Abstracts (alphabetical by author)

Richard Allen
Perception and Understanding in Cinema: A Critique of Cognitive Theory.

For some time cognitive science has been widely considered to provide a model for understanding the human mind, and film theorists and philosophers have begun to apply cognitive theory to the understanding of film. Wittgenstein opposed the application of scientific methods to understanding the mind on the ground that consciousness is a property of human beings not brains. Understanding consciousness is a matter of conceptual investigation, of clarifying the relationship between mental concepts and our patterns of behaviour. Science offers no help in this process because there is nothing empirically to discover about the mind, our mental concepts are fully known, otherwise we would not be able to apply them.

Drawing on the work of a number of cognitive theorists, I will argue in this paper that the use of cognitive science to explain the relationship between perception and comprehension in film demonstrates the kind of conceptual confusion between conceptual understanding and empirical inquiry that Wittgenstein sought to extirpate.

Barbara Fisher Anderson
Restoring Realism

"Realism" has not been dealt with in film theory for almost four decades. Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer made film's affinity for realism the basis of their theories of film, and in his early work Christian Metz provided an articulate analysis of the "Impression of Reality." Since that time, "realism" has been dismissed as a naive theoretical perspective, the underlying assumption in the field being that a more sophisticated and complex analysis of cinema could be derived from an analogy to the use of language. Today, however, with so much more understanding of visual processing and visual cognition, it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss the "impression of reality" in the cinema. I will argue that an ecological approach to cognitive film theory not only supports the reconsideration of realism as a viable approach but calls for its restoration as a central concern in the field of film theory.

Joseph Anderson
Cognitive Film Theory in 1999: What We have Found Out

Cognitive film theory has made major strides in the last few years, especially with regard to perceptual, rational and emotional aspects of film viewing. These approaches, while widely divergent in their origins, have begun to form a pattern of information that greatly illuminates our understanding of film, mind and viewer.

David Bordwell
Stylistic Convergence

The talk examines how similarities in film style across cultures can sometimes be caused by directors posing similar stylistic problems and solving them in congruent ways, guided by the constraints of the medium and some "contingent universals" of perception and artistic creation. It also explores some aspects of viewing which are probably transcultural.

Gregory Currie
Narrative Desires

A great deal of recent theorizing about film and literature has been concerned with desire. But most of that work neglects two central issues. First, no serious attempt is made to clarify the logical structure of desire, its relations to other kinds of states and the kinds of relations there can be between different desires. This is particularly important when we are considering desires that cross the boundary between fiction and the real world. Accordingly, I want to spend a good deal of time focusing on conceptual issues. Secondly, so far as I am aware, no attempt is made in any of this literature to develop theories of filmic desire in a way that would render them empirically testable, or to find empirical support for the background psychological assumptions (often drawn from psychoanalytic theorising) used in building theories of filmic desire.

I introduce a distinction between narrative desires and character desires, and in the light of this distinction, I look at some differences between Casablanca and Othello, especially as concerns the kinds of conflicts of desire they engender. I will discuss whether the distinction I am making might in fact be spurious; I argue that it isn't. That will lead me to a problem about the epistemology of narrative; the question is, "Who tells us: the story, or the characters in it?" Those who think it is the characters are, I suggest, in the grip of a false picture of how imagination links us to fictional stories. I will finally shift the discussion away for the fictional, suggesting that the kinds of conflicts of desire we have been looking at can arise in real life, and that these conflicts can be of moral and psychological interest.

Dirk Eitzen
Overturning Descartes: The Subject of Neo-Functionalist Film Theory

The proper aim of cognitivist film theory, this paper argues, is (or ought to be) to overturn the Cartesian notion that there is some sort of executive decision-making agency in the brain that interprets sensory inputs before either packing them off to the unconscious or serving them up to consciousness. In the face of recent research on the brain, this scenario simply does not hold up. Unfortunately, the antidote to this viewis not necessarily to be found simply by turning to cognitive science. Schema theory, some computational theories, and some other cognitive science paradigms are as prone to Descartes' disembodied view of mind as is (in its own way) the psychoanalytic film theory that cognitivist film theorists have spent so much energy debunking. The antidote to Descartes is, instead, to be found in Darwin (or, actually, in the marriage of evolutionary theory, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind that sometimes goes by the name of neo-functionalism). Since much of the debate surrounding cognitive film theory has hinged on the question of the nature of the self (Is the self a signifying agent or a socially constructed sign?), this paper focuses especially on neo-functionalism's insights into subjectivity and the relevance of those insights to the film theoretical debate.

