(Re-)considering Narrative Complexity in Art-Cinema:

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(Re-)considering Narrative Complexity in Art-Cinema:

cognitive framing as recuperative narrative reception theory

Steven P.M. Willemsen

___________________________________________________________________________ Master thesis, March 2013

Research Master: Literary & Cultural Studies University of Groningen

Faculty of Arts Dr. Miklós Kiss

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1 (Re-)considering Narrative Complexity in Art-Cinema:

cognitive framing as recuperative narrative reception theory

Steven P.M. Willemsen

s1702459

s.p.m.willemsen@student.rug.nl

The cover still is from:

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Introduction

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This research aims to contribute to the discourse that explains the cognitive-psychological underpinnings of cinematic experiences. The type of experience that this thesis seeks to address is that of ‘narrative complexity.’ In film studies, narrative complexity refers to all the ways in which stories can become elaborate, complicated or difficult to follow as a result of a film’s storytelling techniques. Challenging, perplexing or confusing stories do not form a rarity in film history. In fact, without a clear definition, many stories can be said to be ‘complex,’ for a great variety of reasons. It is a known principle that any story that aims to be worth telling will have to contain at least a minimal complicating element. Or, as art critic, film theorist and psychologist Rudolf Arnheim noted famously and more elegantly, “[o]rder and confusion (…) cannot exist without each other. Complexity without order produces

confusion; order without complexity produces boredom.”1

In this thesis, I will be concerned with the kind of film narratives that tip the balance of Arnheim’s scale in such a way that they may indeed verge on sheer confusion. More precisely, the moment that is at stake here is the point at which such a complicated story asks from us viewers that we make a conscious inference. When we encounter complexity or confusion in a story, it demands not only some efforts in order to keep track, but also certain choices. We have to wonder about the nature of the experience we are confronted with. How should we deal with it? How are we to make meaning of it? In short, we must answer the questions: ‘why this film is posing such difficulties’ and ‘what function we should ascribe to its complicated narration’? Is there a central mystery to be solved? Is the confusion the result of the mental state of a character or narrator? Or is it some statement that the author of the film is trying to convey to us? Perhaps we feel that we are possibly being ‘tricked’ by the narration. Each of these various possibilities will provide the complex narrative at hand with entirely different meanings. Conversely, our experience of its specific complexities will vary accordingly.

To some degree, these decisions are classifying acts. Viewers decide on ‘what kind of film’ they are dealing with. People generally do not interpret a film as a fully unique work; in interpretation, viewers inevitably make use of their earlier knowledge and experiences with films (and other fictions) by which they have learned to understand and make meaning of narratives. These prior experiences form pre-existing clusters of knowledge on stories, films, film genres, viewing strategies, viewing competences and other information - all continuously available to us to help us make the necessary interpretative choices. Ascribing a certain narrative classification - such as a genre, type or style - to a film thus entails a particular ‘viewing stance.’ It helps us to determine where we should direct our attention, how we should analyze and interpret it, what we find important and by what standards we have to evaluate the film. Such classifications may significantly alter the interpretive routines and

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strategies we apply to a narrative, and, in fact, may completely change our perception of a given film’s formal qualities.

‘Art-cinema’ is one such classification label. As a prominent critical, cultural and institutional label of films, film-making, and film reception, the label of art-cinema is connected to a considerable set of viewing strategies that precede individual film viewings. In this research, I want to look more closely at this specific label in relation to the notion of narrative complexity. As I will argue, a film’s narration or narrative can constitute one of the key grounds on which viewers may decide to label a film as being an ‘art film’ (note however that there are of course many other reasons conceivable). Consequently, I will try to see what the effects of such a classification are on the reception of a complex narrative and the meaning-making routines that we apply to it. These claims raise a number of questions, which I will try to address throughout this thesis. After all, how exactly do viewers come to the conclusion that a certain complex narrative should be seen as an ‘art film’ in the first place? Do they do so strictly on the basis of a film narration’s formal properties? What could be other factors? What’s the difference in meaning-making between judging a film as an art film, and seeing it as, for instance, a narrative puzzle?

The term ‘art-cinema’ is one of the fuzziest, yet at the same time also one of the most widely accepted notions in film criticism and theory. Viewers and critics alike may consider a film to be art-cinema because of its style or stylistic innovation (from the films of Robert Bresson to Béla Tarr), because of its themes and subject matter (which can range from Jean Renoir to Yasujirō Ozu), because of a certain psychological depth (from Michelangelo Antonioni to Ingmar Bergman) or social engagement (from Vittorio de Sica to Jean-Luc Godard), its specific historical or cultural importance (from Roberto Rosselini to Satyajit Ray), its symbolical allusions (from Luis Buñuel to Lars von Trier) or phenomenological power (from Andrei Tarkovsky to Terrence Malick), through the status of its director as an auteur (a François Truffaut, a Luchino Visconti, or any of the above), its references or affinities to other art forms (like with Jean Cocteau or Sergei Parajanov) - and so on. As a result, when we are speaking about ‘art-cinema,’ this may still refer to a very wide range of films for an almost evenly wide range of motivations.

In this research, I restrict my consideration of the term to its relevance in terms of narrative – that is, the way in which films handle matters of story, storytelling and the specific strategies

that complicate the viewing experiences they provide.2 In film theory, the observation that art

films share a set of narrative strategies has been one of the main grounds on which theorists have conceived of ‘art-cinema’ as a coherent practice of filmmaking (a notion I will further

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discuss in chapter IV of this thesis). Yet, my aim is not focus as much on formally identifying a fixed set of principles that belong to art-cinema narration; rather, I am interested in the label’s function in narrative reception. Recognizing similarities in narrative strategies that have been used in familiar or prototypical art-films may be one (important) reason for viewers to decide that they should treat a given narrative as an ‘art film’, but there are also other factors involved. Moreover, as I will argue, assuming a direct connection between certain formal qualities and art-cinema as a reception label may at times become rather problematic.

