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

The New and the Old in Oldboy 227restricted. To measure the degree of knowledgeability, we have to investigatethe sources of information on which the film relies; if, for instance,the narration confines itself to the knowledge and actions of one character,then it is bound to be restricted and ignore other sides of the story. If,on the other hand, the film switches from character to character and risesabove the subjective level, then it acquires a sense of omniscience.Thirdly, the communicativeness determines the extent to which thenarration communicates the information it has at its disposal. An omniscientnarration is not necessarily obliged to share its knowledge withthe spectators and may choose to suppress it until the very end or evenindefinitely. Alternatively, a restricted narration could be entirely communicative,sharing all its knowledge with us no matter how little that maybe. In other words, the question we seek to answer in regard to the aspectof communicativeness is “how willing is the narration to tell us what itknows?” or “how open and talkative is the film about its story?”Looking at the narration of Oldboy through this prism, one is immediatelystruck by the ubiquitous presence of self-consciousness that constantlyreminds us of the fabricated quality of the film. All the elements of complexitythat I previously detected – from the use of the voiceover to themannerist mise-en-scène and the regular manipulations of the chronology– bring forward the very act of narration, defying the directives of the classicalmodel that dictate the suppression of the aspect of self-consciousness.What is intriguing, however, is that the extreme self-consciousness doesnot block our engagement with the action, no matter how it foregroundsthe artificiality of the filmic texture. This is paradoxical, given that a highlevel of self-consciousness is not usually a sign of easy access to the charactersand the plot. Rather the contrary, as the traditional bearers of selfconsciousdevices, the modernist and experimental films, favored theobscurity and the ambiguity of their signifiers. Nonetheless, in the case ofPark’s film, what tones down the effects of self-consciousness and mitigatesthe sources of complexity is the amplified knowledgeability and communicativenessof the narration.More specifically, the presence of an omniscient narrator who continuallycomments on the action functions as a navigation tool in a diegeticworld that would otherwise seem chaotic. For instance, in the first scenewhere Oh Dae-Su appears locked in a room screaming at the guard andasking for how long his captivity will last, his voice in the form of a nondiegeticnarrator informs us right away that he would remain in the roomfor 15 years. This is a piece of very crucial information that, on the one