1 Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema
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Notes 1 Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema 1. Evan Smith also notes the success during the late 1990s of films featuring complex narrative structures, in terms of ‘impressive reviews, Oscar wins, and dollar-for-dollar returns’ (1999, 94). 2. Lev Manovich argues that narrative and database are two distinct and com- peting cultural forms: ‘the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events)’ (2001b, 225). As I discuss in Chapter 2, Manovich’s argument must be qualified by an understanding of narrative’s ability to make use of the database for its own ends. 3. Manuel Castells, for example, argues that the dominant temporality of today’s ‘network society’, produced through technologization, globalization and instantaneous communication, is ‘timeless time’ (2000, 494): ‘Time is erased in the new communication system when past, present, and future can be programmed to interact with each other in the same message’ (406). 4. Ricoeur’s analysis centres upon Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–27). 5. Syuzhet patterning, argues Bordwell, is medium-independent; the same pat- tern could be reproduced, for example, across literature, theatre and cinema (1985, 49). 6. In his treatment of order, duration and frequency, Bordwell is drawing upon the work of narratologist Gérard Genette. Like Bordwell, Genette distin- guishes between the narrative content (‘story’) and the way this content is organized and expressed (‘discourse’) (1980, 27). A similar distinction is made by Seymour Chatman (1990, 9) and by Christian Metz, who describes narra- tive as ‘A doubly temporal sequence’ that conveys ‘the time of the thing told and the time of the telling’ (1974, 18). A key function of narrative is thus ‘to invent one time scheme in terms of another time scheme’ (18). 7. Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson contrast these narrative rules with the ambiguity, unreliable narration and open-endedness of non-classical films of the 1950s and 1960s such as those of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais. Godard’s attitude towards narrative structure is encapsulated in this attrib- uted quotation: ‘A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order’. In these modernist films, ‘spatial and tempo- ral systems come forward and share with narrative the role of structuring the film’ (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 1985, 381). This multitude of orga- nizational systems draws unity into question, and ‘a dynamic of unity and fragmentation is set up within the text’ (381). Whereas these films progress towards endings that can prove to be inconclusive or even false, classical Hollywood cinema privileges clarity and resolution: ‘in the classical narra- tive, the corridor may be winding, but it is never crooked’ (41). 185 186 Notes 8. Amongst other films that gesture towards modularity, one could include the Chinese film Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2003), Thailand’s Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004) and Iran’s 10 (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002). 9. David Bordwell addresses the broad sweep of complex narrative forms in The Way Hollywood Tells it (2006), but does not provide a focussed typology of films that play with temporal structure. Charles Ramirez-Berg (2006) has assayed a more comprehensive taxonomy, but it is more a loose catalogue of tropes than a tool for illuminating formal dynamics. 10. The distinction between modernism and postmodernism is notoriously con- tentious; I will address this distinction at length in Chapter 2. At this point, it will suffice to point out that many theorists see modernism as more con- cerned with time, while postmodernism is assumed to have a spatial focus (see, for example, Jameson 1991, Cubitt 2004 and Manovich 2001b). 2 The Shape of Narrative Time: Subjective, Schismatic and Modular 1. Mittel draws the notion of the ‘operational aesthetic’ from Neil Harris’s description of P.T. Barnum’s mechanical tricks and stunts (Harris, 1981). 2. The philosopher Henri Bergson went so far as to suggest that public time was not a true temporality; rather, it gave rise to a distorted perspective on the experience of duration and represented it ‘spatially, as on a clock’ (Kern 1983, 26). Bergson was opposed to Einstein’s relativized space-time, insisting that time consisted of a unified duration (see in particular Bergson’s Creative Evolution [1912]). 3. In Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), argues Paul Ricoeur, the experience of time belongs not to individual characters, but is constituted by the network that exists among them. This collective, unified time ‘confronts, in a complex and unstable relationship, monumental time, itself resulting from all the complicities between clock time and the figures of authority’ (1984–8, 2: 112). 