Puzzle Films

Warren Buckland is Reader in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is author of Directed by Steven Spielberg and The Cognitive Semiotics of Film, and co-author (with Thomas Elsaesser) of Studying Contemporary American Film.

"Barratt makes excellent use of graphics to help illustrate the strategies employed by Shyamalan to prevent the first-time viewer anticipating the aforementioned twist . . . ultimately though, Buckland's collection does provide a thought-provoking study of what has become an important genre in contemporary cinema." (Scope Book Reviews, 1 February 2011) "A timely and insightful guide to some of the more complex and labyrinthine currents in recent cinema, drawing on an admirable range of examples from around the globe. Geoff King, Professor of Film and TV Studies, Brunel University

• List of Contributors viiIntroduction: Puzzle Plots 1Warren Buckland1 The Mind-Game Film 13Thomas Elsaesser2 Making Sense of Lost Highway 42Warren Buckland3 “Twist Blindness”: The Role of Primacy, Priming, Schemas, and Reconstructive Memory in a First-Time Viewing of The Sixth Sense 62Daniel Barratt4 Narrative Comprehension Made Difficult: Film Form and Mnemonic Devices in Memento 87Stefano Ghislotti5 “Frustrated Time” Narration: The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman 107Chris Dzialo6 Backbeat and Overlap: Time, Place, and Character Subjectivity in Run Lola Run 129Michael Wedel7 Infernal Affairs and the Ethics of Complex Narrative 151Allan Cameron and Sean Cubitt8 Happy Together? Generic Hybridity in 2046 and In the Mood for Love 167Gary Bettinson9 Revitalizing the Thriller Genre: Lou Ye’s Suzhou River and Purple Butterfly 187Yunda Eddie Feng10 The Pragmatic Poetics of Hong Sangsoo’s The Day a Pig Fell into a Well 203Marshall Deutelbaum11 Looking for Access in Narrative Complexity. The New and the Old in Oldboy 217Eleftheria ThanouliIndex 233