by the spectator’s engagement with the events; if cause and effect are associations in the mind it is the spectator that thus discerns the comprehensibility of the narrative. Complexity is after all, “not an intrinsic property of the phenomena under study, but as much a function of the complexity of the concepts and language available to the observer” (Tsoukas and Hatch quoted in Simons, 2008, 116). This may also suggest why there are such varied responses to ‘complex’ films. This part of the definition of narrative emphasizes the importance of the spectator’s relation to the narrative chain of cause and effect.

The second part of our working definition of narrative is that it must be occurring in time and space. However, can we perceive an event occurring outside of time and space? Tentatively, we could perceive something outside of an objective time, i.e., a protagonist navigating in an environment where time appears to have stopped for everyone else. But in order to perceive any action there needs to be the passage of time, even if it is only local to the protagonist (i.e. time must pass for at least one agent). Temporal and spatial articulations are mutually dependent. An occurrence in space is always at a particular point in time. But how are time and space ordinarily used in narrative? Temporal and spatial continuity is often not strictly adhered to in cinema, as was noted in the introductory passage. While the cinematic events may not be told in chronological order, they presuppose a temporal/spatial continuity that is often established within the film. Even non-linear narratives work within an “[established] ‘coherent’ spatial and temporal continuity” (Burch, 2000, 74). Thus, what is needed to make a narrative comprehensible is a coherent sense of time and space. Therefore, I shall instead make a simple amendment to this working definition: it must be occurring in coherent time and space. To have a narrative that is temporally and spatially ambiguous, that plays with the structure and audience's

2 By reversal I also mean backwards causation, not just merely the narratological method of backwards reasoning. The former is that which I not only believe is entirely possible but integral to a time-travel narrative. For more detailed account of backwards causation see Dummet’s 1954 paper: “Can an Effect Precede its Cause”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 28

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expectations of continuity, requires more than a re-shuffling of 'beginning-middle-end' or the insertion of flashbacks. It requires gaps in time which generate obscurity and where “the viewer's sense of 'real' space [is] constantly subverted” (Burch, 2000, 74). Importantly, to retain a narrative structure it must still operate within a coherent time and space, otherwise the narrative would become so obscure both causality and narrative integrity are lost.

This will be the groundwork for the concepts of complexity and narrative. As the foregoing explained, the basic tenets of a narrative structure rely on temporal formulations being understood as a narrative. It indicates that there are two important features in a narrative that are mutually constitutive: the spectator’s engagement with the narrative and the internal coherence of the space-time construction. However, as we are well aware, narratives are made up of frequent cuts, jumps, and ellipses. So what are the most basic components of our narrative understanding? For the answer we must look towards how we understand time in narrative.

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Chapter 2: Comprehending Narrative Time and Narrative Formation

Bordwell begins his article ‘Film Futures’ with a fascinating extract from Jorge Luis Borges’ novel The Garden of Forking Paths. In which Borges describes complex ideas of time, multiple timelines, and stories-within-stories. Bordwell acknowledges this ‘growing dizzying web’ of time, then turns his discussion to more simplistic forking path narratives and tries to subsume them into a linear trajectory. Why does he even bother mentioning Borges at all? It is not simply for the namesake of ‘forking paths’ which is Bordwell’s moniker for this type of narrative. By showing temporal complexity in another narrative he is not trying to mitigate his claim that linear temporality is a fundamental conception of time. Bordwell does mention an objection to Borges’ conception of many possible worlds but it is not clear that he using Borges as an example of complexity in excess either. Bordwell is, rather, trying to differentiate between a narrative that is influenced by philosophy or physics and what he suggests is a shared feature of all narratives. This shared feature is supposedly the use of folk psychological concepts because they are easier for the audience to digest. He further uses this idea to bolster his claim that the final path ‘really happened’ so that he can concludes that simplicity (i.e. linear time) is preferable due to it being cognitively easier to manage. Bordwell is assuming that linear temporality is the layman’s way of comprehending time. He is proposing that philosophy, physics or psychological thought experiments are just the icing on the narrative cake, if you will.

