Coda: Playing Games with Cinema

Abstract

Collectively, cinematic modular narratives represent encounters between linearity and non-linearity, narrative and database, memory and forgetting, temporal anchoring and temporal drift, simultaneity and succession and chaos and order. The terms in this list are not simple opposites, and the negotiations between them take different forms. All of these films attempt to reconcile different ways of structuring time. In this sense they serve as a collective referendum on the status and value of narrative in the digital era. Each film suggests a limit to narrative’s ability to mediate our experience of the world, although each also recuperates narrative in one way or another.¹ Meanwhile, the popular embrace of modular narrative structures suggests, on the one hand, that audiences are now comfortable with complex articulations of time; indeed, they take pleasure in them. On the other, the fraught temporality of these narratives suggests a residual anxiety regarding the effects of temporal mediation, which is traceable across a variety of genres and national cinemas.