PROCEEDINGS OF SYMPOSIUM
COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE
OF FILM STUDIES
University of Kansas - April
18, 1997
WELCOME by Martha Hensley
Welcome to the first symposium presented by
the Institute for Cognitive Studies in Film and Video. I am Martha Hensley,
a member of the Institute staff. This is an historic event for the field
of film theory and cinema studies, and for ICS. Thank you for joining
us today.The board of advisors for the Institute represent the leading
scholars in the field of Cognitive Film Theory and they have come together
at the University of Kansas to consider our accomplishments and to help
us plan the future. The papers they present today consider the topic "Cognitive
Science and the Future of Film Studies"The presenters are: Stephen Prince
(Virginia Tech) - *Transformational Functions of Cinema*
Edward Branigan (University of California - Santa Barbara) - *The Object
is Also Listening: Cognition and Sound*
Murray Smith (University of Kent at Canterbury - UK) - *Imagining from
the Inside*
Wayne Munson (Fitchburg State College) - Moderator
Ed Tan (Vrije Universiteit - Amsterdam, The Netherlands) - *Information
in Movement*
Carl Plantinga (Hollins College) - *Emotional Contagion and the Human
Face*
Charles Eidsvik (University of Georgia) - *Reading Faces: Cognition and
Cultural Problems*
Torben Grodal (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) - *Cognition, Emotion,
and Visual Fiction*
Barbara Fisher Anderson, Director of Research for ICS, will present the
keynote address - *The Field of Film Studies and the Promise of a Cognitive
Paradigm*
----------------------------
Students and scholars have been working in the field of cognitive film
theory for perhaps 15 years - often isolated. There was no "home" for
their work, no resource center or clearing house. To meet this need, the
Institute was envisioned and brought to life by KU graduate students under
the direction of Joseph Anderson.
The staff began to search for faculty in colleges and universities who
were interested in our project. The response was overwhelming. A very
important part of that response was from students around the world - equal
numbers of young women and men have responded to our announcements and
newsletters. They request information about our resources, our bibliographies,film
study programs and work shops. Students ask us to assist them with their
chosen topics. We look forward to working with these young scholars and
will include their work as a resource of the Institute. We expect some
of them will be standing before you, presenting papers for the ICS Conference
2002.
I would like to introduce the students from the University of Kansas Film
Studies Program who staff the Institute and have planned this Symposium.
Their plans for the academic year 1997-1998 include research for their
own dissertations that will in turn become a part of the Institute files,
expansion of the bibliography on the ICS Web Page, and an electronic journal,
the first journal dedicated to Cognitive Film Theory. Kelly Davis is a
graduating senior and an intern at the Institute. The graduate students
are Bruce Hutchinson, Chris Meissner, Mike Gunter, Stuart Minnis and Ben
Meade. Joseph Anderson is the Director of ICS and Coordinator of the Film
Studies Program at the University of Kansas.
INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND
THE FUTURE OF FILM STUDIES
By Joseph D. Anderson
I am indebted to many people for the
realization of this symposium but to none more than Martha and John.
Let me add my welcome to theirs. We are honored that several of you
have come great distances to be here in Kansas with us today. Torben
Grodal has traveled from Denmark, where he is Professor of Media Studies
at the University of Copenhagen. And he brings with him his new book
in which he sheds much light upon our emotional involvement with film,
entitled appropriately MOVING PICTURES. Ed Tan has come from Amsterdam
where he is Professor on the faculty of Arts at Vrije Universiteit.
He serves on the advisory board of the Institute for Cognitive Studies
in Film and Video, and is of course one of our featured speakers here
today. And Murray Smith has flown over from the UK where he is lecturer
in Film Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He will speak
to us in this morning's session. And we are delighted to have those
of you who have come to Kansas from remote, outlying regions of the
U.S., such as New York and California. If one considers the apparently
inherent Balkanization of departments within a university, perhaps
the greatest distance has been traveled by those of you who have walked
over this morning from another department on campus. Thanks for coming.
To all of you who have gathered here at Oldfather Studios today, we
thank you and we welcome you.
A few months ago I, along with Bruce Hutchinson
and Mike Gunter, attended the inaugural meeting of the Kansas University
Cognitive Science Project, and after the meeting I had the good fortune
to meet the host for the evening Tom Schrieber of the Psychology Department.
