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

218 Eleftheria ThanouliOn first viewing, Oldboy leaves the spectator simultaneously enlightenedand baffled. The secrets of the story are revealed, the masks of theprotagonists are thrown off, and, yet, one feels the need to go over the factsonce more, to double-check the connections among the characters andverify the premises of a particularly twisted narrative as it is transmittedthrough the channels of an equally twisted narration. And indeed, it wasall intentional; as Park admitted at the news conference following the awardpresentations at Cannes Film Festival, he made the film with the DVDviewers in mind so that they could watch it several times and discover newelements each time. 2The young South Korean filmmaker, however, is not alone in the effortto cater for the needs and tastes of the DVD audience, which is not constrainedby the limitations of the single viewing of a film in the theater.Since the late 90s, an increasing number of films have employed complexstorytelling techniques that extend the classical rules of filmmaking andtest the limits of the narrational capacities of the cinematic medium. 3 Someof them experiment with the treatment of narrative time, using time-loopsand repetitions as in Run Lola Run (1998); others exhaust the possibilitiesof the screen by “exploding” the cinematic space as in Time Code (2000),while others create characters with impossible identities as in MulhollandDr. (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).Unlike these examples, however, Oldboy embodies an intriguing paradoxfor, on the one hand, it complicates the workings of all the narrativesystems – causality, time, and space – while, on the other, it remains accessibleand intelligible to the spectator even on the first viewing. Thecomplexity in its narrative construction is so masterfully planned thateverything is still within the viewer’s grasp, everything is almost literally“in our face.” In the close textual analysis that follows, I will try to uncoverthis meticulous narrative planning and explain the delicate handlingof the various narrative devices in the film. My methodological and conceptualtoolkit will primarily comprise the terms and concepts of thenarrative analysis that David Bordwell has introduced in his contributionto the study of historical poetics (Bordwell 1985; Bordwell et al. 1985).More specifically, I will analyze Oldboy along the three main analytical axes– system of narrative logic, narrative space, and narrative time – and,consequently, I will examine the distribution and transmission of storyinformation in the overall narration. The ultimate goal is to unlock themechanisms of the film and reveal the constant and fierce negotiationsthat take place between the classical norms of narrative construction and