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UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Before or beyond narrative? Towards a complex systems theory of contemporary films Poulaki, M. Publication date 2011 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Poulaki, M. (2011). Before or beyond narrative? Towards a complex systems theory of contemporary films. Rozenberg. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:06 Oct 2021 BEFORE OR BEYOND NARRATIVE? Towards a complex systems theory of contemporary films BEFORE OR BEYOND NARRATIVE? BEFORE OR BEYOND This book puts into focus the tendency for increasingly complex forms of narration in post-1990s cinema. The author argues that, because of the fragmentation and nonlinearity that contemporary complex films display—in all three narrative dimensions of time, causality and space—it is not enough to approach them solely as complex narratives. The notion of narrative holds onto an idea of coherency, wholeness and causal-temporal linearity of the story, against the backdrop of which narrative ‘complexity’ is defined. Instead, this book suggests a radically new framework for the analysis of contemporary narrative films, a framework able to shed light to the processes of organization that nonlinear systems follow. Tools from complexity theory are thus derived in order to address complex films as complex systems, and their dynamic forms of textual and cognitive organization. Maria Poulaki Maria Maria Poulaki BEFORE OR BEYOND NARRATIVE? Towards a complex systems theory of contemporary films MARIA POULAKI ISBN 978 90 361 0268 1 © Maria Poulaki, 2011 All rights reserved. Save exceptions stated by the law, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system of any nature, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, included a complete or partial transcription, without the prior written permission of the authors, application for which should be addressed to author. Dissertation University of Amsterdam Printed in Amsterdam by Rozenberg Publishers BEFORE OR BEYOND NARRATIVE? Towards a complex systems theory of contemporary films ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op vrijdag 2 december 2011, te 12.00 uur door Maria Poulaki geboren te Athene, Griekenland Promotiecommissie: Promotor: prof. dr. T.P. Elsaesser Copromotor: dr. W.B.S. Strauven Copromotor: dr. J.A. Teurlings Overige leden: dr. W.S. Buckland prof. dr. L.A. Leydesdorff prof. dr. L. Nagib dr. J.A.A. Simons prof. dr. J.M. Pier prof. dr. P.P.R.W. Pisters Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen The research described in this thesis was made possible by the support of the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece (IKY) To my parents, Kostas and Loula, and my sister Anastasia CONTENTS Aknowledgements 9 INTRODUCTION 11 PART 1 REFLEXIVITY 25 Chapter 1 Implanted time: The Final Cut and the reflexive loops of complex narratives 25 Chapter 2 Framing the revival of (self-)reflexivity in complex films 41 Chapter 3 Reflexivity and organization in systems and in complex films 57 PART 2 EMERGENCE 75 Chapter 4 Are networks narratable? The case of Burn After Reading 75 Chapter 5 Agents and patterns of causality in traditional and network narratives 93 Chapter 6 Causality and emergence through complex systems and narratives 109 PART 3 PATTERN 125 Chapter 7 Systems in crisis: Gomorrah as a case of complex cinema 125 Chapter 8 Complex space: Narrating and describing 141 Chapter 9 The pattern of complexity 159 CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS 177 NOTES 181 ENGLISH SUMMARY 203 NEDERLANDSE SAMENVATTING 205 BIBLIOGRAPHY 207 An altered version of Chapter 1 under the same title is published as an article in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 9, Iss. 4, 2011. The journal is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfts20 AKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation has been a personal adventure. I would like to cordially thank various companions along the way. I am grateful to my first supervisor Wanda Strauven who trusted me and intuitively guided me through the emergent process of writing. Her wise judgement and passion for detail gave the dissertation its form and dynamics. I am equally thankful to my second supervisor Jan Teurlings, who opened up new theoretical directions to me. My dissertation benefitted greatly from his wide knowledge and insistence upon sound argumentation. Last but not least, I thank the promoter of this dissertation Thomas Elsaesser, who provided me with invaluable feedback and helped the organization of my argument vis à vis the complex world of cinema. In the four years that my PhD research lasted I had the chance to be part of the research community of the Imagined Futures project, with all members of which I discussed ideas reflected in various parts of my thesis. Special thanks, not least for their support and friendship, to the core group of ‘iFut nanos’: Tina Bastajian, Zeynep Gunduz, Pepita Hesselberth, Laura Schuster, Jennifer Steetskamp, and Martine Huvenne. For helping me in the early and most difficult period of my PhD I thank Susan Stocker, whose love for English language and open spirit helped me to develop my ideas at the initial stage of my thesis, and Josef Fruchtl for reading some convoluted initial drafts and giving me valuable feedback. For doing the final proofreading of the thesis I thank Bronwyn Birdsall. For making my academic life easier and always being there to solve various bureaucratic issues, I warmly thank the ASCA managing director Eloe Kingma, as well as Ania Dalecki and Jantine van Gogh. This dissertation would not be possible without the financial support of IKY, the State Scholarships Foundation of Greece, to which I am very grateful. Most of all, of course, I am grateful to those who do not need thanks, my family and my friends in Athens and Amsterdam, who have always been there for me, before, during and after the PhD adventure. 9 10 INTRODUCTION Tracing unlikely connections, such as those between butterflies and typhoons, stockbrokers in Boston and divinity students in Cambridge, ant colonies and human brains, cells and the universe: this is how complexity has been discovered, or better, revealed by current science. Through an analogous process, of tracing connections that at first seem unlikely, I approached my own object of research, which, in very broad terms, is contemporary cinema. ‘Contemporary’ here carries particular significance, as cinema is today at a crucial stage of its development, where it needs to choose between two alternatives: on the one hand, homeostatic preservation of what it already is (which is perhaps harder than ever, partly because of the centripetal forces of media convergence) and, on the other hand, contamination with different, sometimes unlikely, disciplines and discourses, and evolution towards an unpredictable but fascinating future. Description of research object While alternative forms of narration have made their appearance in mainstream cinema since the 1970s, when ‘post-classical’ Hollywood made its presence noticeable, in the mid- 1990s a bolder tendency of experimentation with the narrative form emerged from the outskirts of popular production. The films of this recent cinematic tendency have often been discussed as “complex narratives”,1 borrowing this already-existing label from literary criticism and narratology.2 Since the commercial success of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), “complex” films have widely expanded, to the point that we can now, more than a decade after their spread, talk about a new ‘norm’ promoted worldwide, both by large Hollywood studio productions and by the so-called world cinema. Complex narrative structure connects films as diverse as Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998), The Matrix (Andy and Lana Wachowski, 1999), The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan 1999), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004).3 It is not so much the novelty of the alternative narrative means that such films use that makes them worth of investigation;4 what makes them intriguing is rather their quantitative proliferation and popularization, which crosscuts geographical and genre boundaries and manifests an enduring presence—as recent productions indicate, from Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé, 2009, France/Germany/Italy/Canada) or The Sky Above (Sérgio Borges, 2011, Brazil) to Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010, USA/UK). Trying to cluster the common characteristics of these complex films, I would say that they tend to contain many protagonists and parallel and interconnected stories, a different, for 11 some scholars “loose”, form of causality, with chance or coincidence becoming a central force in the plot development, and a nonsequential temporal and spatial structure. As Warren Buckland puts it, complex films “embrace nonlinearity, time loops, and fragmented spatio- temporal reality” (2009: 6). This unconventional structuring of complex films is assumed to have a significant impact upon the viewer and his or her interpretative strategies.

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