Tuesday 4 May 2010

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

Latest update May 10, 2010

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...

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".
 

4 comments:

Just Another Film Buff said...

Wow, what a snazzy topic and a rich back of links. Thanks, Cathrine!

Here's Chris Marker's La Jetee in its entirely for those who've not yet seen this breathtaking piece of cinema!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8796749344506734237#

Simon said...

Lovely, thanks for the links.

sunny said...

Thanks for the links, can't wait to dig in.

I have a blog dedicated to True Blood (sunnynala.wordpress.com) and have detected, with my untrained eyes, a LOT of unreliable narration going on that is quite subtle and twisted.

The musical and visual 'cues' are often highly misleading as well.

Alan Ball is an effing genius.

Adrian Mendizabal said...

this a lovely set of essays. I love puzzle films. I was wondering Catherine if you could put up an Ingmar Bergman collection of criticisms on his works. I was scurrying the net for two nights and no good essay regarding his method of filmmaking.

I am making a 'big' review on his The seventh Seal. I watched it last night, and it was amazing.