Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

190 Yunda Eddie Fengnarrative progression. Both Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly have nonlinearstructures that confuse viewers, since significant portions of storyinformation are elided and causal relationships are unclear when themovies jump back and forth through their chronologies.The confusion caused by temporal instability is compounded by themovies’ aggressive visual style, which is comprised of restless cameras andfrequent, rough edits. The visual confusion also heightens narrative confusionsince Lou gives viewers little opportunity to process the images.Upon first viewing, Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly seem to be comprisedentirely of brief shots. However, on closer inspection, one sees that eachmovie has several long takes lasting more than a minute. These long takesare among the most important moments in these movies. Long takescreate a sense of anticipation, alerting viewers that essential informationor action is about to be revealed.In Suzhou River, most of the long takes indicate when the unseendiegetic narrator is filming the on-screen action. In other words, these shotsare optical point-of-view shots (we see the events directly through the character’seyes). In Edward Branigan’s terms (Branigan 1992, ch. 4), the camerain these shots is “internally focalized (surface),” with the important detailthat they are not accompanied by any reverse angle cutting that showsthe audience whose look is being focalized/represented on screen. Weknow that these shots represent the look of a character within the diegesisbecause the camera interacts with other characters – they look into thecamera and smile or wave, the camera is kissed, we see the character’s handson the frame lines, etc. These scenes are analogous to the cameraworkin Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), the well-knownHollywood experiment that attempted to focus a film exclusively arounda character’s optical point-of-view shots (Branigan 1992, pp. 142–6). InPurple Butterfly, long takes signal that strangers will collide violently soon.Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly differ in the way that they conveyexposition. Suzhou River inundates viewers with exposition delivered viavoiceover narration by a talkative diegetic narrator (who is unreliablebecause he is involved with and manipulates the movie’s events) and dialoguefrom other verbose characters. The viewer has to filter out non-truthsin order to understand the narrative. Further confusion is created by theuse of handheld camerawork representing both the unseen diegetic narrator’soptical point of view and the director’s standard non-focalized shotsof the events. Since the entire movie looks like it was shot by the sameperson (someone in the movie’s diegesis), the viewer might wonder if the