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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Stories. Screen Narrative in the Digital Era Edited by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 208
Text.Serial.Journal
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2019-10-01
2021-09-02
2019-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Filippo Pennacchio
2019/10/01
Università IULM, Milano
2036-461X
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Stories. Screen Narrative in the Digital Era Edited by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 208
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16185/16660
19
Stories. Screen Narrative in the Digital Era
Edited by Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 208




   If there is an aspect towards which the interest of narrative scholars has
consistently grown in recent years, this is represented without any doubt by the
impact of digital technologies on the way stories are constructed and shaped,
as well as on how they are experienced by their audience. Indeed, a number of
books and journal special issues, but also conferences and seminars, has been
devoted to the study of both these aspects, and more in general to the attempt
at mapping the broader transformations of the very idea of narrative in the
contemporary mediascape.
   Stories. Screen Narrative in the Digital Era, the volume curated by Ian Christie
and Annie van den Oever for the Key Debates series of Amsterdam University
Press, participates in this trend in a significant way. Not only does it recapitulate
some of the key issues in the debate on the relationship between narratives and
the digital, but moreover it proposes new perspectives on it, especially concerning
so-called ‘screen narratives’, i.e., the narratives that we nowadays experience
through the mediation of a screen, being it that of a movie theatre, of a personal
computer, or of a mobile phone.
   As the editors suggest, the premise of the volume is to answer two main
questions: first, whether storytelling, or ‘story-following’, has changed decisively
‘either during the era of “cinema” or, perhaps more pertinently, in the postcinema
era of digital and interactive media’ (p. 12); secondly, whether the ‘overuse of the
term “story” devalue[s] or detract[s] meaning from what we would formerly
have called a story’ (Ibidem).
   In order to respond, the authors of the fifteen contributions collected in the
volume draw upon different methodologies, adopt different styles (besides
‘classical’ scholarly contributions, there are interviews, and journalistic or
journalist-like pieces as well), and — perhaps more relevantly — problematize
the contours of the debate, thus suggesting from the outset that easy answers
cannot be given. Or, at least, this is what emerges from the first essay, in which
Jan Baetens discusses the inequalities of stories, namely that, beyond the idea that
Roland Barthes once famously promoted that stories are universal and ubiquitous,
they are not equal at all. By looking at how comics and graphic novels have been
historically overlooked — with comics for a longtime occupying ‘the margins of
the cultural system’ before being accepted, along with his most ‘serious’ twin, ‘in

                                                 Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 33, Fall 2019
                              Reviews / Comptes-rendus


the field of culturally legitimate storytelling’ (p. 40) — Baetens reflects on how
the social status of stories, as well as ‘the degree of acceptation of storytelling
in different fields’ (p. 33), can dramatically change depending on the society
and the historical context in which they appear. This idea resonates even more
vividly in a world such as ours, where, as Ian Christie puts it in his essay, ‘stories
and storytelling have been placed at the center of vast areas of human activity’
(p. 87), and where we seem constantly involved in a process of ‘storification’, i.e.,
a process by which we are invited to give shape and enjoy whatever content, even
the more mundane, as if it were a story.
   Building on this awareness, each contributor focuses on a specific media
product or set of products, pondering the extent to which the stories ‘contained’
within depart from traditional notions of storytelling. However, seeking a
common denominator among all the essays, there are at least two main aspects
that emerge distinctly.
   On the one hand, they all seem to share the idea that if a change has happened
in the way stories look like today, this has to do with their complexity. Many of the
stories we commonly experience are characterized by intricate plots, sophisticated
characters as well as by unconventional visual forms. This is, for instance, what
Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen argue in their essay, a revised version of the last
chapter of their monograph Impossible Puzzle Films. The authors discuss a range
of popular films (most notably, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Spike Jonze’s
Adaptation, and Christopher Nolan’s Inception) ‘that evoke pervasively confusing
viewing experiences, undermining narrative comprehension by means of various
complicating storytelling techniques and the eliciting of dissonant cognitions’
(p. 56), which, for this reason, invite viewers to speculate on the possible ways to
come to terms with such complexity. Similar claims are also made by Ian Christie
in his discussion of Dickensian, the BBC TV show which projects a storyworld
where characters from different novels by Charles Dickens meet and interact,
thus expanding the story in an intertextual direction; by John Ellis, who in a
dialogue with Annie van den Oever acknowledges that many contemporary TV
series are likely to exhaust, more than classical series and of feature-films, ‘the
possibilities of the characters, situations, and themes’ (p. 160); and in particular
by Dominique Chateau, for whom the third season of Lynch’s Twin Peaks, due
to its complexity and its dream-like qualities, erases the boundary ‘between film
and television series’ (p. 120).
   Complex formal and narrative qualities are also crucial aspects of the works
of Michelangelo Antonioni and Chantal Ackerman, whose oeuvres are discussed
respectively by José Moure in an essay devoted to the ‘endless endings’ of the
films by the Italian director, and by Eric de Kuyper in a dialogue with van den
Oever about Ackerman’s La captive (2000). And also Robert Ziegler, even though
he states that, from his perspective as a conductor, ‘the role of music in making
narratives convincing hasn’t really changed all that much’ (p. 193), he also agrees
with Christie that nowadays music needs to be adapted to ‘much less defined


