With a twist: on puzzle films, mind games, unreliable narrators, & spoilers

Latest update May 10, 2010

Image from The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)

Film Studies For Free is a sucker for films and television dramas with a twist, and also a big fan of reading about audiovisual narrative complexity and narrational unreliability. Never one to keep its enthusiasms to itself, here's a little list of some excellent, and openly accessible, online reading of the scholarly kind on those very tricksy topics, and a lovely little short film that FSFF came across on its e-travels, too...

• Gary Bettinson, 'Effects of the dominant in Secret Window', New Review of Film and Television Studies 6:2 (August 2008)
• Robert Bird, 'Andrei Tarkovsky and Contemporary Art: Medium and Mediation', Tate Papers, Autumn 2008
  
• Lesley Brill, 'M. Night Shyamalan: A Preliminary Report', Senses of Cinema, Issue 46, 2008
• Ture Bural, 'Endland Umpire: A placement of David Lynch's Inland Empire', Perforations, 29, 2007
• Leah A.Cheyne, 'The Sixth Sense: Humanizing Horror', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003
• Michel Ciment, 'Kubrick and the Fantastic', (1982) The Kubrick Site, (date unknown)
• T.J. Demos, 'Moving Images of Globalization', Grey Room 37, Fall 2009, pp. 6–29 
• Jonathan Eig, 'A beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity', from Jump Cut, Issue 46, 2003
• Thomas Elsaesser, 'The Mind-Game Film' in Warren Buckland (ed), Puzzle Films (Oxford: Blackwell 2009)
• Thomas Elsaesser, "Performative Self-Contradictions Michael Haneke's Mind Games," in Roy Grundmann (ed), A Companion to Michael Haneke (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
• Jim Emerson, 'Head Trips: Movies Inside the Skull', RogerEbert.com, January 1, 2005 
• Jim Emerson, 'Donnie Darko in his mind's eye (One little boy, one little man)', RogerEbert.com, November 2, 2004
  
• Jim Emerson, ''Birth' of a Buñuelian Notion', Scanners, June 15, 2006
• Jim Emerson, 'Fight Club: Punching in the Dark', RogerEbert.com, October 25, 1999
• Jim Emerson, 'Fight Club: I Am Jack's Manic-Depression', Scanners, July 22, 2008
• Domènec Font, 'In the fabric of time', Formats, No. 5, 2009 
• Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell, “Speculation on Spoilers: Lost Fandom, Narrative Consumption and Rethinking Textuality” Particip@tions Volume 4, Issue 1 (May 2007)
• Coral Houtman, 'Questions of Unreliable Narration in The Sixth Sense', Scope, November 2004
• New Kathryn Muriel Kang, 'Patch and reboot in Memento', in Agnostic democracy : the decentred "I" of the 1990s, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2006 (for full thesis click here)
• Jung-In Kwon, 'Memory Simulated', Journal of Moving Image Studies, Fall 2003 
• Erlend Lavik , "Changing Narratives: Five Essays on Hollywood History", PhD Thesis, University of Bergen, 2007
• Kia Lindroos, 'Non-Linear Narrative As a Form of Political Action: Viewing Chris Marker’s Film Sans Soleil', ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, Mannheim Workshop: 'THE POLITICAL USES OF NARRATIVE' With Maureen Whitebrook and Fabrice Larat (date unknown)
• Todd McGowan, "The Violence of Creation in The Prestige", Žižek and Cinema - IJŽS Vol 1.3, 2007
• Jason Mittell, Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television", The Velvet Light Trap #58, Fall 2006 
• Laura Rascaroli, 'Scopic Drive, Time Travel and Film Spectatorship in Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and Bigelow's Strange Days', Kinema, 15 (Spring 2001)
• Laurence A. Rickels, 'Recognition Values: Seeing The Sixth Sense Again for the First Time', Other Voices, v.2, n.2 (March 2002)
• Laura Schuster, “What does a scanner see?” Techno-fascination and unreliability in the mind-game film", Conference paper: Visions of Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberpunk and Science Fiction, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, July 1-3, 2008
• Laura Schuster , "The Trouble with Memory: Reco(r)ding the Mind in Code 46", Conference paper: Digital Memories, Salzburg, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, March 17-19, 2009
• Aaron Smuts, 'Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002
• New Aaron Smuts, 'Sympathetic spectators: Roman Polanski's Le Locataire (The Tenant, 1976)',  Kinoeye, Vol. 2, Issue 3, 2002
• Donato Totaro, 'Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 1: The Long Take., Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003
• Donato Totaro, Visual Style in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Fantastic” Trilogy, Part 2: Mise en Scène', Offscreen Journal, November 30, 2003
• Donato Totaro, 'Tokyo Sonata: Flirting with the Fantastic: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008', Offscreen Journal,Vol . 13, Issue 5, 2009
• Dennis Tredy, 'Shadows of Shadows - Techniques of Ambiguity in Three Film Adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”: J. Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), D. Curtis’s The Turn of the Screw (1974), and A. Aloy’s Presence of Mind (1999)', E-rea, 2.1, 2004
• Andrew V. Uroskie, 'La Jetée en Spirale: Robert Smithson’s Stratigraphic Cinema', Grey Room 19, Spring 2005, pp. 54–79

Quiet Work by Sean Martin, 2007 (also see here)

"A short film about gardens and gardening, as narrated by my Mother (an unreliable narrator!). Inspired a little by the home movie sequence in Tarkovsky's Solaris, and also the Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait. It's in stereo. The title is from the poem by Matthew Arnold".