Table of Contents

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

About the Author

Warren Buckland is Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is author of Directed by Steven Spielberg and The Cognitive Semiotics of Film, and co-author (with Thomas Elsaesser) of Studying Contemporary American Film.

Reviews

"Barratt makes excellent use of graphics to help illustrate the strategies employed by Shyamalan to prevent the first-time viewer anticipating the aforementioned twist . . . ultimately though, Buckland's collection does provide a thought-provoking study of what has become an important genre in contemporary cinema." (Scope Book Reviews, 1 February 2011)

"A timely and insightful guide to some of the more complex and labyrinthine currents in recent cinema, drawing on an admirable range of examples from around the globe. Geoff King, Professor of Film and TV Studies, Brunel University