Berys Gaut
Film, Representation, and Art

Classical film theory was much concerned to defend the view that film is an art form against the objection that it is a merely mechanical reproduction of reality, and so allows no room for artistic expression. This paper argues that this objection is of more than merely historical interest, and discusses a variation of the objection due to Roger Scruton. The paper then examines Rudolf Arnheim's reply to the objection, and shows that his position, though flawed, contains insights which can provide the basis for an interesting account of the aesthetics of film. Cinema's status as an artform, it is argued, derives partly from the plasticity of the representational capacities of the medium.

Torben Grodal
Film, Character Simulation, and Emotion

I will argue that a cognitive and emotional simulation of characters is central for the experience of visual fictions. Neurological evidence supports the fundamental importance of simulations in comprehension processes. A central way of experiencing visual fictions relies on an 'immersed' simulation of the story by means of diegetic coordinates. The viewer's experience of basic emotions like love, fear or despair depends on a simulation of the characters' preferences and action potentials in the diegetic world. Distant observer-theories are unable to provide a convincing description of the viewer's emotional experience. They are based on abstract 'thought' theories and do not provide an account of the viewer's experience of character-interaction. I will discuss different degrees of immersion and show how they are cued by action potentials and molded by working memory capacity constraints. I will finally argue for a neo-realist theory of visual representations: A strong distinction between audiovisual representations and real-life experiences is erroneous because many aspects of visual simulations rely on mental processes that are similar to the experience of unmediated reality.

Deborah Knight
Sympathy, Empathy and the Modifier, 'Moral'

Theorists including Currie and Feagin have argued that empathy is the central imaginative relationship between viewers and fictional characters. Some, perhaps most strikingingly Carroll, argue against simulationist versions of empathy theory such as Currie's (and, by extension, Feagin's). Others, notably Smith, argue that sympathy rather than empathy is the key to understanding the structure of the viewer-character relationship. This is not to say that there is general consensus about what either 'empathy'or 'sympathy' amounts to. Part of the work of this paper will be to try to disentangle various ways in which these key terms are used. But Lakoff and Johnson (Philosophy in the Flesh) suggest that the sort of imaginative work that we usually use the term 'empathy' to designate is actually an example of something they call 'moral empathy,' and Smith consistently associates sympathy with moral sympathy. The major task of the paper, then, is to assess what 'moral empathy' and 'moral sympathy' amount to, how they relate to their unmodified main terms (empathy, sympathy), and what consequences follow for film theory (and theory of narrative generally) undertaken within the cognitivist paradigm. This will involve reassessing Carroll's criticisms of empathy-based theories, as well as his argument for clarificationism.

Birger Langkjaer
Film Music, Perception, and Emotions.

Film music is not just 'unheard' but rather hard within degrees of attention. Otherwise, the musical idiom would not make much of a difference. It is expresive but (mostly) non-referential and is perceived in terms of kinaesthetic and gestural schemata. I will differentiate between character-emotions and viewer-emotions. These can take the form of affect, emotion, and mood in relation to musical perception of diegetic events. I will further argue that musical perception and maning is conceived in terms of three levels of reference which are: 1. Moment-to-moment perception of characters and their state of mind, 2. The momentary dramatic situations and 3. The viewer's overall sympathise and levels of engagement with different characters.

Ben Meade
An Empirical Look at Adult Film Viewing Motivation

This paper will discuss the development and use of the Viewing Motivations Scale (VMI; Meade, 1998), designed to study viewing motivation by collecting data from live spectators. Results of a recent study of 211 adult-participants will be presented, with an emphasis on motivation and genre preference.

Wayne Munson
'I must see him!': Caligari and Cognition

The presentation will examine the role of cognition in Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari and how that role figures significantly in the film's influence, position and reception.

Carl Plantinga
Nonfiction Film and the Elicitation of Emotion

Although the nonfiction film, or more narrowly, the documentary, has been called a "discourse of sobriety," this is more usually a sobriety of purpose rather than of emotional effect. Documentaries often make us laugh, cry, or feel suspense just as fiction films do. The purpose of this paper is to examine the capacity of documentaries to elicit emotional responses in audiences. In particular, in light of recent work on emotion and fiction, this paper will concentrate on whether and how nonfictions elicit emotion differently than fictions.

