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

16 Thomas Elsaesserdetails that do not “add up” – even though the overall experience “makessense” – would indicate we are dealing with a phenomenon that spectatorsrecognize as relevant to their own worlds. Mind-game films thustranscend not only genre, but also authorial signature (even thoughrecognized auteurs are prominent) and national cinema (even though aEurope–East Asia–American independents triangle can be discerned). Ifread symptomatically, from the point of view of reception, what is at stakeare new forms of spectator-engagement and new forms of audienceaddress(although “new” here functions merely as a diacritical markerof difference: the genealogy of the mind-game film includes such venerablemaster-magicians of surprise, suspense, and the double-take asFritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles, as well as1950s/1960s “art cinema” films by Akira Kurosawa, Alain Resnais, and IngmarBergman).As such, mind-game films could be seen as indicative of a “crisis” in thespectator–film relation, in the sense that the traditional “suspension ofdisbelief” or the classical spectator positions of “voyeur,” “witness,”“observer” and their related cinematic regimes or techniques (point-of-viewshot, “suture,” restricted/omniscient narration, “fly on the wall” transparency,mise-en-scène of the long take/depth of field) are no longer deemed appropriate,compelling, or challenging enough. It would not be the first timethat the “institution cinema” experiments with spectator-address, in theface of technical, economic, or demographic changes. Lars von Trier’s Lookeys,for instance, and the idea of offering prizes to the audience for correct guesses,deliberately confuse film viewing with game-shows on television, in orderto provoke a different, more direct form of participation: the cinematic equivalentof the phone-in. But in the early- to mid-1910s, when the so-called“cinema of attractions” was said to give way to the “cinema of narrativeintegration,” a German director, Joe May, initiated a successful, if brief voguefor so-called “Preisrätselfilme” or prize-puzzle-films as a sub-genre of the(Danish-inspired) detective film, where clues were planted without beingrevealed at the end. Instead, prizes were offered to spectators who identifiedthem (Pehla 1991).On the other hand, besides the transition from “early” to “classical” cinema,drastic changes in audience-address (at least in mainstream cinema)have been relatively rare, and are usually coded generically (comedy andthe musical allowed for frontal staging and direct address, which wouldnot have been common in Westerns or thrillers). If mind-game films areindeed harbingers of such changes in audience-address and spectator-