And in his wonderfully direct way he said "I'm not surprised to see
people from neurophysiology and computer science, but what are you
guys from film doing here?" And I, caught off guard, blurted out an
answer that is probably closer to the truth than a more considered
one might have been. I said "filmmakers have, by trial and error,
learned how to get inside our heads and play with our minds, but we
don't understand much about how that works." I could have added that
even those of us who have actually made movies don't understand how
it's possible. How do moviegoers become emotionally involved with
characters and events on the screen? How do we remember events on
the screen and then witness later events and then go back and reevaluate
the earlier events, and so on. Well, Tom Schreiber is no fool; he
saw that our interest in Cognitive Science is both genuine and justified.
We are among a growing number of students of film who are asking,
perhaps audaciously, but sincerely, how the mind works, because we
want to understand how movies work.
It turns out that this is precisely the project
of Cognitive Science -- not specifically how movies work in the mind,
but how the mind works in all of its particulars. Ruth Byrne and Mark
Keane, writing in the Irish Journal of Psychology in 1989, put the
matter this way.
"Cognitive science is the name of a relatively
new approach to understanding an old problem: the nature of the mind
and mental activities. For some time, researchers in many disciplines
-- cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, linguistics,
and the neurosciences -- have attempted to understand aspects of human
cognition. Under the banner of cognitive science, they are exploring
the possibility that several heads may indeed be better than one for
solving difficult problems." (IJP, i) Howard Gardner writing in 1985
gave this introduction: "In the mid-70s, I began to hear the term
cognitive science. As a psychologist interested in cognitive matters,
I naturally became curious about the methods and scope of this new
science. . . . Some immersion in the writings of self-proclaimed cognitive
scientists convinced me that cognitive science was deeply rooted in
philosophy and therefore, in a sense, had a long history. A the same
time, the field was so new that its leading figures were all alive,
and some were still quite young." (Gardner, xiii) He goes on to say
that "Cognitive scientists today ask what it means to know something
and to have accurate beliefs, or to be ignorant or mistaken. They
seek to understand what is known -- the objects and subjects in the
external world -- and the person who knows -- his perceptual apparatus,
mechanisms of learning, memory and rationality. . . .They are curious
about the differences among individuals; who learns early or with
difficulty; what can be known by the child, the inhabitant of a preliterate
society, an individual who has suffered brain damage, or a mature
scientist?" (Gardner, 5 )
Gardner gives September the 11th, 1956 as the
birthdate of cognitive science and cites a talk that George A. Miller
gave at MIT in 1979 in which he reminisced about the Symposium on
Information Theory also held at M.I.T. on the earlier date.
"I went away from the Symposium with
a strong conviction, more intuitive than rational, that human experimental
psychology, theoretical linguistics, and computer simulation of cognitive
processes were all pieces of a larger whole, and that the future would
see progressive elaboration and coordination of their shared concerns....I
ha[d] been working toward a cognitive science for about twenty years
before I knew what to call it." (Gardner 29)
Gardner notes that at the "Symposium on Information"
in 1956 "Allen Newell and Herbert Simon described the 'Logic Theory
Machine,' the first complete proof of a theorem ever carried out on
a computing machine." And a young linguist by the name of Chomsky
presented a paper entitled "Three Models of Language," outlining his
"approach to grammar, based on linguistic transformations," which
proved to be fairly influential (though not in film studies). And
that George Miller himself laid out his claim that "the capacity of
short term memory is limited to approximately seven entries." (Gardner,
28)
To Gardner's history of cognitive science let
me add that the Cognitive Science Society, in which many of us hold
membership, was founded in 1979, and that the first issue of the Journal
of Cognitive Science was published three years earlier in 1976. We
are to conclude that Cognitive Science as a recognizable movement
has been around since perhaps the mid-fifties, and clearly since the
mid-seventies. So much for cognitive science, but where does Film
Theory intersect Cognitive Science?
Students of psychology know that Hugo Munsterberg
directed the first psychology lab at Harvard in 1892, which was an
outgrowth of the philosophy department then headed by William James.