Stephen Prince
Film Structure and Viewer Assessments of Screen Violence

The talk will discuss how elements of film structure cue viewers to make judgements about how to respond to depictions of violence and the problems that filmmakers face when they try to shape and influence these reactions, especially the emotional components.

Trevor Ponech
Visual Models: Cinema's Psychology of Perception

In this paper I offer an alternative to two competing hypotheses about the audience's visual experience of pictorial cinematic images. My "modelling thesis," as I shall call it, is meant to have some of the strengths and few of the weaknesses of: participation theses, which hold that viewers normally think or imagine themselves to be directly observing the depicted, pre-filmic events; and objectivist theses, which hold that viewers normally learn the image's content and extract information about pre-filmic events without having an accompanying participatory experience. Both kinds of theories misconstrue the spectator's perceptual situation--one by the implausibility of its underlying cognitive requirements, the other by the unnecessary austerity of its description of motion picture perception's subjective dimensions. Rather than settling for either of these two rivals, I suggest that there is a more "lifelike" option available to us. Drawing support from certain traditions in cognitive psychology, philosophical aesthetics, and film studies, I argue that movie images are literally models of subjective perceptual experiences. A standard function of cinematic representations is to describe what it would be like for someone (always ultimately the viewer) to see something in a certain way. Hence spectators correctly and appropriately interpret their experiences of looking at images as similar to experiences of looking at pre-filmic objects themselves. This intentional attitude toward their perceptions is a powerful trigger of affective, aesthetic, and other personal involvements with the imagery. I conclude by taking up some foreseeable objections, including the charge that the modelling thesis regressively and mistakenly psychologizes the cinematic medium.

Johannes Riis
A Cognitive-Functionalist Approach to Non-Realist Film Acting

A comparison to reality is often invoked when discussing film acting, e.g. in employing terms as realist and non-realist acting styles, but from a theoretical point of view we are considerably better off if relating acting to a communicative process. This may done if seeing expressive behavior within a cognitive and functionalist perspective where emotions are viewed as evolved ways of letting us behave adaptively to circumstances with certain concerns at stake. It is argued that film acting can be seen as a direct way of influencing the spectator's cognition and emotion. Film acting not only cues the spectator to see the emotional significance of events in the story world, but interacts with the spectator as well, causing the spectator to feel sympathy, desire, indifference, etc. toward characters. Examples of non-realist acting, e.g. in films by Robert Bresson, are discussed, and the paper will finally assess the advantages of a communicative approach as a general model, informing for instance historical approaches, not only to acting studies, but subjectivity as well.

Greg Smith
'I Was Misinformed': Narration, Uncertainty, and Emotion in Casablanca

Both popular and academic critics examining Casablanca have emphasized the myth that the film was shot without anyone knowing how the film would end. This uncertainty, according to critics from Umberto Eco to Dana Polan, is crucial to the narrative construction of this film and to the pleasures it provides. Now that historians have debunked the myth of Casablanca's multiple-choice ending, can cognitivism provide a better explanation for how this film elicits emotion? What part does the cognitive state of 'uncertainty' play in the text? How can Casablanca provide pleasures for the viewer who has seen the film repeatedly, for whom the ending is no longer uncertain?

Murray Smith
Sound in 'Sundial'

William Raban's 'Sundial' is a short, experimental film which creates abstract visual and sonic patterns out of the urban imagery and sounds surrounding a well-known architectural landmark in London. This paper will focus on the perceptual and aesthetic processes invoked by the 'musique concrete' of the film's soundtrack.

