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The nonlinear narratives of such films as Mulholland Drive, Memento, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind come into sharper focus in Matthew Campora’s newly released book Subjective Realist Cinema: From Expressionism to Inception. Following, the author introduces an excerpt to his book, tells the reader of his initial inspiration to write it, and gives insight into “multiform narrative.”
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What follows is an excerpt from my book Subjective Realist Cinema. I have chosen to present it here because it contains some of the key ideas of the book, as well as a brief analysis of the film that inspired my interest in complex narrative cinema in the first place, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Watching it teenager, I found Brazil confusing, even incomprehensible. However, I was also fascinated by it and suspected there was more to the film than I had grasped. When I returned to it years later and discovered that I was able to comprehend it in a way that had eluded me earlier, I was even more intrigued. How could I have NOT grasped what seemed so simple to me now? That the key to understanding the film lay in recognizing the shifts between Sam Lowry’s nightmarish waking world on the one hand, and his imagination, dreams, and hallucinations on the other. The lack of clearly marked shifts between the film’s different ontological levels had created a complexity that I was not accustomed to, and solving the puzzle the film posed had proven tremendously satisfying. I began seeking out similar films in order to understand how they created their effects and what follows is fragment of the work that has grown out of the years spent with these films.
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