Overview

An exploration of how nonlinear storytelling opens a post-Newtonian reality and changes both the hero’s journey and how we understand history in film and television. Begin at the beginning and keep going until the end. That’s the cardinal rule of conventional storytelling. But ever since the modernists of the early twentieth century, popular narratives have occasionally eschewed this linear approach to temporality. It’s as though our stories, formerly unfolding in the stable, predictable universe of Newtonian physics, can now take place in multidimensional time where anything and anyone can be as incalculable as SchrÖdinger’s cat. Quantum Screens is a journey through the past and present of nonlinear time in film and television. Moving beyond the early experiments of Luis BuÑuel and the first nonlinear commercial films, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Martha Nochimson shows how risk-taking auteurs David Lynch, Damon Lindelof, and Terrence Malik have opened new horizons and a new concept of beauty in storytelling through their revelatory creations. Quantum Screens takes us deep into the audience’s experience of nonlinearity, exploring the emotional dislocations such storytelling creates, using television programs such as Twin Peaks, Westworld, and Watchmen, and films including The Tree of Life, BlacKkKlansman, and Arrival. Indeed, viewers are at the heart of a changing aesthetics of nonlinearity, Nochimson argues. Amid innovations like on-demand viewing, unlimited replay, and binge-watching, the experience of real time is more malleable than ever, and creators are responding by structuring their stories in compelling new ways.

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9781477321379

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Reviews

This is a fascinating book about the intersection of some aspects of science, especially quantum physics, and art, in particular film and television shows. Nochimson's beautiful conceptualization of the creative accomplishments of cinema and television, in their affinity with and grounding in the new and strange nature of reality that is theorized by mathematics and physics, resets and enlarges our understanding of the achievements of both science and art. There really is nothing quite like it in the field.--Jason Jacobs, author of The Intimate Screen Quantum Screens is original and its scholarship scrupulous. It is an important, well-argued, and exceedingly well-written book that could change the way we look at cinema.--David Cook, author of A History of Narrative Film

Author Information

Martha P. Nochimson is a professor emerita of Mercy University, and a former adjunct professor at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She is among the adjunct faculty of the David Lynch Graduate Program for Cinematic Arts at the Maharishi International University. She is the author of No End to Her: Soap Opera and the Female Subject; The Passion of David Lynch: Wild at Heart in Hollywood; David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire; and Television Rewired: The Rise of the Auteur Series.

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