Ed Tan
Specialist Modes of Film Viewing, and Supporting Instruments

The often deplored difference between film viewing in the cinema and watching television in a domestic setting does not necessarily coincide with appropriate vs. poor ways of viewing. Although feature films have been made to be viewed attentively and continuously, and TV allows for a more casual way of viewing, films can be skimmed and TV-imagery can be inspected meticulously, when necessary. Both have to be viewed for special purposes in other ways than the usual as well, and this goes for any type of moving image in principle. An editor views film materials in a very special way, and the same goes for the trades person who buys the rights for exhibiting films, the documentalist who is to catalogue films by viewing, or the laboratory specialist who calibrates colour settings in scanning a film to video.In this paper I will firstly, go through some specialist modes of film viewing. They can be classified according to the type of materials, the purpose of viewing and the manipulating activity that the viewing is part of. Secondly, some digital tools for visualization and manipulation that are currently under development in research institutes will be discussed. Thirdly, specialist modes of viewing may no longer be the privilege of professionals. The increasing integration of film into multimedia environments may offer a large number of ways of dealing with the moving image to the public at large. This creates a need for cognitive film studies to gather knowledge on specialist modes of viewing and their interaction with specialist viewing and manipulation tools.

Kristin Thompson
The Question of Influence: Lighting Styles in Lubitsch's German and American Silent Features

Ernst Lubtisch's rapid transition from being the leading director of the post-World War I German film industry to being one of the most prestigious Hollywood filmmakers offers an excellent subject for studying the phenomenon of artistic influence. This presentation analyzes in detail the changes in Lubitsch's lighting style, based on examination of the equipment available in each country, the typical placement of lamps within sets, and the visual effects in Lubitsch's silent features from 1918 to 1927.

Malcolm Turvey
Problems for the Thought Theory of Emotional Responses to Fictions

Contemporary philosophical and cognitivist theories of emotional responses to fictions tend to argue that "thought" plays a major, if not constitutive, role in our emotional responses to fictions. In this paper, I will seek to challenge this view by arguing that it is premised on an illicit extension of certain cognitive predicates beyond the practices in which their application makes sense. In certain contexts, it makes sense to say that "X feels sadness at the thought of Y," but not typically when X is responding emotionally to a fiction. It is Norman's murder of Marion in the shower in "Psycho" that is horrific for cinematic spectators, not the thought of it, I will argue, just as it is Keaton's travails as a cameraman that are outrageously funny in "The Cameraman," not the thought of them. We apply cognitive predicates to people--we say that they are "thinking" or "imagining," or that their actions are "thoughtful" or "imaginative"--upon the basis of certain patterns of behavior that they exhibit and the backgound against which that behavior takes place. I will try and show why it makes no sense to say that spectators are "thinking" or "imagining" anything in a great many examples of emotional responses to fictions.

Casper Tybjerg
Film History and the Cognitive Revolution

The new approaches in the humanities, informed by cognitive studies and evolutionary psychology, have been criticized for being ahistorical; indeed, they have often been formulated in more or less explicit opposition to historicist and culturalist views. Because they tend to focus on universal human traits, they may seem of little use when trying to explain the sort of changes which preoccupy (for instance) film historians. Nevertheless, the new approaches have much to offer the field of film history.

The tools of cognitive analysis may be applied within two broad domains: that of the historical actors, and that of the historian. The first case could be exemplified by questions of historical spectatorship: did people then see something different from people now? The second case brings up the issue of how our common mental organization impinges on the writing of history, and how that should affect our evaluation of historical accounts. In my paper, I shall give brief examples covering both these areas.

George Wilson
On Fictional Transfigurations of Fictional Worlds in Film

Most of those theorists who have endorsed the idea of a cinematic narrator have wished to recognize thereby a figure who fictionally shows the images and relays to us the diegetic sound (a grand imagier.) However, there are cases--later von Sternberg films may be an classical instances--in which the characters, situations, and events are themselves self-acknowledged to be fictional constructions. For example, the film stylistically foregrounds the fact that the characters we see are fictional roles portrayed by the actors and actresses and that the roles themselves have been constructed by agencies we do not see. I will try to explain more clearly the kind of narrational strategy I have in mind here, and discuss whether the relevant considerations provide grounds for positing something like the NARRATOR SYSTEM proposed by Tom Gunning and other writers.

Dolf Zillman
The Social Psychology of the Horror Film

After a brief review of popular notions concerning the appeal of cinematic horror, human curiosity about terrifying happenings is traced to its primal roots. A biosocialpsychological theory of the enjoyment of cinematic horror is proposed. In this theory, the social conditions of the confrontation with terror are assigned a crucial role in the conversion of incipient fear and repulsion to euphoric reactions. Gender differences in this conversion are elaborated. Experimental research demonstrations are discussed to establish the theory's merits. Implications of cinematic horror for the socialization of emotions along gender lines are also considered.