Aims & Methods

The aim of this thesis will thus be to contribute to defining the notion of art-cinema as a

reception strategy of classifying complex narrative experiences. The analytic scope of my

research therefore strikes a balance between formal devices in film narration, their effect on viewers and these viewer’s interpretive stances, highlighting their dynamic interaction. I will try to extend the notion of art-cinema beyond the formal category of narration (meaning the identification of a set of distinct textual traits of the art film) to a reception label that covers viewers’ complex mental operations in response to a text. This will serve to theoretically address, as aptly as possible, the relevant hermeneutic-narratological matters that are generally involved in the viewing of complex narratives that are perceived to be artistic. In order to achieve this, the research’s theoretical framework and methods too will be reception-oriented. More specifically, besides film theory and narratology in the broadest sense, I will draw mostly from cognitive narratology. Over the last few decades, the field of narratology has seen a notable rise of the influence of cognitive-psychological studies, which now hold a central position in the field. As David Herman summarizes, “a trait shared by all

this work is its focus on mind-relevant aspects of storytelling practices.”3 Crucially, by

departing from such mind-relevant aspects, cognitive narratology tends to treat narrative as a human cognitive instrument or strategy (rather than a structural components of a text), causing a shift from text analysis towards an interest in reception and the activities of the (re-) constructing mind. In this research, I maintain a similar shift of focus. I will define narrative complexity as a perceived or sensed complexity or confusion in viewers. Outlining such a cognitive approach to complex narration will be central in chapter II of this thesis. I will investigate narrative complexity as a cognitive experience that follows from complication devices in narration, which play on viewers’ cognitive makeup and that thwart the processes of narrative understanding.

Following this, I will try to theorize when and how the notion of art-cinema may enter as a reception strategy in response to the felt complexity. I suggest that by classifying a complex narrative experience as ‘art-cinema’, viewers take a viewing strategy which, through the activation of specific interpretive criteria, partially determines the meaning they make from the encountered complexity and confusion. To get a grip on this multifaceted response, I will use the notion of cognitive framing. Frame-theory stresses that ‘framing’ is a cognitive and interpretive activity in which we are constantly engaged; ‘frames’ form the meta-conceptual

3_{Herman, David. ‘Cognitive Narratology.’ The Living Handbook for Narratology, Interdisciplinary Center for} Narratology, University of Hamburg, june 8 2011. Online. November 2012.

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structures that guide our interpretation and enable signification. According to literary theorist Werner Wolf, “a frame is, as a rule, designated by a single term and as such corresponds to one metaconcept but usually governs a plurality of sub-concepts and expectations (…) Frames are, therefore, basic orientational aids that help us to navigate through our experiential universe, inform our cognitive activities and generally function as preconditions of

interpretation. As such, frames also control the framed.”4

For my particular questions on narrative film reception, I will understand narrative framing in film viewing as the application of a pre-existing set of functional knowledge, which helps viewers to determine an appropriate viewing stance. More specifically, I treat the art-cinema frame as a ‘coping strategy,’ a set of inferential strategies that enable viewers to cope with particular narrative complexities through alternative strategies of meaning-making. I will argue how the application of this frame is dependent on a number of textual and contextual cues. This way, I aim to dynamize models of art-cinema narration, connecting formal narrative traits with viewers hermeneutic input and the framing activities that I believe to largely determine their responses.

Introducing the concept of ‘art-cinema’ as a key frame of narrative in film viewing will serve several theoretical aims. First of all, it is a useful tool to discern the viewing routines and competences involved in viewing ‘art-cinema’ from ‘classical narrative’ film viewing (most

importantly).5 Classical narratives form the dominant mode of film storytelling, encompassing

the conventional (and often canonical) modes of storytelling that the majority of films employ. Its conventional principles are based on the continuity editing system, ‘invisible’ film style, clear narrative chains of cause and effect and psychologically motivated characters - all serving an overall mimetic clarity and immersion. Arguably, for most film viewers, these classical narrative principles constitute the default mode of watching and understanding films. As I will argue, drawing from multiple film theorists, many ‘art films’ undermine these traditional narrative parameters, blocking viewers’ immersion, comprehension or straightforward mimetic experiences. As a result, framing a film as an art film may constitute some rather radical shifts in one’s viewing stance. Frame theory provides the terminology to theorize these reception differences as well as viewer’s particular competences. Moreover, as I will argue, it improves on formalist theories, which tend to treat such viewing stances as procedural responses to fixed sets of formal narrative devices or principles. As a cognitive activity, framing too is assumed to be done in response to certain cues; yet although the recognition of textual cues is certainly crucial to frames of narrative, contextual, paratextual, institutional and social factors may also influence framing decisions. As Steve Neale has famously recognized, art-cinema also forms an important institutional category, which governs film production, distribution, reception and evaluation. By offering a more dynamic model, frame-theory can include such extra-textual factors into my theory on the reception of narrative complexity.

4_{Wolf, Werner. “Frames, Framings and Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media.” Framing Borders in}

Literature and Other Media. Eds. Werner Wolf & Walter Bernhart (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2006) 4-5

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7 Narrative complexity in popular cinema

Addressing ‘art-cinema’ as an act of framing also helps to understand how similar narrative devices of narrative complexity may sometimes induce different viewing stances. Narrative complexity is not unique or defining to the art-cinema; while some art films may follow rather classical patterns of storytelling, some mainstream films have also incorporated experimental narrative strategies more typical of art-cinema narration. Interestingly, historically, it seems there has always been a dialectic relation between art-cinema’s offbeat narration on the one hand and innovation in classical narration on the other. Many of the characteristics traditionally found in the art-cinema later found their way into popularized cinema. Moreover, it seems that this process has further intensified over the last two decades, given the recent popularization of complex narratives in mainstream film. For example, András Bálint Kovács notes how “in the 1980s and 1990s, some modernist narrative techniques became increasingly popular not only in European art films but also in America, and some of them were even clearly appropriated by the Hollywood entertainment industry.(...) David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, or films like Crash of Fight Club are systematic manifestations of several sophisticated modernist narrative procedures ‘infiltrating’ probably

the world of quality Hollywood production.”6

Many theorists have noted that over the last two decades, a range of films like Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2001), The Prestige (2007) or Inception (2010),

A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2001), Looper (Rian Johnsson, 2012), or even Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001) have introduced substantially different narrative strategies into

relatively classical and mainstream filmmaking.7 Indeed, looking at recent successful

Hollywood productions like Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010) - with its use of a multiple diegetic levels of narrative - or Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky, 2010) - which uses unmarked focalization to represent its protagonist’s worsening mental state - it is clear that art-cinema is

not (or no longer) the sole domain for complex, layered or deliberately confusing narratives.8

These popular films provide challenging viewing experiences, as they problematize (to different degrees) traditional narrative reception. Thomas Elsaesser, who has called these movies ‘game films,’ notes that “several of the features named as typical of the mind-game film are grist to the mill of professionally trained (literary) narratologists: single or multiple diegesis, unreliable narration and missing or unclaimed point-of-view shots, episodic or multi-stranded narratives, embedded or ‘nested’ (story-within-story/film-within-film) narratives, and frame-tales that reverse what is inside the frame (going back to The Cabinet of

Dr Caligari [1919]).”9 It seems that in general, these movies evoke audience sensations of

6_{See: Kovács, András Bálint. Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950-1980 (Chicago: The} University of Chicago Press, 2007), 60.