Bordwell appeals to folk psychology as the basis of narrative understanding, he defines it as “the ordinary processes we use to make sense of the world” (Bordwell, 2002, 90). He goes on, “perceptual skills we’ve developed to give us reliable information about the world are deployed no less commandingly in following stories” (ibid). That we comprehend the events in our lives in a similar way to narratives is an intuitive assumption. This has been confirmed by recent studies, as I will delineate in the subsequent discussion. However, Bordwell’s insistence on a folk psychological explanation takes an argument regarding narrative time and dumps it rather heavy handedly into another debate. Folk psychology is a term borrowed from the theories of mind debate. Folk psychology, in a theories of mind context, is posed as an explanation for how we understand and predict the behaviours of others. This notion of folk psychological ‘mindreading’ suggests that we can know the mental processes of other people through speculative theorizing from our own experience. The two main arguments in this debate suggest that we do this either by simulating ourselves in another’s position or by creating theories about how people normally behave in these situations. Bordwell is adopting this term to bolster his claim that forking-path narratives are based upon a ‘what-if’ axiom: a common way of projecting oneself through time in order to anticipate future events. In relation to folk psychology this idea would entail that our ‘theory of mind’ can be used to project our mindreading ability onto our future-selves, so that we could

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try and anticipate future events. Bordwell is then saying that folk psychology is what bifurcates the plotline in the forking-path narratives and we find them cognitively manageable because they also appeal to simplicity. Although Bordwell does not explicitly qualify his use of the term folk psychology in any detail, he could also be merely (or additionally) using the term ‘folk’ psychology to extraneously emphasise how ‘commonsensical’ this type of cognitive endeavour is. Unfortunately without much greater explication it seems that Bordwell just shrugs his shoulders and points to ‘commonsense’ ideas of psychology. Bordwell has not only mistaken how we cognitively organise narratives and real life temporal events, he has also assumed that linear time is the most basic temporal formulation. He has even disallowed the reciprocity of cognition, narrative and time.

2.1 Cognitive Psychology and Narrative Time

Narrative time, its comprehension and how it is committed to memory, has been of particular interest in cognitive psychology in the past 20 years. Our immediate experience of time is dynamic and ongoing. However, studies show that our cognitive interpretation of these continuous actions are “parsed, or segmented, into events” (Ezzyat and Davachi, 2011, 243). Experiments have shown that – in reading texts – this parsing into event segments is triggered by shifts in the narrative, with temporal shifts being noted as particularly significant triggers (Zwann 1996, Weingartner and Myers, Speer et al. 2007, Speer and Zacks 2005, and Ditman et al. 2008). The reader or viewer constructs “mental models of the current activity using a combination of information from the environment and knowledge about the typical structure of events in the world” (Speer et al. 2007, 454). This coheres with Bordwell’s assumption that our ordinary perceptual skills assist in narrative comprehension. A significant shift in time, or space and time, encourages the formation of an event boundary. The reader or viewer must then update their mental model: this requires increased cognitive attention. Initial studies suggested that the larger the temporal gap in the narrative the more cognitively demanding it was, or to use the psychological terminology the greater the ‘processing load’. Rolf A. Zwann explains:

When readers read a narrative, their default assumption is that successively reported events occurred successively and contiguously. However, specific lexical (e.g., time adverbials) or grammatical (tense) information may function as a processing cue to the reader to…deactivate the current time interval, and set up a new one (Zwann, 1996, 1205).

This entails that as soon as “the incoming information is incoherent with the evolving structure, readers will start developing a new substructure” (ibid). In the study by Zwann, readers were given a text with a temporal adverbial phrase of either ‘after a moment’, ‘after an hour’, or ‘after a year’ and the reading times were measured by the pressing of a button when the subjects had completed the sentence. The longer the reader took to read the text, Zwann claims, the more likely it was impacting upon their

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processing load. As has been noted in subsequent studies (Speer et al 2007, Weingartner and Myers 2013), the experiment text used by Zwann did not mimic natural reading. Thus, the cognitive effort to incorporate new information (the increased ‘processing load’) could be correlated to the clunky texts that the test subjects were asked to read. Thereby, the increased cognitive effort would not be related to time shifts but a bewildering severing of the narrative continuity. Undeniably using the adverbial phrase ‘after a year’ without any explanation in the midst of describing a football game would be confusing to any reader.

