Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- I Introduction
- II Cinema in the Interstices
- III Narrative Ambiguity in the Classical Cinema
- IV Modern(ist) Cinema: Logic of the Encounter
- V Towards the Embodied Fabula
- VI The Complexity of Complex Narratives
- VII Memento and the Embodied Fabula
- VIII Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Index
- Film Culture in Transition
VII - Memento and the Embodied Fabula
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- I Introduction
- II Cinema in the Interstices
- III Narrative Ambiguity in the Classical Cinema
- IV Modern(ist) Cinema: Logic of the Encounter
- V Towards the Embodied Fabula
- VI The Complexity of Complex Narratives
- VII Memento and the Embodied Fabula
- VIII Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Index
- Film Culture in Transition
Summary
In post-theory, the ‘beautiful’ is not necessarily consilient with goodness, the romantic, or transcendent notions, but to a feeling of duration, movement and continual process: what Deleuze refers to as ‘haecceity’ or ‘intensity’. […] ‘Beauty’ thus pertains to a process that takes empirical precedence over form. […] The determination of beauty becomes temporal, not reflective: an open-ended process, a feeling of flowing, rhythm, or ‘becoming’. Indeed, a refreshing concern with sensation, rather than desire or pleasure, requires us to think about sensation as a rhythmical experience, not one of static shock of excitations on the nervous system.
‒ Kennedy 2000, 30-31What will you find once you have completed the intricate and exhausting path and found the centre of the maze? Yourself – in the middle of a maze.
Introduction
Christopher Nolan's MEMENTO (2000) – based on Jonathan Nolan's short story Memento Mori – is perhaps the most debated complex narrative to date. In addition to countless formal dissections, the film has been the subject of innumerable critical examinations. It has been perceived as exemplary of various different philosophical and theoretical positions, and the philosopher Andy Clark (2010) has even suggested that the film's main character can be perceived as the embodiment of his extended mind thesis. On account of this, Robert Sinnerbrink (2011) has humorously asserted that MEMENTO should now be fconsidered the philosophers’ favourite film, thereby suggesting that it has trumped such beloved examples as RASHôMON (Kurosawa 1950) or more recently THE MATRIX (Andy & Larry Wachowski 1999) (48). The extended attention devoted to the film demonstrates that ‘MEMENTO is a very good example of what a complex narration can be’ (Ghislotti 2009, 87). Although MEMENTO affirms the inferential nature of cinematic spectatorship, it simultaneously renders difficult the cognitive processes that organize narratives into chronological series of events. This chapter argues that MEMENTO thereby questions the narratological coupling of realist and constructivist epistemologies and defamiliarizes linear cinematic perception . In so doing, the film enfolds or embeds the spectator into the narrative, and thus spectator and film become deeply intertwined. To better capture this aspect of the cinematic experience induced by MEMENTO an embodied reconfiguration of spectatorship is required.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cinema and Narrative ComplexityEmbodying the Fabula, pp. 175 - 204Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017