The brilliance of Christopher Nolan's MEMENTO (2000) lies in its complex narrative structure, which imposes a sensation of temporal disorientation upon its viewers that mirrors the anterograde amnesia suffered by its main character, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). Thereby the film allows the spectator to enact – rather than merely observe – the amnesia of what has become ‘the archetypal example of the character who suffers from a loss of memory’ (Elsaesser 2009, 28). Consequently, MEMENTO stands out as one of the most vivid representatives of a contemporary body of films that have challenged the long-dominant opposition between classical Hollywood storytelling and the tradition of (European) art cinema (cf. Kovács 2007, 33-48). PULP FICTION (Tarantino 1994), LOLA RENNT ([Run Lola Run] Tykwer 1998), BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (Jonze 1999), FIGHT CLUB (Fincher 1999), Amores Perros ([Love's a Bitch] Iñárritu 2000), OLDBOY (Park 2003), 21 GRAMS (Iñárritu 2003), ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (Gondry 2004), 2046 (Wong 2004), INCEPTION (Nolan 2010), SOURCE CODE (Jones 2011), and COHERENCE (Byrkit 2013) are but a few examples of the international surge within the landscape of moving images to develop increasingly demanding and challenging narratives. These ‘complex narratives’ (Simons 2008) embrace non-linearity, time loops, and fragmented spatio-temporal realities (cf. Buckland 2009a, 6) to demonstrate a contemporary interest in personal identity, memory, history, trauma, embodied perception, and temporality (cf. Elsaesser & Hagener 2010, 149). Located somewhere in the encounter between film and spectator (cf. Deleuze 2005b; Engell 2005; Pisters 2012; Brown 2013), the complexity of these complex narratives turns out to be a complex phenomenon itself (cf. Simons 2008, 111).

Thus, perhaps not surprisingly, there are disputes on how to comprehend ‘complex narratives’, ‘puzzle films’ (Buckland 2009b), ‘mind-game’ movies (Elsaesser 2009), ‘modular’ narratives (Cameron 2008), ‘forking-path’ narratives (Bordwell 2002a), ‘hybrid’ films (Martin-Jones 2006), or ‘neuro-images’ (Pisters 2012) film-historically.