Deceased directors.

Film In suitably majestic fashion, David Bordwell compares the work of two recently deceased directors, Tony Scott and Theo Angelopoulos:

"Both play games with narrative as well. As early as The Hunger (1983) Scott’s incessant crosscutting uses the soundtrack of one line of action to comment on another. The time looping of Domino (2005) and Déja Vu (2008) creates flashbacks, replays, revised outcomes, and jumping viewpoints. More sedately, Angelopoulos perfected the time-shifting long take. The camera movements of The Traveling Players (1975) glide among different eras. From scene to scene, Angelopoulos will provide few marks of tense. Scene B may follow A, or precede it by several years, and no Hollywoodish superimposed title will help us out. It may be several minutes before we realize that decades have passed.

"Yet the time-scrambling both directors enjoy isn’t wholly at the service of drama. Storytelling takes on a curiously subsidiary role in their work. Neither filmmaker, it seems to me, is centrally interested in probing what many of us take to be the core of narrative—character psychology. This isn’t to say there aren’t poignant moments and glimpses of inner lives. But each director also leaps beyond them."

Lately I've noticed the barriers between the mega-genres, between so-called mainstream and art house cinema to become less and less secure. Whilst its true that formally something like The Turin Horse and 2 Fast 2 Furious (to take two films I've seen recently at random) seem to have nothing in common, both share a narrative fracturing and require a very particular level of audience attention, though admittedly in the latter its because important exposition is either completely missing or being shouted through with such rapidity it's easy to miss.