Acknowledgements
Preface

1. Contemporary Complex Cinema
1.1 Complex conditions: the resurgence of narrative complexity
1.2 Complex cinema as brain-candy for the empowered viewer
1.3 Narrative taxonomies: simple, complex, puzzle plots

2. Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema
2.1 Why an (embodied-)cognitive approach?
2.2 Various forms of complexity and their effects on sense making
2.2.1 Problematizing narrative linearity
2.2.2 Complicating narrative structures and ontologies
2.2.3 Under-stimulation and cognitive overload
2.2.4 Contradictions and unreliabilities
2.3 A cognitive approach to classifying complexity
2.3.1 Deceptive unreliability and the twist film
2.3.2 Disorienting but solvable puzzle films
2.3.3 Impossible puzzle films

3. Narrative Complexity and Dissonant Cognitions
3.1 The concept of cognitive dissonance
3.2 Cognitions in dissonance: from social psychology to narrative engagement
3.3 Types of dissonance in narrative comprehension
3.3.1 Narrative incongruities
3.3.2 Narrative impossibilities
3.4 Cognitive access to impossible storyworlds: immersed and reflected operations
3.5 'Impossibilities' and embodied cognition
3.5.1 Disrupting viewers' reliance on image schemas by perceptual impossibility
3.5.2 Disrupting viewers' reliance on image schemas by formal impossibility

4. Taming Dissonance: Cognitive Operations and Interpretive Strategies
4.1 Cognitive dissonance versus narrative coherence
4.2. Reducing dissonance: interpretation and naturalization
4.2.1 Foregrounding
4.2.2 Narrating agency and authorship
4.2.3 Artefact emotions and metareflexive appreciation
4.2.4 Interpretation as dissonance reduction
4.3 Coping with dissonance: frame-switches and poetic and aesthetic readings
4.4 Frame-switching as hermeneutic play in impossible puzzle films
4.4.1 Switching between narrative and symbolical readings: Enemy and Mulholland Drive
4.4.2 Cognitive hesitation and the fantastic

5. Impossible Puzzle Films: Between Art-Cinema and (Post-) Classical Narration
5.1 From art-cinema to puzzle films
5.1.1 Art-cinema as a narrative mode
5.1.2 Dissonance in modernist art-cinema
5.1.3 Art-cinema as a cognitive reception frame
5.1.4 Narrative complexity and meaning-making in art-cinema
5.2 Impossible puzzle films and (post-)classical narration
5.2.1 High degree of tellability
5.2.2 Identification with goal-oriented characters
5.2.3 Strong reliance on classical genre elements
5.2.4 Adherence to classical narrative cohesion devices
5.2.5 Inclusion of quasi-rational frames of naturalization

6. Wallowing in Dissonance: The Attractiveness of Impossible Puzzles
6.1 Hermeneutic play and interpretive multiplicity
6.2 Orientation, navigation, mapping
6.3 Game logic and the fascination in failure
6.4 Effort justification
6.5 Diegetization of decoupling
6.6 Fascination in infinity
6.7 Destabilized ontological certainty
6.8. Eudaimonic motivations and intrinsic needs

References
Filmography