Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema - Paperback

by Warren Buckland (Editor)

Drawing upon the expertise of film scholars from around the world, Puzzle Films investigates a number of films that sport complex storytelling--from Memento, Old Boy, and Run Lola Run, to the Infernal Affairs trilogy and In the Mood for Love.

• Unites American 'independent' cinema, the European and International Art film, and certain modes of avant-garde filmmaking on the basis of their shared storytelling complexity
• Draws upon the expertise of film scholars from North America, Britain, China, Poland, Holland, Italy, Greece, New Zealand, and Australia

Back Jacket

Puzzle Films examines the influence of a new storytelling epoch on contemporary world cinema. Identifying and analyzing films that reject classical storytelling techniques and instead embrace nonlinearity, time loops, and fragmented spatio-temporal reality as their narrative form, these films blur the boundaries between different levels of reality, are riddled with gaps, deception, labyrinthine structures, unreliable narrators, and overt coincidences.

Drawing upon the expertise of film scholars from around the world, this edited collectioninvestigates a number of films that sport complex storytelling--from Memento, Old Boy, and Run Lola Run, to the Infernal Affairs trilogy and In the Mood for Love.

At a time when many a film is asking more--not less--of fans and cineastes, Puzzle Films will help viewers keep pace with a form of narration that captures the anxiety and ambiguity of our time.

Author Biography

Warren Buckland is Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is author of Directed by Steven Spielberg and The Cognitive Semiotics of Film, and co-author (with Thomas Elsaesser) of Studying Contemporary American Film.