What they may not know is that Munsterberg also wrote the first book
on film theory. He entitled it, THE PHOTOPLAY: A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY
and published it in 1916, about 6 months before his death in that
same year. Martha Hensley argues that the theory he offers would today
be considered a cognitivist theory, "... for he was interested not
so much in how films are constructed or how they related to reality,
but in how films in their structure and content simulate the processes
of the human mind." (Hensley, 1)
In spite of his unquestionable contribution
to the field of film studies, there was little interest in Munsterberg
or his psychology for the next 57 years--until Donald Fredericksen
chose his work for a dissertation in 1973. (U of Iowa, 1973) By the
mid seventies, I was offering a course at the University of Wisconsin
called Psychophysics and Cinema in which I recounted the early work
of Munsterberg and attempted to bring some of the recent findings
in psychology and neurophysiology to the attention of film students.
In 1978 Charles Eidsvik wrote that
"...although the historical and technical
sides of film making have received intensive study, answers to the
most basic question about the movies -- how do they work? -- have
evaded us. Why? certainly not because knowledge is unavailable..."
(Eidsvik, 3)
He goes on to say that we must be "aware of
recent information from the physical and social sciences, and willing
to deal openly with the larger cultural contexts within which the
cinema functions." (Eidsvik, 3) Charley will present a paper at this
afternoon's session.
Ed Tan notes in his new book that J.J. Gibson
made a similar observation in 1979 when he wrote that "The technology
of cinema and television has reached the very highest level of applied
science. The psychology of the awareness provided by a motion picture,
however, is non-existent..." (Tan, ix ). And, of course, Julian Hochberg
and Virginia Brooks had written their brilliant chapter in the Handbook
of Perception entitled "The Perception of Motion Pictures" a year
earlier. (Hochberg & Brooks)
But in 1980 cognitive science remained but
a ripple in mainstream film scholarship. One interesting ripple was
the double issue of the Journal of the University Film Association
edited by Ed Small and dedicated to Cinevideo and Psychology. Among
the contributors to that issue were Fredericksen, a young psychologist
named John M. Kennedy, and Barbara Fisher Anderson, who by the way,
will give the keynote address here today (in a very few minutes, I
promise).
It is fair to say that the cognitive revolution
in film studies did not really get off the ground until David Bordwell,
in his book NARRATION IN THE FICTION FILM (1985), argued that "any
theory of the spectator's activity must rest upon a general theory
of perception and cognition." ( Bordwell, Narration, 30) He followed
this heresy with MAKING MEANING, published by Harvard Press in 1988
which contains one of the most extraordinary paragraphs in the literature
of film studies:
"... contemporary interpretation-centered
[film] criticism tends to be conservative and course-grained. It tends
to play down film form and style. It leans to an unacknowledged degree
upon received aesthetic categories without producing new ones. It
is largely uncontentious and unreflective about its theories and practices.
As if all this weren't enough, it has become boring." (Bordwell, MM,
261)
In the same year he presented a paper at the
Society for Cinema Studies convention entitled "The Case for Cognitivism"
(in which he quit beating around the bush and said what he really
thought). Bordwell's "Case for Cognitivism" clearly, decisively, and
permanently, connected film theory to cognitive science. At that same
conference Edward Branigan presented a paper titled "Fiction as a
Partially Determined Referent," in which he asked "how can data that
has been organized into a narrative... be connected, matched, or fitted
to the world and to our projects in the world?"
In the same year (1988 was a big year for film
studies) Noel Carroll published his book MYSTIFYING MOVIES in which,
after noting that Marxist-psychoanalytic-semiology is the film theory
of the academic establishment, goes on to charge that "in their attempts
to show how movies purportedly mystify spectators, contemporary film
theorists, in fact, mystify our understanding of cinema." (Carroll,
2)
By 1989 film scholar Dudley Andrew, taking
care to point out that he had "not as yet taken the side of the cognitivists"
(and still has not to my knowledge), is, nevertheless, moved to write
that "recent and forthcoming books by Noel Carroll, David Bordwell,
and Edward Branigan have begun to change the tone of thinking and
writing about the cinema." (Andrew, 1) Andrew goes on to say that
"Cognitive science brings a hardheaded
style of research that will make Americans proud. It relies on common
sense and experiment in addressing problems that continental theory
has treated through brilliant metaphors and clever "readings". At
last America seems to be bringing something of its own to film study,
and something solid to boot. Importantly, that something has been
mined in the traditional center of American academic prestige -- Cambridge,
Massachusetts -- a town that has been rude and inhospitable to continental
film theory, a town that houses the cognitivist citadels of M.I.T.
(Schank, Fodor, Chomsky) and Harvard (Howard Gardner).
