(In)visibility and (Un)awareness in Complex Cinema

Contemporary techno-cultural conditions bring a qualitative shift in cinematic communication, which arguably becomes increasingly complex in its structure. This chapter suggests a complex systems framework to approach this shift. Using the films Antichrist and Melancholia as a twofold case study, I argue that, in them and other complex or “mind-game” films, film form becomes a machine of multiple observation, expressed through many instances of systemic self-reference that create mise-en-abyme structures, where viewers repeatedly locate and lose themselves. Complex cinema engages film and viewer in a mutual systemic constitution and communication, of which uncertainty is the basic principle