7_{There seems to be little consensus among film scholars on the theoretical conclusions that should be drawn} from this. Over the last few years, theorists have come up with a number of different labels and categorizations for these films, like Puzzle Films (Warren Buckland 2009), Mindgame Films (Thomas Elsaesser 2009), Modular

Narratives (Alan Cameron 2008), Riddle Films (Miklós Kiss 2012) or Forking-Path films (David Bordwell

2002).

8_{It is very debatable whether this was ever the case, given the sophisticated treatment of narrative that can also} be found in, for example, 1940s film noir or ‘art-cinema’ tendencies in films of the New Hollywood generation. 9

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‘perplexity’ (while maintaining some ‘classical’ accessibility). Some theorists have proposed that we should recognize these narratives as substantially different from their classical predecessors, arguing (all in their own terms) for a post-classical paradigm of storytelling and

a corresponding viewership.10 Others, like David Bordwell (whose work will receive further

attention in chapters IV and V), oppose this notion. Although Bordwell recognizes that certain elements have indeed changed, intensified or become more complex, he sees these as mere extensions and small alterations of the classical narrative paradigm in which these films,

according to him, still fundamentally operate.11 The point that I want to stress is that, in any

case, there seems to be an increasingly broad overlap between art-cinema’s experimental techniques and classical, mainstream narration. Moreover, art-cinema narration can definitely not - or no longer - be defined by the use of such techniques only. Therefore, the popularity of the ‘complex’ mainstream film thus presents theorists with a question, which is aptly summarized as follows by Matthew Campora, in Senses of Cinema: “Do these films represent some new form of cinema or are they simply variations on a theme? Are they ‘art films’ that

have crossed-over into the mainstream, or are they something else altogether? If so, what?”12

This also provides my current questions with new relevance. After all, if these films make use of some of similar narrative devices, how are they different from art films? How do the same narrative devices evoke different viewing stances, or, perhaps, simultaneously evoke multiple? By investigating the notion of narrative framing, I aim to open up theorizing to these key issues, like how viewers judge some complex films as art-films, whereas they find others to be just a complex movie or a narrative puzzle. There are some differences in the ways in which both types of film use narrative complexity, as I will stress in chapter V. Mainstream complex films seem to counter their complex devices with elements from the classical narrative paradigm. But besides these textual cues, other contextual cues may also be decisive in our interpretation, such as those provided by the institutional context of art-cinema. I will address these questions by investigating the boundary points when we have to make these decisions. Special attention will be paid to a small branch of films that seem to balance classical or genre-bound elements of storytelling with complexities and strategies known from art-cinema traditions. Investigating these films helps us to understand more precisely where the differences and boundaries may be between classical narrative principles, narrative complexity, and the use of the label ‘art-cinema.’

Goals

In short, following all the above, this thesis will aim to theorize the cognitive experience of narrative complexity and, consequently, investigate the art-cinema label as a cognitive frame that may be applied in film reception. My analysis will mostly be based on frame theory and

10_{See for instance: Buckland, Warren. Puzzle Films: complex storytelling in contemporary cinema (Chichester:} Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Thanouli, Eleftheria. Post-Classical Cinema: An International Poetics of Film

Narration (London: Wallflower Press, 2009); Cameron, Allan. Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema.

(Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 11

For an elaboration on the flexibility of ‘classical’ film narration, see: Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood

Tells It. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006)

12_{Campora, Matthew. ‘Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema by Allan Cameron.’ Senses of Cinema,}

Book Reviews Issue 55, july 10, 2010. Online, december 2012.

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9 cognitive poetics (a notion that I treat as a blend of textual analysis, cognitive narratology and reader-response criticism). The chosen approach hereby connects a cognitive approach to

narrative complexity with viewers’ hermeneutic and analytic strategies that influence narrative meaning-making. I must note that the intention of this research is not to provide closed and finalized stances on all the complex notions and concepts that it attempts to elaborate on. Rather, I hope to open new theoretical perspectives that may bridge the gap between cognitive views on narrative on the one hand, and the analysis of viewers’ evaluative and hermeneutic sense-making strategies on the other. In the process, I also hope to be able to provide some reflection on the rather problematic grounds on which theorists have discerned

art-cinema as a specific mode of film narration, highlighting some elements of where this

category may become fuzzy and suggesting how it may become useful as a reception label. Lastly, I aim for a better understanding of the specific role that complexity on the level of narrative fulfills in our viewing experiences and their (artistic) evaluation.

In conclusion of this introduction, the research’s guiding hypothesis can be summarized as follows: ‘art-cinema’ is not merely some theoretical, typological or evaluative category, but

constitutes a functional frame of narrative understanding and meaning-making in reception, which entails viewing stances and certain coping strategies. This frame is essential to making meaning of many complex narratives, yet is triggered by not only textual, but also contextual and paratextual cues. Throughout this thesis, I will try to outline the essential components of

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Chapter II:

Narrative complexity, a cognitive perspective

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In order to argue that viewer’s experience and classification of a film can be the result of a narrative’s formal complexities, I must first treat in more detail the central notion of this research, ‘narrative complexity.’ This chapter will focus on the nature of ‘complex’ narrative experiences as cognitive experiences. I will first briefly indicate why I find most of the available (formal) typologies on narrative complexity to be insufficient in terms of explaining viewing experiences. Consequently, I explicate how the frameworks of cognitive narratology and embodied-cognitive theory offer useful approaches to understand narrative complexity as a perceived and felt confusion, rather than as a formal quality of an artifact. Ultimately, the main question of this chapter is how to understand and theorize the viewing experience that

follows from formal narrative complexity? How and when does film narration pose the kind

of problems to viewer’s faculties of narrative understanding that demand an inferential effort? Although the perception of a distinction between a simple story and a more intricate narrative can be rather intuitive, it is less clear how formal choices gives rise to this sensation. Does the presentation of a high amount of story information make a story feel complex? Or does it rather concern complications in the way in which a story is told? Is it in the logical impossibility or incoherence of a story’s events? Or maybe it is in the use of novel, unknown narrative patterns? All such matters, so it seems, can contribute to create a narrative that is perceived and felt to be more ‘complex.’ Yet, from the perspective of cognitive poetics, I believe we can nevertheless find common ground in these various functions.