In experiments carried out by Weingartner and Myers, the test subjects were given much more naturalistic texts to read and they eye movements were recorded to indicate the processing load required (i.e. eyes that linger over the text for longer mean longer reading time). Weingartner and Myers noticed that sentence structure and flow of the text were critical. They used anaphoric sentences after the adverbial to strengthen the connection of a perceived narrative whole. This entailed that the experiments more accurately tested the impact of temporal markers on the formation of event boundaries in a naturalistic reading setting. They still found that “the explicit discontinuation of an event leads to a processing load” (Weingartner and Myers, 2013, 292). In a study by Speer and Zacks it was found that readers “were more likely to perceive an event boundary at the points at which a temporal reference indicated a change in narrative time [and that] any temporal reference may provide an anchor point for establishing an event boundary” (Speer and Zacks, 2005, 137). Studies that used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) also drew similar conclusions from the responses evoked by the activation of brain regions and they found that they were the same areas “involved in the comprehension of everyday activities” (Speer et al., 454, 2007). This correlation between how we understand narrative structures and real life events is remarked on by all of the aforementioned studies; the way we record memories and how we interpret narratives are inextricably linked.

Perhaps then Bordwell is right after all and linear temporality (or a ‘continuous flow’) is the most cognitively manageable way to understand narratives – as Zwann suggests above. The brain may prioritize the linear organisation of a narrative because it is the most similar to everyday activities and experience (figure 2a). However, if we look more closely at the aforementioned studies, linearity does not take dominance. Narrative structures are parsed into events. Our comprehension of the narrative is an evolving structure simply one of many ways to temporally order events. If narrative comprehension and committing ‘real life’ events to memory are subject to the same processes, this still does not entail linearity. Narrative comprehension is best described as a web of mental connections where the organizational structure need not be linear (figure 2b). In both figure 2a and 2b the circles depicted are events, with the circumference being the event boundary. The diameter is dependent on the quantity of

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information retained within each event; factors such as temporal duration, density (of information contained) and velocity (of changes within the timeframe) will influence size. As the two diagrams show the organisational structure has no inherent need to be linear to retain the flow of time through the events. However, do we even need to retain the flow of time to make events comprehensible? Perhaps we do not. One particular issue with the above experiments is that reading narrative text is not radically similar to everyday experiences, firstly we receive information predominantly in a visual format and secondly we cannot pause to linger at the end of an event for longer than the time it is allocated. Furthermore, as Zwann notes, people “do not jump around in time, for example, form the present to the past and then into the future” (Zwann, 1206, 1996). Although people do not, our memories and future anticipations do jump about in such a way. Thus, to understand the impact of temporal jumps on cognition we must also look to the impacts of event boundaries on memory retention and retrieval, as well as event boundary formation in narrative visual mediums.

2.2 Cognitive Psychology and Film

In a study by Magliano et al.(2001) the test subjects were presented with film extracts from three films3_{and asked to indicate whenever they thought that the “situation or circumstance in a given scene}

had changed” (Magliano et al., 2001, 539). The intention of the study was to monitor shifts in space and time as perceived by the film viewers. Prior to showing the viewers these film extracts, the experimenters devised an objective [sic] way of parsing the films into possible ‘event segments’. They saw the shot as

3 The extracts were taken from the beginning, middle and end of each of Moonraker (Gilbert, 1979), Star Trek II: The Wrath of

Khan (Meyer, 1982), and Jeremiah Johnson (Pollack, 1972). e1 = first event in sequential order of experience e2 = second event in sequential order of experience ….. en = nth event in sequential order of experience e1 e2 e4 e3 e5 Figure 2 b

A Possible Configuration of Narrative

e1

e2 e4 e3

e5

Figure 2 a

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their unit of analysis, roughly equating it to a sentence in narrative text. Then they analysed each shot to “determine whether there was a break in continuity in time, movement, and/or region” (Magliano et al., 2001, 538). Then they compared these breaks in the films with the viewers results to see which of them they agreed to be a significant ‘change in situation’, i.e. an event boundary. They found that events occurring concurrently in the storyworld but in different locations were seen as “part of the same causal-temporal sequences of events” (Magliano et al., 2001, 542). Thus “shifts in region alone were not enough to create a new situation” but “shifts in region did [have] an impact on the perception that a situation has changed when they co-occurred with temporal ellipsis” (ibid). Thus, Magliano et. al concluded that the comprehension of narrative film and narrative texts were similar, suggesting that the mechanisms for event understanding operates “independently of medium or mode of experience” (Magliano et al., 2001, 533). They describe the film viewer’s comprehension of narrative as follows:

As each story event and action is comprehended, understanders monitor changes in continuity in entities, time, space, causality, and intentionality. This indexing provides a basis for monitoring coherence because it enables an understander to determine how incoming information is related to the prior context. To the extent that a current event shares an index of a particular dimension with an event that is in current working memory, a link will be formed between them, via the index. If no link can be established, a new index will be formed on that dimension (ibid).

