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
V - Towards 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 fact, an important and pervasive shift is beginning to take place in cognitive science under the very influence of its own research. This shift requires that we move away from the idea of the world as independent and extrinsic to the idea of a world as inseparable from the structure of these processes of self-modification […] The key point is that such systems do not operate by representation. Instead of representing an independent world, they enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system.
‒ Varela et al. 1992, 139-140What is Mind? No Matter. What is Body? Never Mind.
Introduction
In the opening scene of David Fincher's FIGHT CLUB (1999) spectators are literally taken on a ride through the brain of the film's protagonist. The film can thus be taken as emblematic of a tendency within complex narratives to move inside the characters’ brain spaces. Observing this, Patricia Pisters (2012) labels such films ‘neuro-images’ (a category of films largely corresponding to complex narratives) since ‘[w]e no longer see through characters’ eyes, as in the movement-image and time-image; we are most often instead in their mental space’ (14). Another example is to be found in Darren Aronofsky's REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) in which the effects of the main protagonists’ drug use are not merely ‘represented’ but cinematically ‘enacted’ so as to make spectators embody the drug experience. In his trademark ‘hip-hop montages’, Aronofsky uses short close-ups to intensify particular actions that demonstrate the effects of the drugs such as the widening of pupils, the preparation of cocaine, a fast-motion illustration of a sudden explosion of energy (e.g. dancing, talking, cleaning), or microscopic images demonstrating changes in brain chemistry. Jamie Skye Bianco (2004) has described the cinematic experience of such montages as follows:
We sense and feel drugged in this explosion of intensive powers and control that normally bind the apparatus to the organic clock. The game that REQUIEM [FOR A DREAM] plays out is the relentless organization of non-organic rhythms, temporalities, diffractions, and affects decentering the capacities of the observer.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Cinema and Narrative ComplexityEmbodying the Fabula, pp. 111 - 136Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017