Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema

Since the early 1990s there has been a trend towards narrative complexity within popular cinema. This book examines a number of contemporary films that play overtly with narrative structure, raising questions of chance and destiny, memory and history, simultaneity and the representation of time.

Since the early 1990s there has been a trend towards narrative complexity within popular cinema, as evidenced by the successes of such films as Pulp Fiction, Memento and Run Lola Run. Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema looks at the way a number of these films play with time and narrative. Allan Cameron shows how this formal play reflects a persistent fascination with questions of chance and destiny, memory and history, and the representation of simultaneous events. Collectively, modular narratives represent encounters between linearity and non-linearity, narrative and database, memory and forgetting, temporal anchoring and temporal drift, simultaneity and succession, and chaos and order. Ultimately, they stage the crisis and redemption of time, exploring the relationships among past, present and future in the context of contemporary media and database aesthetics.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema The Shape of Narrative Time: Subjective, Schismatic and Modular Projecting the Future: Order, Chaos and Modularity Navigating Memory: Temporal Anchoring and the Modular Subject Articulating History: Archival Aesthetics and the National Narrative Deciphering the Present: Simultaneity, Succession and Mediation Coda: Playing Games With Cinema Notes Bibliography Index