Harvard, we should recall, was Hugo Munsterberg's
institution." (Andrew, 2)
Apparently we have come full circle in film
theory -- from the first book on film theory by Hugo Munsterberg of
the Harvard psychological laboratory to the publication of David Bordwell's
book MAKING MEANING by Harvard University Press.
I have attempted to answered the question of
when and where Film Theory intersected Cognitive Science. Looking
back over the years it becomes clear that there were several intersections,
the first occurring in 1916 (even though Cognitive Science didn't
exist until the fifties), if we allow that Munsterberg was a "proto-cognitivist,"
with some connections in the seventies, and then with the intersection
in the eighties resulting in a strong covalent bonding -- thanks in
large part to the participants in this symposium -- David Bordwell,
Charlie Eidsvik, Carl Plantinga, Ed Tan, Murray Smith, Ed Brannigan,
Stephen Prince, and our keynote speaker Barbara Fisher Anderson.
_______________
Works Cited:
Andrew, Dudley. "Cognitivism: Quests and Questionings."
IRIS 9 (Spring 1989): 1-11.
Bordwell, David. "A Case for Cognitivism." IRIS
9 (Spring 1989): 11-41.
________. MAKING MEANING: INFERENCE AND RHETORIC
IN THE INTERPRETATION OF CINEMA. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989.
________. NARRATION IN THE FICTION FILM. Madison:
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Byrne, Ruth M.J. and Mark T. Keane. "An Introduction
to Cognitive Science," THE IRISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY. Vol 10, No.
2. Special issue on Cognitive Science. i-vi.
Carroll, Noel. MYSTIFYING MOVIES. New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1988.
Carterette, Edward C., and Morton P. Friedman,
eds. HANDBOOK OF PERCEPTION. VOL. 10, PERCEPTUAL ECOLOGY. New York:
Academic Press, 1978.
Eidsvik, Charles. CINELITERACY. New York: Random
House, 1978.
Gardner, Howard. THE MIND'S NEW SCIENCE: A HISTORY
OF THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Grodal, Torben. MOVING PICTURES: A NEW THEORY
OF FILM GENRES, FEELINGS, AND COGNITION. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
Hensley, Martha E. "Hugo Munsterberg: Proto-Cognitivist
in the Classic Tradition" Masters Thesis, University of Kansas, 1994.
Munsterberg, Hugo. THE FILM: A PSYCHOLOGICAL
STUDY (The unaltered and unabridged republication of THE PHOTOPLAY:
A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY, originally published by New York: D. Appleton,
1916). New York: Dover Publications, 1970.
Small, Edward S., Guest Editor. JOURNAL OF THE
UNIVERSITY FILM ASSOCIATION Vol. 32, Nos. 1&2 (Winter-Spring, 1980):
Special double issue: Cinevideo and Psychology.
Tan, Ed S. EMOTION AND THE STRUCTURE OF NARRATIVE
FILM (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996)
FILM STUDIES AND THE PROMISE
OF A COGNITIVE PARADIGM
by Barbara Fisher Anderson
The field of film studies has traditionally
been divided into theory, history and criticism. In recent years those
categories have increasingly become conflated, with the result that
many film programs make no distinction, but instead practice what
David Bordwell has called "Grand Theory."
The dogmatic nature of "Grand Theory" promotes
agenda-driven research and doctrine-driven thinking. The future of
film scholarship depends upon making clear distinctions among our
scholarly pursuits.
Although it can and should inform film history
and criticism, cognitive science pertains most directly to film theory.
We need, as Stephen Prince has put it "to reemphasize and carefully
study those points of correspondence between photographic or moving
picture images and the real-world visual experience available to viewers."
(Prince, 80). A cognitive paradigm provides just such an opportunity
for film theory. It offers, for example, a new foundation for theories
of spectatorship, theories based solidly on data and supported by
evidence. Instead of the passive spectator implicit in theories of
"suturing" and "positioning" or the "textually constructed spectator"
(who in the strictest sense is not a spectator at all), cognitive
science brings for our study an active, biological spectator, complex
but not inscrutable, some of whose perceptual and cognitive capacities
are known, and some of whose perceptual and cognitive stragegies have
been convincingly demonstrated in experimental studies.
