Shifting Complexity - Complex Storytelling in Historical Film Noir and Contemporary Mainstream Cinema

Since the early 1990s, mainstream cinema has seen the proliferation of non-classical, disruptive narrative devices such as non-linear storytelling, unreliable narration and embedding, devices that were previously thought to be practically exclusive to the realms of (post)modernist literature and art cinema. This thesis compares the formal and experiential complexities of contemporary mainstream films with the complexities found in film noir of the 1940s and 50s in order to investigate whether the recent proliferation of complex narratives in mainstream cinema is indicative of a ‘paradigm shift’ to a radically new form of storytelling, or whether, instead, it is forms part of a long tradition of classical Hollywood narration. In order to make this comparison, this thesis constructs a definition of narrative complexity that links the formal complications of a film narrative to the cognitive challenges a narrative may pose for its viewer. Starting from Torben Grodal’s PECMA-flow model (2009), narrative complexity is defined as an effect that arises from the filmtextual complications and paradoxes that block the flow of cognition of a viewer and problematize his embodied immersion in the action of the diegetic world. Following this, six complicating techniques that may elicit such mental blocks are discussed: nonlinear storytelling, embedding, metalepsis, alternate timelines, the withholding of plot information and narrative unreliability. This definition forms the basis for a structural comparison of the narrative complexity in film noir and contemporary mainstream cinema in the form of nine case studies. The results of these studies indicate that, while certain types of story complexity were already present in film noir, contemporary cinema does indeed display innovative new forms of complexity at the level of presentation. In its conclusion, this thesis offers several brief hypothetical explanations for this development, all of which require further investigation.