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narrative arcs, use of “dead time” and wide variations of pace that would been
unthinkable in the 1940s and 1950s, and even later’ (pp. 194-95).
   However, as Sandra Laugier reminds us in her essay on Game of Thrones and its
astounding success, such complexity is not just thematic or formal. Indeed, there
is a moral element involved in many of the stories we currently enjoy: fictional
universes as the one projected by Game of Thrones are permeated by a sort of
‘moral atmosphere’, i.e., by ‘a plurality of singular expressions, stage arguments
and debates’ (p. 145) which invite viewers to reflect on important moral questions.
   This observation helps to highlight the second aspect that is central to the
essays collected in the volume: namely, that if stories have changed and become
increasingly complex, their audiences have undergone a similar transformation.
Not mere passive spectators, viewers are increasingly attracted by complex films
and TV series, to the point that they seem more interested in feeling challenged
by them than by solving their puzzles, as Kiss and Willemsen argue. This does not
come as a surprise, though. Indeed, this is the premise of transmedia storytelling,
whose recipients, according to Melanie Schiller, are not satisfied solely by
enjoying a story, but also by being someway involved in it, making connections
among different media contents, expanding them via fan fictions, and more in
general manipulating the materials of which a story is made.
   Furthermore, it can be argued that this kind of involvement with stories
informs also our everyday experience with the devices with which we usually
interact. For instance, according to Vincent Amiel our use of mobile phones,
portable computers and other devices changes significantly the way in which we
look at images and interact with them. Since within such devices ‘images and
frames are moved, interlocked, and zoomed in or out according to the viewer’s
will’, this familiarizes us with a range of experimentations with images that were
still precluded a few years ago, at the same time opening the ground to ‘a new
conception of storytelling’ (p. 52), one that is probably less author-driven than in
the past. This is also what Roger Odin suggests in his short but very compelling
contribution, focusing on the aesthetics of the single shot which dominates our
use of mobile cameras. He argues that we have ‘incorporated’ the basic figures
of filmic language, thus suggesting that ‘we can no longer film naively’ (p. 167).
According to Odin, the way in which we approach communication devices
and screens can often produce, even beyond our intention, artistic effects, thus
introducing creativity in the space of everyday communication.
   In a sense, this last remark is likely to synthesize in a rather provocative way
the double assumption that underlies Stories: that the very idea of narrative is
evolving in quite unexpected ways, and that we are probably becoming not just, as
Jason Mittell puts it, self-trained narratologists, but also self-trained filmmakers,
who learn the ways in which films, TV series and stories more generally work, not
just by looking at them, but also actively exploring the possibilities and the limits
of the images and the screens around us.

                                  [Filippo Pennacchio, Università IULM, Milano]

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