The Sensed and the Seen. Exploring Mind-game Films from a Phenomenological Perspective

Abstract

This thesis investigates what Thomas Elsaesser calls ‘mind-game’ films from the perspectives of phenomenology and embodied spectatorship. Mind-game films are a sub-group of complex narratives that have become popular over the last two decades. Complex narratives, which have also been called ‘puzzle’ films, ‘modular narratives’ and ‘twist’ films, have often been analyzed using narratological and cognitive theoretical positions. However, this research has neglected the sensuous and corporeal dimensions of mind-game films.

This project uses substantial case studies of The Sixth Sense, The Others, Memento, Fight Club, and Possible Worlds to examine the ways in which mind-game films bring different epistemological and perceptual registers of our bodies into conflict, thereby soliciting tensions between regimes of knowledge and ways of being-in-the-world. Drawing on the work of Vivian Sobchack, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Laura Marks, and Jennifer Barker among others, it employs a ‘textural’ analysis approach in order to trace how embodied structures of meaning shape and inform our experience of these films.