Categorizing complex narration

Multiple theorists have, especially over the last few years, dedicated books and articles to narrative complexity in film. These works have often focused on challenging strategies in contemporary film narration and are not (strictly) related to art-cinema. For some key contributions on this subject, see for instance Warren Buckland’s volume Puzzle Films:

Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Alan

Cameron’s book on Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (Houndmills/ Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Jan Simon’s 2009 article Complex Narratives (in: New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, 111–126) or Janet Staiger’s 2006 contribution

Complex Narratives, An Introduction (in: Film Criticism 31/1-2, 2-4).

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simply providing extensive taxonomies of complex storytelling techniques.”13 It seems that

the abundance of such taxonomies has indeed barely led to a better understanding of the phenomenon. Moreover, a point I would add here is that since they tend to deal exclusively with contemporary, post-classical complex films, they often ignore or exclude the art-cinema. One exception on the latter issue is Alan Cameron’s book Modular Narratives in

Contemporary Cinema, in which Cameron rightly traces the origins of popular complex (he

uses the term ‘modular’) storytelling back to art-cinema’s inventions. In other respects however, Cameron’s account forms a good example of how such theorizing may end up discerning essentially similar strategies of complication. For example, Cameron relates narrative complexity solely to the arrangement of time, which seems to exclude all challenging strategies that are essentially related to space and focalization (from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion [1965] to Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan [2010]) or that relate to other problems tied to character integrity (e.g. Ingmar Bergman’s Persona [1966] or David Lynch’s

Lost Highway [1997]). Cameron’s typology thus ultimately addresses only the different

temporalities in the history of narrative complexity. The first, subjective temporality, he finds to originate from the modernist novel (as András Bálint Kovács similarly argued). Non-linear temporalities that are tied to subjective storyworlds can be found in art-cinema narration from its earliest examples on - such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) or early surrealist art films like A Page of Madness (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926) and La Coquille et le

Clergyman (Germaine Dulac, 1926). Yet, I do not agree that this can be reduced to matters of

temporal arrangements only, especially since narration and subjectivity in film are by their nature always related to the (re)presentation of space. Cameron’s second category, schismatic temporalities, consists of those narratives that employ even further fragmented temporalities, which seem to resist recuperative reading. This mode seems to stem primarily from modernist literature too - like in the work of Samuel Beckett or Alain Robbe-Grillet - rather than to originate from film experiments themselves. In film history, this mode is only represented by a handful of well-known examples, like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Lastly, Cameron differentiates (primarily art-cinematic) strategies from contemporary complex narratives, which he calls ‘modular’ temporalities. Modular narratives, Cameron argues, offer “a series of disarticulated narrative pieces, often arranged in radically achronological ways via flashforwards, overt repetition, or a destabilization of the relationship

between present and past.”14 Modularity covers several types of narration, like episodic

narratives, split-screen films, forking-path narratives (stories that investigate multiple possible outcomes) and anachronic stories (which consist of ‘decentered’ flashback storytelling). Cameron finds all these to be symptomatic of the same contemporary tendency in film

narration.

In conclusion of the above, I would argue that although a categorization like Cameron’s may

13

Kiss, Miklós. ‘Navigation in Complex Films: Real-life Embodied Experiences Underlying Narrative Categorisation.’ In: Bernd Leiendecker et al (eds.). (Dis)Orienting Media and Narrative Mazes. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013). 237-256.

14

Cameron, Allan. ‘Contingency, Order, and the Modular Narrative: 21 Grams and Irreversible.’ In: The Velvet

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provide an interesting historical overview, it teaches us little about the nature of the complicating strategies at work. Rather, for the sake of retaining a historical perspective, a typology like this tends to create narrative demarcations between essentially similar strategies of complication. For example, why would episodic narration belong specifically to the contemporary modular temporality? Episodic narratives can be found throughout film history. Moreover, some of these can be equally well considered subjective temporalities; one can think here of the largely ‘episodic’ narration in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), which may equally well be perceived as a ‘modernist’ subjective temporality grounded in the boredom and aimless wandering of its protagonist. Subjective temporalities, in turn - although often more spatial than temporal by nature - formed a significant share of popular complex ‘twist’ narratives, like Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) or A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2001). Moreover, these films do not specifically foreground a ‘modular’ sense of time, like Cameron argues. Viewing these contemporary film narratives as manifestations of some distinctly contemporary, ‘modular’ sense of temporality thus seems difficult to justify, either formally or experientially.

For the above reasons, I will here abandon such historical theorizing in favor of approaches that I deem to have more analytical potential for this research. In my approach, I will try to adopt a more a-historical stance. This allows looking for coherence among the narrative strategies of both art films and contemporary (post-)classical narratives. Rather than seeing them as tied to historical narrative trends or worldviews, I will relate narrative complexity first and foremost to strategies that evoke a perceived and sensed ‘confusion’ in viewers. I will thus adopt the stance of the cognitive poetician, focusing on narrative complexity as a cognitive experience. The frameworks handed down by cognitive narratology and embodied-cognitive theory can offer a solid ground for such an understanding.

Cognitive narratology

As noted in my introduction, David Herman summarizes cognitive narratology as the branch of post-classical narratology that focuses on all the “mind-relevant aspects” of storytelling

practices and story comprehension.15 Cognitive narratologists treat narrative primarily as a

human cognitive instrument or strategy, not as an aspect of a text or artifact. Thereby, the scientific interest has shifted from text-based approaches to the activities of the mind when

(re-) constructing stories. 16 Cognitive narratologists have therefore focused on the role of

such key elements of the human mind, like perception, language, memory and knowledge in

narrative comprehension.17 For my particular inquiry, cognitive narratology can be useful for

two main reasons. First of all, its theoretical positions facilitate the kind of reception-based orientation that I think is necessary to relate narrative structures to viewing stances. As noted, through cognitive narratology, I want to theorize narrative complexity as a perceived

15_{Herman, David. ‘Cognitive Narratology.’ The Living Handbook for Narratology.}

16_{These processes are assumed to largely take place in the realm of the unconscious – that is, we are unaware of} many of our mind’s constructing activities in shaping a story. Although they are beyond our phenomenological experience, they nevertheless do make up a significant share of our narrative understanding, and are as such considered fruitful objects of study by cognitive narratologists.

