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

230 Eleftheria Thanoulisome of the compositional and generic elements of the classical narrative,such as the role of the male avenger or the motif of the investigation, onlyto subvert them by entailing them in a Möbius strip structure that allowsevery person and every event to be doubly coded. Similarly, the cinematicspace enriched the options of the classical mise-en-scène and continuity editingwith spatial montage and intensified continuity, respectively. Moreover,in the axis of narrative time the filmmaker employed several breaks in thechronology of the events and manipulated the temporal signifiers quite freely,resulting in a sense of a continually mediated progression of time. All theseinnovative elements created a complex narrative that discovers new possibilitiesfor the storytelling capacity of the cinematic medium.On the other hand, the thread that holds this narrative together is theunremitting transmission of story information through an extensive networkof sources that range from the characters’ diegetic interactions to avery “talkative” voiceover commentary and a long chain of old and newmedia. The film invests a great deal on the increased knowingness andcommunicativeness of the narration in order to offer the viewers a coherentaccount of the action and to allow them to access its secrets. Therefore,by latching onto the classical principles that dictate the gradual expositionof the story and the complete filling of the knowledge gaps by the closingcredits, Oldboy manages to combine the forces of innovation with somesolid and reliable classical mechanisms.However inventive Park’s narrative choices may appear, they are notpath-breaking; rather, they seem to fit in with a wider trend in currentfilmmaking that strives to outgrow the classical norms and experiment withnew tools and new territories. Elsewhere, I have argued about the existenceof a post-classical paradigm of narration that offers internationalfilmmakers 10 a new set of constructional options that do not radically subvertthe classical model but imbue it with the logic – and the corollaries– of a highly mediated mode of representation (Thanouli 2006). What isintriguing for me in the case of Oldboy is to see how a South Korean filmmakerhas, on the one hand, mastered the rules of this new post-classicalmode, while, on the other, he has instilled it with a particularly South Koreansensibility evidenced in the thematic choices and the approach to physicalviolence. Perhaps it was the negotiation between the international codesof post-classical cinema and the local story material that secured the filma successful performance on all the fronts. Perhaps not. I am afraid thatsecrets of world cinema will require more investigation in hidden places,other than those of narrative analysis, before they reveal themselves to us.