A Guide to Post-classical Narration

The Future of Film Storytelling

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by Eleftheria Thanouli

Type: Studies
Subject: Technique > Scriptwriting
Keywords: movie script, scriptwriting, narrative process, storytelling
Publishing date: 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 288 pages
6 x 8 ¾ inches (15 x 22.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-5013-9307-5

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Book Presentation:
In A Guide to Post-classical Narration, Eleftheria Thanouli expands and substantially develops the innovative theoretical work of her previous publication, Post-classical Cinema: an International Poetics of Film Narration (2009).

A Guide to Post-classical Narration: The Future of Film Storytelling presents a concise and comprehensive overview of the creative norms of the post-classical mode of narration. With dozens of cases studies and hundreds of color stills from films across the globe, this book provides the definitive account of post-classical storytelling and its techniques. After surfacing in auteur films in varied production milieus in the 1990s, the post-classical options continued to gain ground throughout the 2000s and 2010s, gradually fertilizing several mainstream productions in Hollywood. From Lars von Trier's Europa (1991) to Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead (2021) and Baz Luhrmann's Elvis (2022), the post-classical narration has shown not only impressive resilience but also tremendous creativity in transforming its key formal principles, such as fragmented and multi-thread plotlines, hypermediated realism, parody, graphic frame construction, complex chronology, and intense self-consciousness.

Through the meticulous textual analysis of the post-classical works, Eleftheria Thanouli addresses head-on a series of methodological questions in narrative research and brings the tradition of historical poetics back into the limelight. By reinforcing her previous work with numerous new films as well as more nuanced narrative terms and concepts, she not only strengthens her position on post-classical cinema but also establishes the relevance of formalist analysis in the study of film today.

About the Author:
Eleftheria Thanouli is Professor in Film Theory at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and author of Post-classical Cinema: an International Poetics of Film Narration (2009), Wag the Dog: a Study on Film and Reality in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2013) and History and Film: A Tale of Two Disciplines (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Press Reviews:
"This guide offers the first comprehensive study of post-classical cinema as a prominent and consistent form of storytelling in the current media landscape. Merging ongoing debates in film narratology with key topics from contemporary cinema studies, the narratological analyses and case studies in this book show how the post-classical has developed into a rich and diverse narrative style, with a surprisingly consistent set of underlying compositional principles and norms." ―Steven Willemsen, Assistant Professor in Arts, Culture, and Media, University of Groningen, Netherlands

"The complex fictional worlds of Nolan and Tarantino, among other contemporary filmmakers, are elucidated in Thanouli's compelling approach to narrative analysis. A bracing and authoritative model for reading the most challenging film texts of the 21st century." ―Robert Burgoyne, author of The New American War Film (2023)

"This "guide" helps solve the Rubik's Cube of Post-Classical Narration by exposing the innards of films that have baffled students since 1990. Sketching how 35 titles, drawn from her list of 220, expanded the rules and limits of storytelling on screen, Eleftheria Thanouli reinvigorates, with intensified continuity, the historical poetics championed by David Bordwell, her own distinguished guide. The fundaments of film theory uphold her bracingly clear survey of this spate of formerly (and formally) perplexing films, dissipating the critical fog surrounding them and shining back on film history in toto." ―Dudley Andrew, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Film Studies, Yale University, USA

"Thanouli makes a compelling case for post-classical narration as a persistent thread in global cinema since the 1990s, showing how new modes of self-consciousness and textual play have been integrated into contemporary screen storytelling. A key strength of the book is in its vivid, concise film analyses, which illustrate the overt and hypermediated convolutions of space, time, and narration that have reshaped cinema across a range of national and industrial contexts." ―Allan Cameron, Professor of Media and Screen Studies, University of Auckland, Australia

"Eleftheria Thanouli's book is notable for employing formalist theory to delineate the distinctive traits of the post-classical mode of narration. Yet, this is not an abstract treatise on film narratology, for each chapter is infused with numerous concise and insightful case studies of films ranging from Requiem for a Dream to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, ending with a comparative study of the author's and David Bordwell's different formal analyses of Dunkirk. This book's balance of theory and examples, as well as the clarity of Thanouli's writing, makes it an ideal guide to the narrational strategies and tactics of post-classical cinema." ―Warren Buckland, Reader in Film Studies, Oxford Brookes University, UK, and author of Narrative and Narration: Analyzing Cinematic Storytelling (2020) and editor of Puzzle Films (2008)

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic

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