17

Jahn, Manfred. “Cognitive Narratology.” In: Herman, David, Manfred Jahn & Marie Laure Ryan (ed.).

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13 confusion rather than a complex structure. I believe this sensed confusion to be of key

relevance to viewer’s determination of the appropriate narrative frame, interpretation and evaluation. In the case of art-cinema, this confusion can (among other paratextual and contextual cues) be a key trigger, causing a different apprehension and a redistribution of cognitive efforts and attention. Secondly, when dealing with a narratively complex film, looking at viewers’ perceptual and cognitive processes, besides their routinized processing habits, is relevant because often exactly these processes are being challenged. Complex stories do not only play on narrative patterns handed down by tradition, culture and viewers’ ‘literacy’; they may also play on skills that are given through hardwired cognitive processes. If we understand that narrativity is a strong sense-making aspect of the human mind, then we can also attempt to understand what happens when its fundamental mechanisms are thwarted.

Embodied-cognitive Theory

In recent years, theorists of the moving image have increasingly stressed how in film viewing, viewers depend on the same strategies of perception and sense-making that they use in everyday life. Although this may sound somewhat self-evident, it is quite a departure from older film theorizing which (often using psychoanalytic notions) tended to underline film as

an unreal ‘dreamlike’ state, dependent on the constant ‘suspension of disbelief.’18

These more recent recognitions have lead film theorists to detect strong overlaps in the ways in which films are constructed (in terms of narrative and stylistic principles) and human skills of perception and sense-making. To take in account such crucial overlaps between film narration and the everyday functions of human cognition, I will also employ several notions from what is known as embodied-cognitive theory.

The concepts of embodied-cognitive theory stress how all of ways of perception and cognition are fundamentally intertwined with the body and our bodily ‘being-in-the-world.’ Scientists have increasingly acknowledged the role of the body and basic embodied schemata in such domains as abstract reasoning, language and cognition in general. Famously, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson further demonstrated how even higher order symbolic systems are in fact

based on fundamental schemata that arise from embodied experientiality.19 Furthermore, film

theorists have likewise started to understand that we bring our ‘embodied minds’ into our film viewing experiences. Introducing embodied-cognitive theory to film theory can help to acknowledge the overlap between real-life skills and film-related understanding. It opens up the theorizing of narrative sense-making in film to real life aspects of perception and cognition, but thereby also raises the question of what artistically intended or perceived narration can mean in terms of the reception of this experience. As Torben Grodal argues: “storytelling represents an innate mental capacity to synthesize an agency’s perceptual input, its emotions, and its output in terms of action (…). We experience stories as representations of exterior worlds, and they may be described as such, but at the same time they represent internal, physical and mental processes that have to follow the innate specifications of the

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body and brain.”20

In the light of these theoretical perspectives, I believe the main question here - how do art-cinema and other post-classical narratives influence our narrative experience? – to be opened up to new dimensions, unavailable to traditional narratological approaches. For many theorists, the question was mainly how a film’s narration may disrupt or complicate known and established classical norms of storytelling. I would also ask here how some films disrupt or problematize viewers’ naturally given and habitually trained strategies of narrative sense-making, orientation, temporal understanding, character-construction and so on. As I will argue later on, problematizing such modes of understanding often leads directly to a sense of confusion, which in turn may call for different sense-making strategies and viewing competences. I assume that complex narrative experiences emerge out of a combination between formal disruptions of storytelling conventions, the cognitive processes underlying these and the (partially conventionalized) interpretive pathways that viewers employ.

On cognition, perception and classical film narration

First of all, for this line of reasoning, it is crucial to note that what we have here called

classical narratives21 are not merely arbitrary, culturally determined constructs. Of course, classical narration’s conventions, codes, norms and genres have been shaped and passed on through traditions in culture and film production. Yet, the mimetic abilities of classical film narration have also, through decades of trial-and-error, been shaped to match the human cognitive skills on which it must operate. Joseph D. Anderson, who was among the first to argue that film production and spectatorship should be seen in a natural, ecological context, notes that “the particular way a motion picture is crafted, those elements often referred to collectively as style have, particularly in the United States, developed in the direction of

accessibility.”22 ‘Accessibility’ is here not to be understood as a value judgement, nor merely as a set of culturally and historically determined norms to which films subordinate themselves. According to Anderson, “the problem of accessibility in a motion picture is not

merely a matter of culture. It is more fundamentally a matter of perception.”23

I will partially follow such a ‘Münsterbergian’ view of film style and narration, assuming that the dominant modes of popular film narration should not only be understood historically, but also as being to some degree as structured to the human cognitive capacities for which these stories are

made.24

Classical narration generally aims to provide unproblematic and minimally confusing access to a story and story-world. As such, it is possibly film’s strongest example of an ecological development, along with continuity editing system, with which it is fundamentally

20_{Grodal, Torben. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. (New York: Oxford University} Press, 2009) 159

21_{Others say ‘simple’ narratives, following Aristotle’s distinction between complex and simple plots}

22_{Joseph Anderson. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. (Carbondale:} Southern Illinois University Press, 1996) 10

23_{Ibid. 12}

24_{Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg was the first to argue - as early as 1915 - that films and film style} were shaped and structured analogous to the functioning of the human mind. See: Münsterberg, Hugo. The

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intertwined. Both these stylistic systems have determined the majority of all filmmaking for over a century and (although the manifestations have been adapted, intensified or perfected) both have remained relatively constant in their essence. From an ecological perspective we may assume how this shaping of film storytelling to maximally stimulating yet unobtrusive effect has involved viewers’ cognitive and embodied-cognitive parameters. Cognitive (film) narratologists have already recognized much of these cognitive poetics in classical narration. For instance, David Bordwell argued that narrative fiction films take in account the range of attention, memory and general comprehensibility available to most viewers. “Storytellers' well-entrenched strategies for manipulating time, space, causality, point of view and all the rest,” he argues, “reflect what is perceptually and cognitively manageable for their

audiences.”25

Directors have gradually learned to use stylistic devices like editing, cinematography and music to direct viewers’ attention according to their intentions. Classical narration’s strive for epistemological certainty has also established certain principles of

redundancy of information to facilitate memory capacities. Moments of possible narrative

fuzziness, like focalization shifts or flashbacks, are generally clearly marked by established

conventions.26 Film viewers are trained to recognize these and to make clear distinctions in

different ontological or epistemological narrative levels. All this serves the goal of a seamlessly mimetic story experience.

