1 Puzzled Hollywood and the return of complex films Maria Poulaki Abstract Complex forms of film narration, almost two decades after their popularization in the mid-1990s, make now a come-back through Hollywood productions. This chapter discusses the return of complex films and studies their storytelling modes from the scope of a broader epistemological paradigm shift towards the complexity of systems. The author suggests that this different perspective lets us address complex films not as deviant and alternative narratives, but as complex systems in their own right. Certain processes of complexity such as self-reference and pattern formation are highlighted as principles of organization of the complex filmic forms, and at the same time as new directions for film analysis and criticism. While alternative forms of narration have made their appearance in mainstream cinema since the “post-classical” Hollywood films of the 1970s (Elsaesser 2009a), in the mid-1990s a bolder tendency of experimentation with the narrative form emerged from the outskirts of popular production. The films of this cinematic tendency have often been discussed as “complex narratives”, borrowing this already-existing term from literary criticism and narratology. 1 Since the commercial success of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), complex films expanded widely, to the point that we can now, almost two decades after their spread, talk about a recognizable complex storytelling model that appears, in different forms, both in large Hollywood studio productions and in the so-called world cinema. Since the beginning, complex narrative structure connected films as diverse as Run Lola Run (Tykwer