The Cinema of Disorientation

Dominic Lash’s book powerfully demonstrates the importance of an aesthetics of confusion in film analysis, importing many of the tactics and the crucial delicate distinctions that William Empson brought to the study of the types of disorientation we encounter in literature. One of the most fruitful implications of this elegantly written text, which Lash continually wrestles with, is that when a filmmaker cannot make a narrative cohesive or fully coherent — beset by the confusions he or she initially feels hopeful of controlling or mastering — the film may benefit from the fact that no sufficient solution to the "confusion" impasse has been found. A persisting sense of lostness can have a value in narrative equal to that achieved by a resolving order. Whether Lash is talking about Marion’s death tear in Psycho or the shifting sense of Diane Selwyn’s crying over the fantasy return of Camilla in Mulholland Dr., he manages to take us through the range of interpretive possibilities and associations with wondrous care. His lengthy readings of Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE, Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, and Michael Haneke’s Caché are as illuminating as any that I’ve encountered. -- Professor George Toles, University of Manitoba