First-Year Seminar: Multiverses and Mind Games in Film and TV

Over the past three decades, contemporary film and television have seen a trend of increasingly complex storytelling, in the US and worldwide. We see such innovative narrative forms in Hollywood films such as Source Code (Duncan Jones, 2011), Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010), and Butterfly Effects (Eric Bress and J.Mackye Gruber, 2004), as well as in TV serials such as FlashForward (ABC, 2009-10) and Russian Doll (Netflix,2019), not to mention global art cinema Too Many Ways to Be No.1 (Wai Ka-fai, 1997) and Peppermint Candy (Chang Dong Lee, 1999). Named "puzzle films," "mind-game films," or "complex TV," these films and series manifest common new features, such as non-linear narratives, jumbled chronologies, labyrinthine spatial orientation; they creatively use time travel, multiverse, compulsive repetition, and loops to transcend spatial-temporal limitations. These films play with our perception of the reality, present new psychological and cognitive challenges, and thereby create new spectatorial pleasure. This course teaches students to enjoy, view, closely analyze, and critically think about films and series of complex storytelling. Reading these films along with recent film and television studies scholarship, students learn analytical skills and conceptual frameworks to untangle the convoluted narrative logic and discern in the narrative architecture new modes of rethinking identity, reality, history, and future in our contemporary societies. Required Screenings: Wednesdays @ 4pm. This course is appropriate for first-year students.
Course Attributes: EN H; FYS; AS HUM

First-Year Seminar: Multiverses and Mind Games in Film and TV

FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES 1122

Section A

Section 01