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Maria Poulaki finished her dissertation at the interdisciplinary program Media and Culture (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and Media Studies, UvA). She has studied Psychology (BA) and Media Psychology (MA), and her research focuses on the links between complex systems theory, narratology and film/media theory. She is a member of the research group Imagined Futures (UvA).
Dissertation
Before or beyond narrative? Towards a complex systems theory of contemporary films
My dissertation puts into focus the tendency for increasingly complex forms of narration in post-1990s cinema. I argue that, because of the fragmentation and nonlinearity that contemporary complex films display—in all three narrative dimensions of time, causality and space—it is not enough to approach them solely as complex narratives. The notion of narrative holds onto an idea of coherency, wholeness and causal-temporal linearity of the story, against the backdrop of which narrative ‘complexity’ is defined. Instead, a new framework for the analysis of contemporary narrative films is suggested, shedding light on the processes of organization that nonlinear systems follow. In my research I used theoretical and methodological tools from complexity theory in order to address complex films as complex systems, and their dynamic forms of textual and cognitive organization.
Promoter: Thomas Elsaesser
Co-promoters: Wanda Strauven, Jan Teurlings
Interests
Intersection of humanities and complexity sciences, post-narrative theory, neuropsychology, digital culture, philosophical ontologies, film-philosophy, sociology of scientific knowledge, STS, media psychology, epistemology.