In his 2009 book Embodied Visions, film theorist Torben Grodal further argued from an embodied-ecological cognitive perspective how classical film narration, in different forms, appeals to embodied and innate dispositions. Grodal notes the ecological, embodied origins of the actions, goals and mind-representations found in many canonical story structures, as well

as genre elements like suspense, romance et cetera.27 Classical narration, he argues, serves to

strongly and unambiguously link these dimensions for optimal stimulation, while film style likewise serves to show or represent this interaction between embodied minds, goals and

actions.28 According to Grodal, “viewers prefer to experience narratives that strongly activate

the mind and body, that move and touch, that cue the production of adrenaline and elicit visceral reactions. Such feelings and physical reactions are linked with narratives that offer

stimulating cognitive problems and scenes of spectacle and intrigue.”29

Means of Complication

Whereas the classical narration’s mimetic realism offers accessible, epistemologically clear, unambiguous but stimulating stories, I argue that part of the enjoyment of many art- and complex narratives stems from a deliberate break with this mimetic clarity in favor of a

25_{See: Bordwell, David. “Film Futures.” In: SubStance (vol.31, no.1, 2002), 88-104.}

26_{As Edward Branigan notes in his book on Point of View in Cinema, subjectivity in the cinema cannot be} strictly formally defined in fixed forms or stylistic markers. It “rather, must be defined as a certain kind of statement about the narrative, the condition under which it is told, perceived and known.” See: Edward Branigan.

Point of View in the Cinema: a theory of narration and subjectivity in classical film. (Amsterdam: Mouton

Publishers, 1984) 81

27_{Grodal, Torben. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. (New York: Oxford University} Press, 2009), 208

28_{To grasp these embodied dimensions, Grodal introduces the PECMA-flow model, which encompasses} Perception, Emotion, Cognition, Motor and Action-related aspects of the brain - in this respective order. 29

Grodal. Torben. “Emotions, Cognitions and Narrative Patterns in Film.” In: Greg Smith and Carl Plantinga.

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16 controlled sense of confusion and ambiguity. Confusion can be a desirable aesthetic and

narrative strategy to filmmakers; its artistic motivations can range from posing a stimulating cognitive puzzle to a mode of estrangement. But how do filmmakers create such confusion through narrative devices? In a somewhat hypothetical fashion - that is, without wanting to argue that these would definitively exhaust all the possibilities – I would discern two overarching methods that complementarily can cover most complex narrations’ strategies. The first one concerns methods of narrative over- and under-stimulation, which relates to the

amount of story-information offered [A]. The distribution of story information is at the heart

of multiple strategies of challenging our cognition or narrative norms. This is not necessarily related to formal disruptions in a narrative’s structure. Hence the second category concerns all such violations of the cognitive schemata available to viewers - the ways in which the narrative information is integrated, understood and structured [B]. These cognitive schemata may range from earlier knowledge on (film) narratives, but also more fundamental and embodied schemata of meaning-making and (real life) comprehension in general.

[A] Over- and under-stimulating narrative strategies

An often easily and intuitively discernible aspect of narrative complexity lies in the amount of story information that the story at hand presents us. Simply put, an elaborate family chronicle with multiple central characters, spread over several generations and numerous events, is readily felt to be more ‘complex’ than the average fairytale. By playing or varying with the amount of story information, narratives can evoke different levels of sensed cognitive confusion, ambiguity or clarity. I will refer to these here as matters of stimulation, to be divided in the challenging narrative strategies of over-stimulation and under-stimulation. Classical narratives, which mostly employ omniscient narration, deliberately present limited amounts of story information. They anchor the offered information to its relevance for the plot’s progression and, to ensure clarity, repeat it recurrently through patterns of redundancy. As such, they generally attempt to keep confusion to a minimum, or only withhold small chunks of information to create suspenseful narrative effects. But filmmakers can also choose to deliberately create abundance or excess in terms of story information. Films may extend the number of plotlines and subplots, focus on multiple characters, increase the amount of story events and plot points or otherwise aggrandize the amount of narrative cues.

These latter are all strategies of narrative over-stimulation, and its manifestations are numerous. This device is not necessarily restricted to art-cinema or other non-classical films; to a limited degree, high amounts of narrative information can also function within the system of classical narration. For example, many film noirs have used this strategy to create the perplexing sensation of an almost overly-intricate plot. One can think here of films like The

Big Sleep (1946), which reportedly left even its director Howard Hawks in confusion,30 or Roman Polanski’s acclaimed 1974 neo-noir film Chinatown. In art films, over-stimulation is

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sometimes used to over-stimulate the viewer’s meaning making mechanisms - often in combination with breaking with narrative schemata. Good examples are the later films of David Lynch. Mulholland Drive (2001) provides an abundance of narrative cues, often highly contradictory and incoherent, thereby violating several schemata of a conventional narrative. Such methods over-stimulate our sense-making mechanisms and overload the viewer’s limited (working) memory capacity. In general, over-stimulating narratives obstructs those processes involved in the construction of storyworlds and the reconstruction of the fabula that normally take place without much thought – id est: they normally remain consciously unnoticed. Often, such overstimulation narratives will have to present viewers with an interest or riddle in order to engage viewers to invest the cognitive efforts that are necessary to keep track and integrate the abundant story information.

In art-cinema, under-stimulation is perhaps traditionally the more common strategy, especially when compared to classical narration. Classical narration tends to continuously stimulate and feed viewers’ narrative interest, forming tight chains of cause and effect. The art-cinema narration’s strategies (that David Bordwell discerns as the ‘loosening’ of these causal chains, as we will see in the next chapter) form one example of under-stimulating narration. Such under-stimulation creates ‘loose ends’ in terms of causation. Viewers may feel also that meaningful determination of story elements is placed in their hands, or is even entirely left to them. It gives rise to those typical ‘art-cinema feelings’ that, in the words of Bordwell, cue us to “be prepared to fill in a lot (…) Instead of who done it? we ask what are

they doing?”31

In its most extreme form, narrative under-stimulation ends in what came to be

known in art-cinema discourse as temps mort. Many art films use long stretches of screen time in which narrative development is kept to a minimum. Think for an extreme example of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which realistically examines the repetitive life and household of a single mother for over three hours, mostly in real time. Temps mort is also typically (but not necessarily) brought about by the redundant use of the long take and slow paced editing, like for example in the films of Béla Tarr or Andrei Tarkovsky. In some films by Michelangelo Antonioni, such as L’Eclisse (1962), shots are even continued long after the characters have already left the frame, leading to no real narrative development whatsoever.

