Perplexing Plots

Perplexing Plots

Nominated, 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of best critical/biographical, Mystery Writers of America Shortlisted, 2024 Agatha Awards - Best Mystery Nonfiction, Malice Domestic Posthumous Winner - 2023 IFCA Book Prize, International Crime Fiction Association Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences? In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

Perplexing Plots

Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema

Over the last two decades, Yasujiro Ozu has won international recognition as a major filmmaker. Combining biographical information with discussions of the films' aesthetic strategies and cultural significance, David Bordwell questions the popular image of Ozu as the traditional Japanese artisan and examines the aesthetic nature and functions of his cinema.Over the last two decades, Yasujiro Ozu has won international recognition as a major filmmaker. Combining biographical information with discussions of the films' aesthetic strategies and cultural significance, David Bordwell questions the popular image of Ozu as the traditional Japanese artisan and examines the aesthetic nature and functions of his cinema.