This dissertation will examine the relationship between the narrative styles of the art cinema and those of mainstream contemporary American cinema. In particular: it will focus on a unique style of narration used in the art cinema since the early decades of the 20th century, contending that “multiform narrative”—a concept adopted from the work of Janet Murray—offers a useful framework for analyzing this style. The key structural features of the “multiform narrative” are its multiple narrative strands and multiple ontologies, and it is the latter feature that sets it apart from other narrative styles. It will argue that “multiform narratives” differ from the unified narratives of classical Hollywood cinema in their use of multiple narrative strands. However, they also differ from multi-strand narratives of American independent cinema in their use of multiple realities. The usefulness of the “multiform” as a category will be demonstrated through a consideration of a diverse group of films ranging from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1919) to Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1951), as well as through contemporary multiple-ontology films such as Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004). These contemporary films share many narrative and aesthetic characteristics of the earlier multiform films that have become exemplars of “modernist” and/or “art cinema,” even though they have emerged from very different social and institutional contexts. In this respect, the category of the “multiform” will be shown to offer both a flexibility and specificity that is not provided by earlier concepts. Consequently, it provides a framework for analyzing films from different movements and time periods with similar narrative structures that have yet to be considered together on this basis. As a result, the multiform will be shown to close a research gap in the field of complex narrative in the cinema and to provide a helpful refinement to the evolving taxonomy of narrative forms. In addition, it will be argued that a further distinction can be made within the category of the multiform itself through the identification of a style of multiform film that uses subjective realist narration to create its alternate ontological levels. Subjective realism presents the internal world of a character as if it were as real as other levels of narration and, in the films that will be considered, subjective realist strands are used to represent the dreams, hallucinations, and/or lying flashbacks of key characters within the films. A historical overview of subjective realist multiform cinema from 1919 to the present will be offered, and it will be argued that the innovative and challenging contemporary films which employ this narrative structure are aesthetically and narratively indebted to their precursors in the art cinema, but are also informed by recent technological developments as well as contemporary production and reception contexts. They will be shown to be part of a cycle of films emerging in the mid-1990s that has offered multiplex audiences narrative pleasures of the type formerly reserved for the denizens of art house cinema.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/254155 |
| Creators | Matthew Campora |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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