The aim of this book has been to offer a framework for comprehending the transformative nature of cinematic spectatorship, especially as it has recently been altered by the fluid boundaries of contemporary media culture (cf. Pisters 2012, 11). Contemporary complex cinema forces us to rethink and reconfigure the linear-non-linear dichotomy of film studies that harks back to the opposition of classical cinema and the tradition of (European) art cinema. As a consequence, complex cinema is no longer well accounted for by the overarching Deleuzian categories of the movement-image and the time-image. Instead of emphasizing the difference between the classical and the modern, contemporary cinema explores their mutual inextricability. Required is thus an approach that emphasizes the interrelation of what has traditionally been kept isolated, such as the linear and non-linear; the affective, emotional, and cognitive investment of the audiences; the contingent from the causaldetermined; the body from the mind; etc. In their experiments with different modes to invoke a unique narrative experience, complex films render the limitations of reducing the spectator's narrative engagement to the cognitive processes involved in organizing the narrative events causal-linearly visible. Similarly, once confronted with the ‘will to complexity’ that defines contemporary cinema, several prevalent concepts (e.g. the fabula, background, or defamiliarization) have begun to reveal their explanatory limitations.

Following the main argument raised by this book, contemporary cinema demands a reformulation of cinematic spectatorship by revealing the limitations of the classical narratological fabula insofar as this concept 1) insulates spectators’ cognitive responses from their emotional and affective responses to the film and 2) conflates the multilayered cinematic temporality to its causal-linear predispositions.