Cinema of Disorientation

Dominic Lash is an associate lecturer in film at Anglia Ruskin University. He is the author of The Cinema of Disorientation (EUP, 2020) and Robert Pippin and Film (2022, Bloomsbury).

Dominic Lash’s book powerfully demonstrates the importance of an aesthetics of confusion in film analysis, importing many of the tactics and the crucial delicate distinctions that William Empson brought to the study of the types of disorientation we encounter in literature. One of the most fruitful implications of this elegantly written text, which Lash continually wrestles with, is that when a filmmaker cannot make a narrative cohesive or fully coherent — beset by the confusions he or she initially feels hopeful of controlling or mastering — the film may benefit from the fact that no sufficient solution to the "confusion" impasse has been found. A persisting sense of lostness can have a value in narrative equal to that achieved by a resolving order. Whether Lash is talking about Marion’s death tear in Psycho or the shifting sense of Diane Selwyn’s crying over the fantasy return of Camilla in Mulholland Dr., he manages to take us through the range of interpretive possibilities and associations with wondrous care. His lengthy readings of Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE, Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, and Michael Haneke’s Caché are as illuminating as any that I’ve encountered.

• List of figuresAcknowledgementsIntroductionProspectusPart One: Confusion as Fusion: metalepsis, completeness, and coherence1. Metalepsis in film and its implications2. Genres within genres within genres: nested narrative and metalepsis3. "Disappeared where it's real hard to disappear": three ways of getting lost in INLAND EMPIRE4. Achieving coherence: diegesis and death in Holy MotorsPart Two: Disorientating Figures and Figures of Disorientation5. Figuring (out) films: figuration in narrative cinema 6. Distinguishing the indistinguishable: figures of imperceptibility and impossibility in Lost Highway and Caché7. Homes for displaced figures: Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth8. Sink or swim: immersing ourselves in Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au langageConclusion: Method-free orientationAppendix: Colossal Youth scene breakdownBibliographyFilmographyNotes Index