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The Cinema of Disorientation
Inviting Confusions
by Dominic Lash
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Book Presentation:
Examines disorientation and confusion, and their theoretical implications, in contemporary narrative film
• Explores the relationship between orientation and disorientation for the film viewer
• Defends a flexible and responsive form of criticism that is not without method but that tailors its method to the demands of the film in question
• Outlines the history and theory of the rhetorical figure of metalepsis and of the concept of figuration, both of which suggest many possibilities for further research in film
• Critically discusses a very wide range of texts in film criticism, film theory, philosophy and beyond
Precisely, perhaps, because they are so immediately absorbing, narrative films can also be profoundly confusing and disorienting. This fascinating book neither proposes foolproof methods for avoiding confusion; nor does it suggest that disorientation is always a virtue. Instead it argues that the best way to come to terms with our confusion is to look closely at exactly what is confusing us, and why. At the heart of the book are original close readings of four important recent films: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (2006), Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012), Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth (2006) and Jean-Luc Godard's Goodbye to Language (2014). Clearly written but critically and theoretically bold, The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions explores both how we get (or fail to get) our bearings with respect to a film, and what we might discover by (and while) doing so.
About the Author:
Dominic Lash is a film scholar and musician. His writing on film has appeared in Screen, Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, and Cinergie. He has taught film studies at the Universities of Bristol and Reading, and at King's College London.
Press Reviews:
Dominic Lash’s book powerfully demonstrates the importance of an aesthetics of confusion in film analysis, importing many of the tactics and the crucial delicate distinctions that William Empson brought to the study of the types of disorientation we encounter in literature. One of the most fruitful implications of this elegantly written text, which Lash continually wrestles with, is that when a filmmaker cannot make a narrative cohesive or fully coherent — beset by the confusions he or she initially feels hopeful of controlling or mastering — the film may benefit from the fact that no sufficient solution to the "confusion" impasse has been found. A persisting sense of lostness can have a value in narrative equal to that achieved by a resolving order. Whether Lash is talking about Marion’s death tear in Psycho or the shifting sense of Diane Selwyn’s crying over the fantasy return of Camilla in Mulholland Dr., he manages to take us through the range of interpretive possibilities and associations with wondrous care. His lengthy readings of Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE, Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, and Michael Haneke’s Caché are as illuminating as any that I’ve encountered.– Professor George Toles, University of Manitoba
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
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