Given the understanding of spectatorship provided
by a cognitive paradigm, we can begin to study issues of interest
to film theory: character identification, emotion and film, diegesis
and diegetic involvement, narrational processes. A cognitive paradigm
offers, too, an opportunity for feminist film theory to move away
from a focus on "representation" produced by the filmic text and away
from a constructed spectator to an (inter)active biological spectator
subject to the constraints of his or her perceptual and cognitive
systems and utilizing strategies developed over millions of years
of evolution while interacting with a film made in the present. In
its struggle to better understand the human mind, cognitive science
has gained significant insights into gender differences that could
form the basis of a more vital and productive "feminist" film theory,
one informed by an understanding of what it means--from a perceptual,
cognitive and psychological perspective--to be female.
Finally, as cognitive film theorists begin
to understand how film engages the spectator, what we in film studies
have learned begins to feed back into the larger enterprise of cognitive
science, and we all learn a little bit more about how the human mind
works. We look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration.
TRANSFORMATIONAL FUNCTIONS OF CINEMA
by Stephen Prince
The turn to cognitivism in recent film scholarship
has had the salutary effect of emphasizing the ways that cinema builds
on the everyday skills and knowledge of its spectators rather than
being (as formalist views have tended to emphasize) an abstruse medium
requiring special skills of discourse analysis from its viewers. But
cognitivism, in its turn, faces some limiting conditions or, at least,
a set of characteristics in cinema that it has not proven as good
at analyzing. I call these the transformational components of cinema,
and they co-exist with the correspondence-based features that invite
the viewer's transfer of everyday skills and experience to the medium.
Cinema has a dual function relative to the viewer. It both corresponds
with the viewer's experience of space, time and the dynamics of human
behavior, and, simultaneously, it transforms these qualities by going
beyond, to creatively reconfigure, the viewers's understanding of
space, self and world. In this paper, I re-emphasize this transformational
capability and discuss where cognitivism might fit in relation to
it.
For the cognitive perspective, the cinema is
comprehensible, in large part, due to its basis in perceptual realism,
that is, its ability to copy real world sources of perceptual information.
Cognitive accounts are extremely powerful in explaining how this occurs.
However, in its transformational components, cinema can exceed, falsify
or transcend the perceptual and social bases of viewer experience.
Cognitive accounts, to date, have been less attentive to this aspect
of the medium. I discuss how various elements of cinematography are
used by filmmakers to reconfigure the viewer's perceptual understanding
of space, self and world.
A filmmaker's stylistic choices can be understood
as a means of overcoming the camera's tendency to operate as a recording
instrument and of negating straightforward perceptual correspondence.
Until cognitivism comes to terms with the transformational functions of
cinema, it will have a hard time dealing with that basic task of all filmmakers,
the excercise of creative choice from which style develops. At present,
issues of stylistic design tend to fall outside the purview of cognitivism,
and this will limit the usefulness of the paradigm for many scholars and
students.
THE OBJECT IS ALSO LISTENING:
COGNITION AND SOUND
by Edward Branigan
Film sound is understood through the cognitive
uses we make of it and the descriptions we offer in such contexts
as the physical, phenomenal, existential, nominal, fictional, and
narrative. A sound has no absolute meaning apart from its relationship
to a perceiver's goals and descriptions in (under,for) a given set
of circumstances. Various situations and motivations evoke different
degrees of schema and data use, resulting in different degrees of
accuracy, depending on the specific goals of the perceiver. The guiding
principle behind people's relative use of schemas and data seems to
be the needs of the particular interaction and the costs of being
wrong.
IMAGINING FROM THE INSIDE
by Murray Smith
In this paper, I will elaborate on the so-called
'thought-theory' of emotional response, focussing on the role of 'imagining
from the inside', or'central' imagining, in generating empathic emotions.
Imagining 'from the inside' is a particular kind of imagining in which
we simulate the beliefs and emotions of characters, as if we were
those characters in the situations in which we see them depicted.
I begin by discussing the relationship between such 'central' imagining,
and the contrasting form of 'acentral' imagining in which we simulate
belief in the events and characters of the fiction, but not 'from
within' any character's perspective. I also discuss certain techniques,
like the point-of-view shot, which are usually assumed to elicit central
imagining, and limn the very specific conditions under which these
devices may be said to perform this function. Through reflection on
my own earlier work and on Gregory Currie's Image and Mind, I argue
that, while central imagining cannot be made the basis of a theoretical
understanding of imagination and emotion prompted by fiction films,
neither can it be eliminated from such theories.
