Making Sense of Mind-Game Films: Narrative Complexity, Embodiment, and the Senses, by Simin Nina Littschwager

• Main Author: Luis Antunes
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University College Cork 2020-07-01
• Series: Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media
• Subjects: multisensory film experience; mind-games films; embodiment and the senses; littschwager
• Online Access: http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue19/HTML/ReviewAntunes.html

Simin Nina Littschwager’s Making Sense of Mind-Game Films: Narrative Complexity, Embodiment, and the Senses offers a phenomenological approach to the concept of complexity in film. Littschwager develops her arguments and analysis around a set of six films, namely, The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2000), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999), Possible Worlds (Robert Lepage, 2000), and Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011). Littschwager’s main thesis asserts that mind-game films—a term introduced by Thomas Elsaesser in his 2009 essay “The Mind-Game Film”—need to be understood from the perspective of embodied experience, and beyond the predominantly visual and cognitive approaches that have so far been used to address the topic in film scholarship. Littschwager believes that complexity in film has been understood mainly as a brain-teaser effect where “the body and the senses play only a marginal role” (3).