Palao-Errando JA, Loriguillo-López A, Sorolla-Romero T. Beyond the Screen, Beyond the Story: The Rhetorical Battery of Post-Classical Films. Q Rev Film Video [Internet]. Routledge; 2018;0(0):1–22. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1080/10509208.2017.1409097
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2018
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Papers by Teresa Sorolla
In this article we aim to address a cinematic trend towards narrative complexity that Film Studies have labelled as mind-game films (Elsaesser, 2009) or puzzle films (Buckland, 2009). Understood by film scholars as part of post-classical cinema (Thanouli, 2009), their entangled narratives are
often based on the nonlinear temporality and unreliable narrators. We start from this theoretical framework on the case study to focus on the narration of mind-game films focalised on amnesiac main characters. We limit our research to those mind-game films whose main character suffers from amnesia, and has forgotten some intimate trauma. We apply film and narratology analysis in order to understand the narrative focalisation (Gaudreault and Jost, 1995) of representative films of this trend such as Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Shutter Island or Inception, and to determine how the amnesia of the protagonists affects the aforementioned narrative development of the story. As hypothesis, we propose that when these protagonists recover the knowledge they had forgotten, a sense of tragedy emerges, both from the narrative disposition of the story, which allows us to trace the survival of Aristotelian concepts such as anagnorisis and hamartia, and from the content of the memory, in which we find echoes of classical myths such as those of Oedipus and Orpheus
In this article we aim to examine the representation of the figure of the mother in what some scholars label as mind-game or puzzle films. Without the spectators or, frequently, the protagonists themselves being aware of it, the films we study sustain their narrative on delirious subjectivities and deceitful points of view. The filmic narration, complicit in the characters’ self-deception, amnesia or trauma, transfers their altered perception of reality to the spectators. Here we propose that an important part of this heterogeneous corpus of films depicts stories in which the cause of delirium is the painful and unaccepted loss of a child. Throughout the text we will attempt to analyse the representation of the mother figure in these stories, associated with the aesthetics of the sinister and, frequently, with an intimate feeling of guilt related to the death of the child.
In this article we intend to focus on the most significant aspects of the aesthetic and narrative strategies which interwave the filmic discourses devoted to Victoria of the United Kingdom along the first two decades of the 21 st century: The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Valleé,
2009), Mrs. Brown (John Madden, 1997) and Victoria & Abdul (Stephen Frears, 2017). Our aim is to identify which biographical choices are emphasized –that is, which facets are highlighted, omitted or invented– in order to understand which mechanisms articulate several filmic images of the British monarch and Empress of the India.
dressed in a white tunic walks by a gallery illuminated by a soft chiaroscuro. A stable traveling accompanies his firm steps. The camera’s gaze leaves behind
paintings that remind unattended by the walker. Under them, The Young
Pope’s credits appear on neon lights, as if they were giving information about
the paintings. The frieze of chronologically disordered images from different
epochs and styles is stitched by a kind of Star of Bethlehem, which becomes
progressively destructive and sets fire to the painted scenes. The guide star,
transformed in a meteorite, finally impacts with a sculpture of John Paul II and
becomes La nona hora (Maurizio Cattelan, 1999). The wink that Lenny dedicates to the spectator breaking the fourth wall advances some key traits of the young pope’s character, by reminding previous examples of this gesture from cinema and television as well. In this article we intend to analyse The Young Pope’s opening, attending to the meaning born from the collision between the pictorial references showed along the travelling.
Este artículo analiza diversas obras del cine español contemporáneo como integrantes de una tendencia experimental de la complejidad audiovisual contemporánea: las llamadas puzzle films o mind-game films. Para resolver qué discurso subyace a su desestructuración en el caso español, analizamos fragmentos clave de Abre los ojos (1996), Los otros (2001), La mala educación (2004) y La piel que habito (2010). Concluimos que los principales malestares que emergen son el terror a no distinguir entre realidad y ficción, la desconfianza hacia la tecnología que condiciona la subjetividad y el olvido de la propia culpa. Palabras clave: análisis textual; cine postclásico; puzzle films; mind-game films; no linealidad narrativa, narrativas complejas; cine español.
Este artigo analisa várias obras do cinema espanhol contemporâneo como parte de uma tendência experimental da complexidade audiovisual contemporânea: os chamados filmes de quebra-cabeça ou filmes de jogos mentais. Para resolver o discurso subjacente à sua desestruturação no caso espanhol, analisamos fragmentos-chave de Abre los ojos (1996), Los otros (2001), La mala educación (2004) e La piel que habito (2010). Concluímos que os principais desconfortos que surgem são o terror de não distinguir entre realidade e ficção, a desconfiança da tecnologia que condiciona a subjetividade e o esquecimento da própria culpa. Palavras-chave: análise textual; cinema pós-clássico; puzzle films; mind-game films; não linearidade narrativa, narrativas complexas; cinema espanhol. CUADERNOS.INFO Nº 40
El fin del recorrido es aproximarnos al devenir del que fue uno de los motivos más recurrentes de la pintura decimonónica y que, metamorfoseado, habita todavía hoy la imagen contemporánea.
pictórica que emerge en la puesta en
escena de L’Apollonide. Casa de
tolerancia (L’Apollonide. Souvenirs de
la maison closee, Bertrand Bonello,
2011), cuyo sentido trasciende la mera
ambientación de época. Toilettes
postimpresionistas, orientalismos
simbolistas y salidas al campo de aire
impresionista forman parte de las
referencias de las cuales el filme se
nutre y que, a la vez, metamorfosea
para escribir un relato detenido en el
eterno final del siglo XIX, cuyo lacónico
tedio y militante artificialidad no son
obstáculo para la irrupción despiadada
de la barbarie. Partiendo de la
identificación de intertextualidades y el
análisis textual de la materialidad
fílmica, proponemos defender que
L’Apollonide aprehende la estética y el
sentir decadente del arte francés del
crepúsculo decimonónico para
construir un relato que humaniza con
mirada contemporánea el día a día de
las prostitutas que trabajan en un
elitista burdel abocado al cierre. La
configuración de la puesta en escena
que reclama determinados referentes
pictóricos es clave para repensar,
redibujar y proponer un reverso al mito
de la femme fatale pictórica.
The appeal that interactive apps and games have been gathering has put in jeopardy the dominance of the film industry. The threat of interactivity has not only affected technical processes in film production, but their influence is felt in the storytelling devices of the flagship product par excellence of mainstream cinema: the action blockbuster. This paper proposes the analysis of the poetics of the contemporary action film that features certain traits of video game narratives by bringing up the case of Edge of Tomorrow (D. Liman, 2014). In particular, we focus in the construction of the time loop in which their characters are trapped, unable to escape death in the battlefield and forced to repeat the process ad nauseam. The spectator, identified on the protagonist, experiences a similar situation to the life cycle of the avatars in the game: a symbolic death in the form of a setback punishment, to which follows a new opportunity by going back to a immediately preceding state in the game. As if it were a difficult level of a platform video game, in Edge of Tomorrow this reversibility of death becomes an indispensable requirement for overcoming a narrative challenge that demands for the active participation of the spectator/user in the context of the contemporary digital entertainment.