Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, popular cinema has displayed a turn towards narrative complexity. In many cases, this complexity has taken the form of a database aesthetic, in which the narrative is divided into discrete segments and subjected to complex articulations. These films, which I am calling ‘modular narratives’, articulate a sense of time as divisible and subject to manipulation. They suggest both the pleasures and the threats offered by a modular conception of time. ‘Modular narrative’ and ‘database narrative’ are terms applicable to narratives that foreground the relationship between the temporality of the story and the order of its telling. For Marsha Kinder, ‘Database narrative refers to narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories’ (2002a, 6). This description, suggests Kinder, applies to interactive computer-based narratives as well as to the cinematic experimentation of European art cinema. In its cinematic form, database or modular narrative goes beyond the classical deployment of flashback, offering a series of disarticulated narrative pieces, often arranged in radically achronological ways via flashforwards, overt repetition or a destabilization of the relationship between present and past.

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