Making Sense of Mind-Game Films: Narrative Complexity, Embodiment, and the Senses
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Overview
Mind-game films and other complex narratives have been a prominent phenomenon of the cinematic landscape during the period 1990-2010, when films like The Sixth Sense, Memento, Fight Club and Source Code became critical and commercial successes, often acquiring a cult status with audiences. With their multiple story lines, unreliable narrators, ambiguous twist endings, and paradoxical worlds, these films challenge traditional ways of narrative comprehension and in many cases require and reward multiple viewings.
But how can me make sense of films that don’t always make sense the way we are used to? While most scholarship has treated these complex films as narrative puzzles that audiences solve with their cognitive skills, Making Sense of Mind-Game Films offers a fresh perspective by suggesting that they appeal to the body and the senses in equal measures. Mind-game films tell stories about crises between body, mind and world, and about embodied forms of knowing and subjective ways of being-in-the-world. Through compelling in-depth case studies of popular mind-game films, the book explores how these complex narratives take their (embodied) spectators with them into such crises. The puzzling effect generated by these films stems from a conflict between what we think and what we experience, between what we know and what we feel to be true, and between what we see and what we sense.
Investigates mind-game films through the framework of phenomenology and theories of embodied spectatorship, exploring how audiences can understand these films with the body and senses and not just the mind.
First book to specifically address the mind-game film as a subgroup of complex narratives
Provides fresh insights to popular films like The Sixth Sense, Memento and Source Code as well as lesser known films such as Possible Worlds
Applies phenomenology and theories of embodied spectatorship, the most dominant paradigms of current Film Studies, to films where these theories have been considered least
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter One: Seeing What Others Cannot See
Chapter Two: Solving Things Differently
Chapter Three: Getting Lost, Sensing the Way
Conclusion: Play it Again: Games with the Mind or with the Body and the Senses?
References
List of Films
List of Television Shows
Notes
Index
Setting out to examine ‘what happens with the body in the mind-game film’, Simin Littschwager moves beyond existing accounts that treat such ‘complex’ film narratives primarily as cognitive puzzles, demonstrating instead how ‘mind games’ can lead into an intensified engagement with bodily experience. Deftly weaving together phenomenological concepts and detailed film analysis, Littschwager sheds new light on some of the most significant and talked-about movies of the past twenty years. It is a testament to her insight and intellectual resourcefulness that the exploration of these familiar works is so very fresh and engaging.
Among the proliferating literature on mind-game/puzzle films, Littschwager’s Making Sense of Mind-Game Films impresses by its clarity of exposition and singularity of focus. Tracing what she calls ’the ruptures between body, mind and world’ that mind-game films exemplify in their story worlds and embody in their affective impact, she advances our understanding beyond the cognitive challenges and narratological puzzles that other writers have highlighted.
- Title: Making Sense of Mind-Game Films: Narrative Complexity, Embodiment, and the Senses
- Author: Simin Nina Littschwager
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2019
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 256
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781501337055, 9781501376276, 1501376276, 150133705X
- Resource ID: LLS:9781501337055
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:03:24Z
Simin Nina Littschwager is an independent scholar and film maker based in Wellington, New Zealand. She holds a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, where she has previously taught undergraduate courses in film studies.