Blackwell Reference Online

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Within the canon of Michael Haneke's cinema, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) and Code Unknown (2000) have a special status. Rather than having their stories revolve around a small, homogeneous group of characters (commonly in Haneke, the nuclear family), each film expands its dramatis personae to a larger, more diverse set, whose individual narratives are linked only loosely. This mode of storytelling is marginal not only within Haneke's body of work. A recent comprehensive study of multicharacter constellation films in global cinema stops short of identifying a seamless cinematic history for this model, singling out isolated precursors instead, as well as pointing to television's serialized productions for strong affinities ( Tröhler 2007 ). It seems, however, that films with multicharacter constellations and multistrain narratives have become more prominent over the past two decades and have developed into a fledgling trend. The main assumption projected by this trend is that a film, by featuring a large cross-section of characters, can most effectively represent the complexity, heterogeneity, and interconnectedness of the modern world. Its myriad stories are most democratically told through a dehierarchized narrative structure and a decentered aesthetic capable of conveying the fragmented mode in which this fully globalized, fully mediatized world experiences ... log in or subscribe to read full text