Prospectus

Summary

In this Prospectus I aim to offer a concise account of The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions, under three main headings. First, I shall detail the book's main subject (confusion and disorientation) and something of its philosophical underpinnings; second, I will explain the body of work on which it concentrates (the cinema of disorientation); and finally I shall set out the means by which I will conduct my examinations (a critical focus on figuration). Finally, I will give an outline of the structure of the book as a whole.

I should say something briefly here about my use of the terms confusion and disorientation. I have not found it necessary or useful systematically to distinguish them, so in some contexts they are more or less interchangeable. Elsewhere, however, disorientation refers more to the subjective state of the viewer1 (I have not tended to refer to films themselves as disorientated) and confusion to qualities of films themselves, in the ways discussed immediately below. This should be clear from the context.

TOPIC: INVITING CONFUSIONS

This book is about inviting confusions in two senses: first, in the sense that I propose that the aesthetics of film will profit from welcoming – rather than resisting and attempting to diminish – confusion; and, second, in the sense that the book aims to demonstrate exactly what it is about many of the confusions to be found in film that might be considered inviting. But it is important to be clear that in saying this I am referring to two related but distinct senses of confusion, the first familiar, the second a little peculiar to contemporary ears. First, there is confusion as the name of something experienced by the audience. This is the familiar affective sense, whose meaning is very close to that of disorientation (‘I’m confused!’); it is a possible effect of confusion in the second sense. This second sense refers to the confusion which we find in the films themselves. In saying this I am not using the word pejoratively (indeed part of my purpose is to counter critics who find the films I discuss confused in just such a sense), but rather in a sense related to that which Alexander Baumgarten, the eighteenth-century founder of aesthetics, thought was particular to aesthetic cognition.