The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions, by Dominic Lash

Abstract

The feeling of being utterly lost that is cultivated by David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), one of a handful of films central to Dominic Lash’s The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions, might be the paradigmatic effect of the body of work that Lash refers to as the “cinema of disorientation”. These films insistently problematise the viewer’s relation to the unfolding diegesis, leaving them without the stability of interpretive points of reference that audiences have come to expect and rely upon, or shifting these points of reference as soon as they have been established. In The Cinema of Disorientation, Lash takes these films as case studies, using their disorientations to flesh out a humble but profoundly robust methodology of filmic analysis centered around his idea of orientation and the means by which a film construes it. As he puts it, “[u]nderstanding is always operative and always under negotiation, continually shifting and developing; examining disorientating films can help bring this process clearly into view”