In a somewhat less extreme sense, under-stimulation can also lead to feelings of ambiguity. This may perhaps better be named under-determined narration, since it is not necessarily tied to those feelings of under-stimulation that we associate with temps mort. Under-determined narratives can refuse to provide internal motivation for certain story elements. Of course, withholding information is a trait of most strategies of narration. But when a story (continuously) lacks crucial internal motivating cues, it may no longer be ensured that all of

its elements can be understood within a single interpretative frame. 32 For example, the

31_{Bordwell, David. ‘How to watch an art movie.” Observations on film art. Online.}

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/08/26/how-to-watch-an-art-movie-reel-1/ (august 2012).

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narration may leave us in the dark regarding the ontological status of a certain event or

character in the story and maintain such ambiguity throughout its unfolding. 33 This can also

prevent the outcome of a singular resolution in terms of the story’s closure. These strategies are at the basis of the cliché that art-cinema supposedly offers questions rather than answers. Art-cinema is indeed especially fond of such strategies, undermining notions of truth and

narrative.

[B] Violating (narrative) schemata

Although the above strategies of narrative stimulation may make a given film viewing experience more complex, they do not necessarily belong to the level of formal disruptions that form the main concern of this thesis. Films may over- or under-stimulate our cognitive skills while using perfectly classical narrative devices, as for example some of Hollywood’s film noirs have demonstrated. The second general set of complication strategies covers those radical formal disruptions that generally tend to pose greater challenges to viewers, and which are generally found in the art-cinema rather than in the mainstream. The collective label of violating schemata refers to all deviancies not in the amount of distributed story

information, but rather in the story structures and narrative mechanisms themselves.

The term schemata, as I will use it, aims to cover the basic, prior knowledge clusters of stereotyped experiences and narrative patterns that film viewers employ in their narrative understanding. Cognitive psychology has shown how all information processing consists of both bottom-up and top-down processing. New bits of information are fitted into existing memory structures, a mode of processing called bottom-up; in turn, these structures and patterns held in memory determine our handling of incoming new information in by

top-down processes. These top-top-down processes help us to direct our attention and perception,

pinpoint targets, set goals and so on in accordance with expectations of what will be relevant.

The memorized information structures are generally called schemata.34 “Schemata theory’s

basic assertion,” as Joanna Gavins summarizes in the Routledge Encyclopedia for Narrative Theory, “is that all new experiences are understood by means of comparison to a

stereotypical model, based on similar experiences and held in memory.”35 Narrative

understanding, like all meaning-making, should be seen as such a combination of top-down and bottom-up processes; schemata, the memories of earlier narratives and our knowledge of typical narrative patterns, are used to approach new situations and form hypotheses, while we try to integrate new and problematic elements into these pre-existing schemata. Schemata

Ambiguity / The Example of Henry James by Shlomith Rimmon (review).’ In: American Literary Realism

1870-1910 (vol.11 no.2. Autumn 1978) 322-324.

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Note that this may also follow from over-stimulation on the narrative level. A classic example would be Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), which offers multiple possible versions of reality for one event through an over-determined set-up that takes in account the subjectivity of all of its characters. This ambiguity here is one of one dissonance, providing determined but conflicting or contradictory information, whereas the sensation of ambiguity of underdetermined narration is connected to the vagueness of multiple tenable probabilities. 34

They are also sometimes called ‘frames’ or ‘scripts’, but I will here maintain the term schemata. I will use the term ‘frame’ for an overarching mindset or viewing stance that triggers multiple schemata simultaneously (see chapter III)

35_{Gavins, Joanna. “Scripts and Schemata.” In: Herman, David, Manfred Jahn & Marie Laure Ryan (ed.).}

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theory thus allows theorizing on how, in facing new stories, both earlier experienced story

structures and real life experiences have a key part in our understanding. 36

Although schemata are dynamic in the sense that they are continuously re-shaped by new information integrated bottom-up, radical disruptions can lead to challenging problems. Whereas complexity through over- and under-stimulation generally problematizes bottom-up processes of integrating information, the violation of schemata relates to the problematizing of all top-down processing active in narrative comprehension. It does so by upsetting expectations or by deviating from known formal structures. This problematizes viewers’ construction of a meaningful whole, since meaningful patterns and knowledge held in

memory are rendered inappropriate.

The most severe problems to our understanding are posed when narrative composition disrupts the most common and basic aspects of one’s narrative understanding and expectations. In both art-cinema and post-classical complex stories, formally deviant narration and narrative compositions are often used to create challenging viewing experiences. One may think here of the violation of known temporal patterns (inversions, forking chronologies, and other non-linear time representations) that are at the heart of many complex narratives. This can range from seemingly random re-shuffling of a story’s plot (as Quentin Tarantino famously did in his 1994 Pulp Fiction) to elaborate set-ups of a non-linear flashback narration (like in Alain Resnais’ 1959 art-cinema classic Hiroshima Mon Amour). As Torben Grodal notes, in film viewing, the “experience of time is linked to cognitive processes evaluating causal chains in the (diegetic) world, based on schemata of ‘objective

time structure’ and linked to the construction of the fabula.”37

Such narratives in effect prevent the straightforward construction of a fabula. When basic temporal patterns are violated, viewers can hardly rely on this elementary understanding or knowledge to neatly order the incoming information; rather, a conscious effort must be undertaken to consciously understand the internal rules of narration and to construct the narrative coherently.

Blocking unproblematic access to a mimetic viewing experience can be a goal in itself. Art films have often deliberately challenged compositional norms and convention as an attempt to engage their viewers in other, more ‘active’ ways. Mainstream complex films, on the other hand, tend often choose to offer story-worlds that motivate their internal narration. For example, an odd temporal structure may be anchored to character subjectivity, usually by means of attributing a mental condition (e.g. Memento [Christopher Nolan, 2001]) or by creating storyworlds that motivate the complex narration, like many time-travel stories do – think of Looper (Rian Johnson 2012).

36_{Some theorists have even further argued that schemata function in a fundamental ‘story grammar,’ extending} Noam Chomsky's seminal insights on sentence grammars. Story grammar has been theorized to consists of schemata on the types of content that are generally represented in stories and schemata on the ways in which this content tends to be causally structured – in units like setting, initiating event, internal response, goal, attempt, consequence and reaction. For further reading, see the entry ‘Story Schemata and Causal Structure” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 568.

