Before or beyond narrative? Towards a complex systems theory of contemporary films

This book puts into focus the tendency for increasingly complex forms of narration in post-1990s cinema. I argue that, because of the fragmentation and nonlinearity that contemporary complex films display—in all three narrative dimensions of time, causality and space—it is not enough to approach them solely as complex narratives. The notion of narrative holds onto an idea of coherency, wholeness and causal-temporal linearity of the story, against the backdrop of which narrative ‘complexity’ is defined. Instead, this book suggests a radically new framework for the analysis of contemporary narrative films, a framework able to shed light to the processes of organization that nonlinear systems follow. Tools from complexity theory are thus derived in order to address complex films as complex systems, and their dynamic forms of textual and cognitive organization