A Guide to Post-classical Narration: The Future of Film Storytelling

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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 Triers Europa (1991) to Zack Snyders Army of the Dead (2021) and Baz Luhrmanns 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.

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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 *

Author Bio

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).