"Mind-Game" is film theorist Thomas Elsaesser's name for the wide variety of films made since the 1990s that present puzzling, complex, and/or impossible narrative devices and structures that play games with spectators' expectations for how traditional narrative films work. For familiar Hollywood examples, think Christopher Nolan (Inception) and M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense), but perhaps more emblematic are the films of David Lynch and Apichatpong Weerasethakul and cult classics like Donnie Darko and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Mind-Game films have benefited greatly from the insights of cognitive film theory—their complex narrative structures laid bare and comprehensible, their peculiar effects explained in the terms of analytic philosophy and cognitive science—but have generally received less attention from other perspectives. This panel invites presentations exploring mind-game films (individually or collectively) which seek to move beyond (and/or through) analyses of narrative complexity and cognitive responses to that complexity. Of particular interest, evoking this year's theme of (R)EVOLUTION, are the possibilities opened up by (this non-exclusive list of) alternative approaches to mind-game films:

• Disability Studies
• Feminism
• Mind-Game Films in Global and World Cinema
• Marxism
• Mind-Game Films and Other Media (Literature, Television, Video Games, etc.)
• Philosophy of Film
• Queer Theory

Some questions to consider: What ideological forces are driving mind-game films towards narrative complexity and unresolvability? What global challenges are mind-game films responding to? How might considerations of class, disability, gender/sex, and race contribute to our understanding of this tendency in film?

Please use NeMLA's portal for abstract submissions: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21088