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

226 Eleftheria Thanouliscene not only completes the temporal loop but it also helps us reinterpretthe event before our eyes: the man holding the neck-tie does not try to killthe other one, as it appeared the first time; instead, he tries to forestall hisdeath. This deception results from the staging of the action and foreshadowsthe broader sense of deception that the narrative performs, as regardsthe relations of the characters and their goals. Thus, the temporal orderingof the events becomes an ally in twisting the story and withholding itskey secrets.Moderating the ComplexityThe complex narrational choices I have examined so far in the systems ofcausality, space and time serve Park’s avowed goal to present his viewerswith a dense and demanding film that would require several viewings ona DVD in order to unravel all its dimensions. And yet, there is an organizingprinciple underlying the various levels of complexity and maintaininga high degree of intelligibility even for those who see it only once. I believethat the mechanism that holds the film together and attributes to it a considerablemeasure of coherence is related to the way the narration controlsthe transmission and the flow of story information.At the broadest level of inquiry, the narration of a film can be definedas a vehicle for information of different sorts. The sum of the causal andspatiotemporal elements aim at transmitting varying amounts of informationand distributing the knowledge about the story at various paces fromthe beginning till the end. This multifaceted process of conveying data tothe spectators is moderated by three properties: “self-consciousness,”“knowledgeability,” and “communicativeness” 7 (Bordwell et al. 1985, p. 25).Firstly, the self-consciousness refers to the degree in which the filmacknowledges its constructed nature and breaks the illusion of being asegment of reality. More specifically, a narration can be self-conscious todifferent degrees, depending on how much it flaunts the actual transmissionof information to the audience. When we want to evaluate the elementof self-consciousness in a film, we ask questions such as “how awareis the narration of addressing the audience?” or “which aspects reveal theartificiality of the narrating act?”Secondly, the knowledgeability is related to the amount of informationthat the narration possesses about the story. Depending on the range andthe depth of knowledge, a narration can be either knowledgeable or