4. It is notable that certain parts of Ulysses were influenced directly by cinema: in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ segment, Joyce deliberately used montage tech- niques to show a variety of perspectives on the same events (Kern 1983, 77). 5. As Brian Henderson notes, this structure is to be found in such prominent examples as Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) and All About Eve ( Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) (Henderson 1983, 6). 6. As Anne Friedberg points out, different art forms have been associated with the term ‘postmodernism’ at different times: it has been used ‘in literature since the early 1960s, since the middle 1970s in architecture, since the late 1970s in dance and performance, and applied to film and television only in the 1980s’ (1993, 157). In the face of this theoretical impasse, I propose to call the literary and cinematic experiments of the 1960s ‘late modernist’. There are two significant features that distinguish these works from the broader tendencies within the postmodern: they retain an intense focus upon innovation, striving to create new modes of representation, and they are at odds with the populist orientation of mainstream postmodernism. Notes 187 7. The notion of a breakdown in narrative order is also central to Jean-Francois Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern in terms of its ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard 1984, xxiv). 8. Heise designates these novelists as ‘postmodernist’. However, for reasons noted above, I propose to call the literary and cinematic experiments of the 1960s ‘late modernist’. 9. According to Alain Robbe-Grillet, time ‘played the lead’ in the nineteenth century realist novel, typified by the work of Balzac, while ‘in the modern narrative, one might say that time was cut off from its temporality. It doesn’t flow any more. It isn’t the agent for anything any more’ (1965b, 151). 10. Another key film in terms of thinking about modular narrative structures is Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (1974), which consists of a series of tan- gentially linked, surreal scenes. 11. For an overview of complex television narratives, see Mittel 2006; for a detailed account of the ‘neo-baroque’ narrative formations of television series and serials, see Ndalianis 2005. 12. For more on science fiction’s relation to postmodern ‘schizophrenia’, see Sobchack 1997, 282; Telotte 1995, 133; and Telotte 2001, 56–58. 13. Brooks Landon connects science fiction and non-linear narrative structure directly, by pointing to the possibilities for non-linear narrative forms afforded by digital hypermedia (1999, 43). 14. Anxiety around the representation of time effectively spans the modern and postmodern, stretching from Bergson (1912) to Jameson (1991) and to the more recent work of Sean Cubitt (2004) and Andreas Huyssen (1995, 2003). 15. Digital culture in its present form can be traced to a number of key factors, including the rise of global capitalism, the development of military tech- nologies during World War II and the Cold War years, the emergence of certain techno-scientific discourses and post-war avant-garde artistic move- ments (Gere 2002, 75). 16. Nye argues that the ‘computerization of society’ has been contemporaneous with cultural postmodernism in the same way that electrification accompa- nied the emergence of aesthetic modernism (1997, 162). 17. The approach promoted by Landow and his colleagues is also well articu- lated in the collection Hyper/ Text/ Theory (Landow, 1994). 18. The notion of lexias is itself borrowed from Barthes’s book S/Z (1974). Barthes suggests a mode of reading and analysis that interrupts ‘the flowing discourse of narration’ and ‘the “naturalness” of ordinary language’ by seg- menting it arbitrarily ‘into a series of brief, contiguous fragments, which we shall call lexias, since they are units of reading’ (13). 19. Here, Manovich echoes Walter Benjamin’s earlier warning that an informa- tion culture (characterized by the rapid dissemination of news) is displacing storytelling (Benjamin 1968a, 89). 20. Manovich argues that formal modularity is not only integral to computer- based media; it is also a feature of contemporary society, in which ‘every- thing from objects to people’s identities is assembled from ready-made parts’ (126). 21. For a brief account of the aesthetic promise of database narrative, addressing the contributions of both Kinder and Manovich, see Anderson 2004. 188 Notes 3 Projecting the Future: Order, Chaos and Modularity 1. This contradiction perhaps explains the divergent responses to early cinema among modernist thinkers. Henri Bergson, for one, saw it as yet another example of the division and spatialization of time (Kern 1983, 101). James Joyce, however, was ‘deeply impressed with cinematic montage’ (76), and even deliberately introduced filmic montage techniques into Ulysses (6). 2. Literary theorist N. Katherine Hayles counters Prigogine and Stengers’ brand of chaos theory, which shows how order emerges from complex systems, with another theory, more favoured within scientific circles, which ‘emphasizes the hidden order that exists within chaotic systems’ (1990, 9).