This explanation concurs with my earlier delineation of narratives being a chain of events linked by cause and effect that occur in coherent time and space. Events are linked through the mental activity of the spectator who uses their current working memory in order to form links. If no link can be made a new index (i.e. event) is formed on that dimension. This does not entail that the causal chain is broken; it can continue across events or be consistent within isolated events. Being formed along the same dimension suggests that the events are closely related, if not contiguous. This means that the event ‘circles’ are connected and that their connection indicates the formation of a narrative (figure 2a and 2b). Magliano et al. in their study focus on the impact of shifts in time and space because, they claim, they are the most basic dimensions of events: “[e]very event has an obligatory spatial and temporal index, that is, it always occurs at a certain time an in a certain location” (Magliano et al., 2001, 534). Their study explicitly illustrates the importance of time and space to the viewer’s formation of event boundaries.

The multiple formations and web-like structure of narrative, as given above, may seem to preclude the flow of time that seems to be obligatory in linear formations. Perhaps, if we turn our attention to the temporal structure within each event module, we could say that time flows continuously, in a linear fashion. Figure 3 shows a singular coherent event module

that occurs across three concurrent locations. It is hard to see this as

a strictly linear sequence when the multiple spatial locations are Figure 3

The Internal Structure of an Event Module

Location 2 Location 1

Intro

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taken into consideration. This is an instance of parallel editing in film. When we look to both spatial and temporal coordinates the straight arrow of time bifurcates into a fork of space-time. But why include space? As Magliano et al. assert, time and space are essential features of an event. They explicitly state that when temporal and spatial shifts occurred together, an event boundary is more likely to be formed. The formation of event boundaries organises and structures our understanding of narratives. Furthermore, the inclusion of the spatial dimension seems particularly relevant to the filmic medium; in their study Maglaino et al. recorded two spatial changes, changes in spatial regions and changes in spatial movement. Although not all event boundaries were perceived as forming when both time and space shifted, this study illustrated the importance of both factors being measured. Thus, even internally within an event module linearity is often not retained or, even, needed. In addition, the importance of space to narrative time has come to the fore. With this in mind it is now time to turn to the question of memory retention and retrieval.

2.3 Event Boundaries and Memory Retention

In the majority of the aforementioned studies it was also noted that event boundaries caused difficulties in the memory retention and retrieval of information that occurred prior to the boundary (Zwann 1996, Ditman et al. 2008, Speer and Zacks 2005, Ezzyat and Davachi 2011). This suggests that temporal jumps cause forgetting, creating a new event module entails reducing the accessibility of previous information. Research has “shown that information in a narrative becomes less accessible immediately following spatial or temporal boundaries in a way that is simply not related to the passage of time since the information was encountered” (Ezzyat and Davachi, 2011, 243). This ‘less accessible’ information was not at the event boundary but was the information that was given prior to or after the event boundary.

In their study, Ezzyat and Davachi sought to explore the impact of event boundaries on long-term memory. They found that event boundaries “weakened the long-term links between information proceeding and following the boundaries” (Ezzyat and Davachi, 2011, 248). Following previous studies, this is not limited to the event boundaries formed solely by temporal links either, other studies have shown that “crossing an event boundary, such as moving from one location to another, can disrupt memory…that is, walking thorough doorways causes forgetting” (Radvansky, 2012, 269). In studies by Gabriel Radvansky, test-subjects were asked to recall objects or word-pairings given to them in a previous room after walking into a new room. Results showed that “people took longer and made more errors when there was an event shift than when there was not” (Radvansky, 2012, 270). Interestingly, walking back into the room did not improve memory and walking through two rooms increased the

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likelihood to forget (ibid). This seems to lead to a troubling conclusion: how can we remember anything at all if a story that jumps around in space and/or time? We would be continuously baffled by any time-travel story and a long-distance romance would leave us scratching our heads; indeed any deviation from strict chronology would be potentially baffling to the audience. Yet there is more to the above findings than meets the eye.