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Temporal rearrangements seem to form the most conventional form of unconventional narration. But film narration can also problematize other narrative, top-down sense-making schemata. For instance, characters may be duplicated, or their psychological consistency (character integrity) can be broken. Methods of internal focalization and unreliable narration are also central to many complex ‘twist’ narratives, in which the subjectivity is left unmarked by the known stylistic cues. The sensation of ultimately having been tricked by the narration’s withholding of knowledge became a popular narrative technique in mainstream cinema about a decade ago – until, arguably, it gradually became part of viewers’ regular

repertoire of narrative schemata.38

Another ‘common’ yet disruptive a-temporal technique is that of narrative metalepsis, the

conflation of narrative levels that are conventionally or ontologically separated.39 Metalepsis

may be used to momentarily ‘confuse’ viewers through impossible switches among embed narrative levels. A typical example is that of the writer intruding in his own story or, conversely, story elements entering real life, like in Ober (Alex van Warmerdam, 2006) or

Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, 2006). Multiple, embedded or unexplained metalepses

can create elaborate and perplexing set-ups. Well-known examples of which can for instance be found in the screenplays of Charlie Kaufman, like Adaptation (2002), Eternal Sunshine of

the Spotless Mind (2004) or the perplexing Synecdoche, New York (2008).40 Such radical metaleptic set-ups are essentially abstract and demand that a viewer actively hosts and tracks the narrative levels of concern, revising his or her notions on mimetic narrative story-worlds.

Films can use every other conceivable narrative parameter as a means to such ends. This can include impossible spatial dimensions, conflicting cues, incoherent representations or characters, paradoxes and so on. In all those instances, formal conventions are violated to block a straightforward mimetic experience. Blocking these convention means blocking the habitualized viewing routines and more fundamental sense-making strategies involved. This necessitates the integration of the information in a more intensive, bottom-up fashion. Such an active effort, despite being relatively demanding and confusing, may nevertheless be rewarding for viewers who are involved and immersed in the narrative.

Experiential schemata underlying narrative comprehension

But why is it that story elements like linear time, coherent space or character continuity often prove instantly complicating to narrative comprehension? After all, other schemata, like certain genre conventions, are violated continuously - to little disruptive, but often even a pleasurable effect. I would argue that disruptions of these most basic dimensions – space,

38_{Cf. earlier mentioned titles such as The Sixth Sense, A Beautiful Mind and Fight Club.}

39_{Narrative Metalepsis was originally defined by Gérard Genette as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator} or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse[.]” See: Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983 [1972]) 234-235.

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grasp because they deviate not only from narrative conventions, but also from the parameters of our everyday, real life experientiality. I will refer to such complications of cognitive parameters as the violations of embodied-cognitive schemata. In her 1996 book ‘Towards a

‘Natural’ Narratology,’ Monika Fludernik argued for a central role for the concept of

‘embodiment’ in all narrative understanding. According to Fludernik, much more than our individual preconceptions or life experiences, our shared notions of embodied existence facilitate most of our narrative understanding. “Embodiedness,” she argues, “evokes all the parameters of a real-life schema of existence which always has to be situated in a specific time and space frame, and the motivational and experiential aspects of human actionality likewise relate to the knowledge about one's physical presence in the world. Embodiment and

existence in human terms are indeed the same thing.”41

Undeniably, many of the governing principles of all narratives (action, causality, continuity, linearity, character integrity) are based on fundamental features of our embodied cognition and consciousness. As representations of human consciousness and action, most stories follow these specific calibrations in terms of mental processes, action patterns and embodied spatiotemporal, deictic dimensions.

Yet they may also deliberately interrupt these parameters. Fludernik’s prime example of a ‘disembodied’ narrative is Samuel Beckett’s play Not I (1972) - which is literally disembodied in the sense that it eliminates the experiencing body from the narrative. Yet, I would argue that many film narratives have also employed ‘disembodied’ story aspects in ways less radical than Beckett’s late modernist play. There are numerous ways in which film narration can create disembodied, artificial, ambiguous or otherwise highly conceptualized and abstracted diegetic spaces or temporalities. These tend to ensure a complicated viewing experience. For example, the aforementioned transgressions of story levels in narrative metalepses cannot be understood by recourse to real life schemata, simply because there is no phenomenological experience held in memory of a multidimensional existence or navigation. When narratives offer storyworlds that do not correlate with either narrative (or generic) conventions or these embodied-cognitive parameters, viewers will have to orientate on the basis of the information presented within the narrative and actively fill in the gaps. Arguably, temporal inversions can pose such problems to our natural frames of understanding most easily. As Torben Grodal points out, “linearity is not a product of Western metaphysics but it is based on fundamental features of the world, action and consciousness. An experiential

flow - unless totally unfocused - is a linear process in time.”42 Linearity is not only our

default mode of narrative, but also of all experience and sense-making; this may account for the fact that temporal disruptions seem to form the largest share of complex narratives. In sum, narratives that distort, block or alter such principles and conventions break with our fundamental sense-making strategies. Rather than relying on similarities between real world experience and the narrative, or on known narrative conventions, viewers must in such

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situations actively orient themselves through the spatiotemporal dimensions that host the action. The analytic strategies that viewers thereby employ are still based on embodied-cognitive schemata of real world orientation, but the reliance on these routines is no longer natural - i.e. they are no longer in overlap with real life sense-making for which they are designed. Consequently, blocking embodied-cognitive schemata by which we normally integrate narrative information calls for a new structuring of the information offered, which may (temporarily) confuse us. In any case, the increased effort that viewers must invest into mapping such a plot is what makes such a story feel complex.

Thus, although I have in the above discerned schemata specifically related to either acquired, conventional narrative schemata or given, embodied-cognitive schemata, it must be stressed that the former category is in many ways founded on the latter. Nevertheless, there is still a very significant cultural component missing here, namely the variations in viewers’ familiarity with narrative ‘conventions.’ Viewers individually may vary strongly in terms of the competences they possess for dealing with narratives (i.e. the range of schemata that are available to them). A significant difference may lie in how often viewers have dealt with a specific narrative set-up before. Viewers may also be more familiar with certain ‘generic’ conventions, which can help to smoothen or motivate narrative transgressions (e.g. humans can be turned into animals in myths). Knowledge of film or film history may also motivate strange elements; one can recognize certain formal traits as part of a film style, period or its specific author. In short, viewers that are used to seeing more complex films or art films will be more competent in terms of motivating or interpreting the complexities they encounter than viewers who have only seen classical narratives.

(Re-)considering Narrative Complexity in Art-Cinema: