Night Film by Marisha Pessl

Marisha Pessl (*October 26, 1977) is an American novelist, who started working as a financial consultant and just wrote in her free time. Her first novel “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, published in 2006, almost exclusively got good reviews and criticism (especially in US-American literature criticism). Her second novel “Night Film” (2013) features some interesting structural peculiarities.
     The novel is a mystery thriller and as well as her first novel, a New York Times bestseller. It is about the young Ashley Cordover (24), who was found dead in a not working elevator in Manhattan warehouse. Her dead was ruled a suicide. Her father is the cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova, who hasn’t been seen in public for 30 years. He is a mysterious man who is despised by many people because of his harrowing movies. The Journalist Scott McGrath wants to investigate the death of Ashley Cordova with the help of two acquaintances of Ashley, Nora and Hopper, because he beliefs that there is lying more behind her death and Stanislas Cordova. McGrath’s life took a turn for the worse during his first researches about Cordova, this time he could lose his mind.
     The structural peculiarities of this book are its connections to the material McGrath is researching in and its interactivity with the reader. On one hand this book offers next to the normal text some experts and details of the things the figures in the book are looking at. These are excerpts of telephone books, letters, text message-chats, photos or magazines. By these little images, the reader can have a look at the material by his- or herself. Moreover, Pessl included some screenshots of author created web pages. There are many pages of this book which just contain web pages, belonging to the story (for example online blogs or a web page of Cordova votaries), which Pessl invented all by herself. On the other hand, Pessl published an app, the “Night Film Decoder” app belonging to this book  On some pages the reader can find an image of a bird, which Pessl calls Ester eggs. If the reader scans these images with the Night Film Decoder app, it unlocks additional texts, PDFs, videos and audio files by which the reader can get deeper insights into the story.
     Some reviews of the connection of this book and the app claim the interactivity as a distraction. They state that the reading experience would be interrupted too often and that the app and the technical device, the mobile telephone, lead the reader to lacking of concentration. Supporter however state that the huge amount of information keeps the reader interested, that the search of these Easter eggs is entertaining and that this interactivity intensifies the reading experience instead of distracting it. Pessl explained, that she mentioned the app at the end of the novel, because she wants the reader to read though the novel without getting interrupted and use the app afterwards to have a closer look at some details. 

S. Lamouchi

"Inhabiting House of Leaves" by N. Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles' text "Inhabiting House of Leaves", published in her book Writing Machines in  2002 is an analysis of Danielewski's novel House of Leaves. Hayles interprets the novel with regard to mediation and remediation techniques and the book´s materiality.
     According to Hayles, the novel can be considered a physical artifact which incorporates all kinds of different media (film, video, photography, tattoos, handwriting etc.), as well as various different inscription surfaces. At the same time a constant process of remediation is taking place. The incorporation of all these different kinds of media in one print novel makes the novel unique, opening up questions about the format of the novel being reinvented or leading to something new.
Alongside the remediation techniques, Hayles interprets the novel as a mediation plot which is highly self-aware of its materiality. The subjects in the plot are constantly mediated and mediation brings the characters into being through film, footnotes, critique and various other inscription devices. Hayles henceforth calls the narrator of the novel a remediated narrator making inscription technologies visible and making the reader conscious of their various effects.  
     All these processes of mediation and remediation lead to the effect that the novel takes the shape of a labyrinth mirroring the house in The Navidson Record. The various alternative paths and multiple layers of the novel are mirroring the style of a labyrinth, which are impossible to bring into a coherent order. The materiality of the book is constructed through the interlinking of words, nonverbal marks and physical properties.
     All in all, the novel positions itself through its techniques of remediation in the digital era. Hayles describes the novel as a physical artifact which incorporates messages which are transformed through mediation and remediation and in which technology constructs the novel as a material artifact.    
     Additionally, in her text Hayles mentions a shared performance of Danielewski and his sister, who performs under the name Poe, in which the singer incorporates a reading of her brother into the performance of one of her songs. Indeed, this concept was further realized in a music video of the same song.

 

Hey Pretty by Poe 

 

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. "Inhabiting House of Leaves." 108-132. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.


M. Barbod