In their discussion of the data Ezzyat and Davachi explain that their findings show “at least two distinct mechanisms of event segmentation that influence memory in different ways: mechanisms operating at event boundaries enhance boundary representations [and] mechanisms operating across sentences, albeit within the same event, contribute to [the long term memory] binding of those sentences” (emphasis added, Ezzyat and Davachi, 2011, 249). These two mechanisms are confirmed in Radvansky’s findings too, he suggests that the structuring of large sets of data into events can improve memory and that the memory retention of information that occurs at an event boundary is improved: “one memory boost comes from the increase in processing that occurs at the event boundary itself…people show superior memory for content information about elements, such as objects, that are present during the event boundary” (Radvansky, 2012, 270). This means that the increase in processing load that we see at the event boundary leads to improved memory function. This said it can also improve over all memory function in some cases. In one particular test, subjects were asked to read a list of twenty words either whilst walking across a large room or from one room to another, it was found that subjects ability to recall information “was better when there was an event boundary in the middle of the list than when there was not” (ibid). Thereby “walking through doorways can enhance memory” (Radvansky, 2012, 269). So, what about the previous studies that noted the decreased memory of subjects and their difficult recall of information in these test situations? Again this can be linked back to the test conditions.

Weingartner and Myers noted that the inaccessibility of information prior to an event boundary may have been due to inadequate techniques used to test the participants. “[T]he postcomprehension probe task might have induced readers to retrospectively consider an events relevance to the situation described by the preceding text” (Weingartner and Myers, 2013, 295). The probe task that was frequently used in these studies involved asking participants if a particular word was present in the text they just read. The time it took to answer and their error margins were then recorded. This could contribute to the varying experiment results because information in working memory would have a privileged status. Shifts in narrative time (or time and space) create event boundaries and event boundaries could signify the end of an event thus it is no longer needed in working memory. This would account for the faster response times for participants who read texts that did not include an event boundary as that information would still be in working memory. This is because information stored in the working memory could be retrieved

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faster (Radvansky, 2012, 270). Weingartner and Myers suggest there are many variables that could influence the ability to recall event information after an event boundary. As mentioned, previous studies have noticed the ‘increased processing load’ at the event boundaries. They presumed that this would be the reason why the memory function was impaired. However, in subsequent studies it was noted that object-related information was particularly salient at the event boundaries, this lead some researchers to suggest the increase in processing load that was actually improving memory function (Radvansky, 2012, 270). Thus, this parsing of narratives into events is perhaps a double edged sword; it both helps and hinders memory, albeit in different ways.

The reason why the memory function that surrounds event boundaries is important is because it relates to the spectators understanding of a narrative whole. Furthermore, it indicates that a continuous linear flow is not cognitively more manageable. Interestingly, it also points to a complex relation between enhanced and decreased memory functions. This suggests qualitative differences in the retention of information, depending on its relative position in relation to an event boundary. This could be explored further by subsequent studies in cognitive psychology. However, for now, it is useful to now turn our attention to another feature of narrative: moving about in time.

2.4 Flashbacks and Flashforwards: Moving about in Time

One of Bordwell’s qualifying remarks for a folk-psychological comprehension of narrative is that flashbacks are easier to comprehend than flashforwards, he explains “film flashbacks, for example, are seldom questioned, while flashforwards are always under a cloud, apparently because we assume the past to be knowable in a way that the future is not” (Bordwell, 2002, 90). Admittedly, this allowance for flashbacks suggests his linearity assumption is not as strong as first suggested. Although, the crux here is that Bordwell allows these exceptions (from linearity) due to the influence of folk psychology. Bordwell is no stranger to the notion that the cinema screen is particularly apt at depicting images of the mind. Thus, flashbacks that are associated with mental depictions of a character may face no issue with Bordwell’s account. The problem with omitting the future because it is ‘unknowable’ is that a spectator may believe the land of fairies, the underworld, and a galactic spacecraft are ‘unknowable’ – in an empirical sense – yet they can still entertain their inclusion in narratives. So, excluding flashforwards because they are ‘unknowable’ seems inherently problematic without further explication.

As Bordwell suggests we know the past and the future in different ways. This still does not give good reason to omit the future. Bordwell does admit that flashbacks are more prevalent partly because of ‘a matter of convention’ but he still insists it is our folk psychological conceptions that lie at the bottom of

Narrative Time in Complex Films: Temporal Cognition and Cinematic Time

Universiteit van Amsterdam