Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema

List of Contributors vii

Introduction: Puzzle Plots 1
Warren Buckland

1 The Mind-Game Film 13
Thomas Elsaesser

2 Making Sense of Lost Highway 42
Warren Buckland

3 “Twist Blindness”: The Role of Primacy, Priming, Schemas, and Reconstructive Memory in a First-Time Viewing of The Sixth Sense 62
Daniel Barratt

4 Narrative Comprehension Made Difficult: Film Form and Mnemonic Devices in Memento 87
Stefano Ghislotti

5 “Frustrated Time” Narration: The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman 107
Chris Dzialo

6 Backbeat and Overlap: Time, Place, and Character Subjectivity in Run Lola Run 129
Michael Wedel

7 Infernal Affairs and the Ethics of Complex Narrative 151
Allan Cameron and Sean Cubitt

8 Happy Together? Generic Hybridity in 2046 and In the Mood for Love 167
Gary Bettinson

9 Revitalizing the Thriller Genre: Lou Ye’s Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly 187
Yunda Eddie Feng

10 The Pragmatic Poetics of Hong Sangsoo’s The Day a Pig Fell into a Well 203
Marshall Deutelbaum

11 Looking for Access in Narrative Complexity. The New and the Old in Oldboy 217
Eleftheria Thanouli

Index 233