INFORMATION IN MOVEMENT
by Ed Tan in collaboration with Robert Kiewiet
The development of knowledge about the film
experience seems to be expanding in two directions at present. On
one end of the spectrum, important progress is being made in research
into various aspects of the cognition of film narrative. On the other
end, knowledge about elementary sensory and neural processes in film
vision and movement perception is also steadily accumulating (Anderson
& Anderson, 1980; Perret et al. 1990). It maybe that complementary
effort is needed to cover processes inbetween the atomic and molar
levels of the film experience just referred to. This is the level
of within scene, within action and within shot constituents of filmic
space, temporal structure, object and event representation, and figure
and camera movement. It has received attention from the Filmologie
school in France in the fourties and fifties. We now have the important
work of Hochberg on filmic comprehension of movement and shot transitions
(Hochberg 1996)and Brooks' (1989) account of the perception of filmed
dance. There is another tradition of research established by Albert
Michotte that deserves continuation. Michotte developed experiments
in apparent causality, using a specially designed cinematic device
for the controlled presentation of simple geometric stimuli. His experiments
(Michotte, 1963; Thinès, Costall, and Butterworth, 1991) contribute
to cognitive science as a whole, e.g. in exploring the perception-cognition
divide, the determinants of causal impressions, and verbal labeling
of elementary events. They also seem to be most relevant for film
studies. This kind of experiments, may throw light on principles underlying
(human figure) animation, staging of actor interactions, and single
actor movement and style. Carroll's (1981-82) and Hochberg's (1996)
studies of movement within filmic action refer to Michotte's work
in explaining the impression of causality. As an example we will present
a pilot experiment à la Michotte by Robert Kiewiet and myself on the
perception of `launching'. In the experiment, abstract geometric figures
were presented on screen. Figure A moves and halts. Then figure B
moves in the same direction. We varied the velocity of A, the delay
between A's arrival and B's departure, and A's shape. Effects of these
factors on perception of causality and expression were measured. Suggestions
were made further experiments.
EMOTIONAL CONTAGION AND THE HUMAN FACE ON FILM
by Carl Plantinga
The "scene of empathy" is common in many films.
In it the narrative progression slows and the face of a favored character
becomes the locus of attention, either in a single shot of long duration
or in a point of view structure. Such scenes often, though not always,
occur near the end of a film, for example, in Stella Dallas, Yankee
Doodle Dandy, BladeRunner, and City Lights.
Such scenes encourage empathy for the favored
character in part through emotional contagion, the phenomenon by which
we "catch" the emotions of screen characters. Also central in this process
are affective mimicry and facial feedback.
In my talk I described the strategies used
by filmmakers to elicit empathy in relation to the human face, including
devices to focus attention, shots/scenes of sufficient duration, the
development of allegiance for a favored character, and the development
of a narrative context that "justifies" our empathy. These strategies
are necessary because the use of the human face to elicit emotional
contagion is under-determined, and must be accompanied by other reinforcing
strategies.
READING FACES: COGNITIVE AND CULTURAL PROBLEMS
by Charles Eidsvik
Though the expressions on actors' faces have been
a part of film rhetoric since the cinema's beginnings, and though there
is good reason to believe that much of our film viewing time is spent
watching faces, since the advent of sound film little has been published
on facial expressions in cinema. In the silent period, film theorists
often approached the subject, partly because the close-up was new to the
performing arts (though not of course to photography or painting) and
partly because the supposed "universality" of gesture and facial expression
helped cinema gain an international audience. Kuleshov's famous montage
experiments showed - correctly - how the face and its "meanings" are problematic,
not a given. Balazs' Der Sichtbare Mensch and Pudovkin's Stanislavsky-based
Acting in the Cinema added insights. And Eisenstein's advocacy of "typage"
as a casting principle was a brash embrace of how stereotyping works.
Since sound, however, attention has drifted from the face and from the
role of the performer in general. This paper suggests that such inattention
may be a mistake, and points to a few places in which attention to performance
might produce insights.
EMOTIONS, COGNITIONS AND NARRATIVE PATTERNS
IN FILM
by Torben Kragh Grodal
The lecture describes how a categorization of different
film genres and narrative patterns can be made based on their emotional
effect. This emotional effect is again linked to the the way in which
viewers relate to situations and actions in film. I begin by describing
the mental flow induced by film viewing in the viewer's brain. The film
first activates eyes and visual cortex in the rear of the brain, then
it flows forward to association areas, further forward to fronal areas
molding scenes and actions, and the flow ends in premotor areas, which
eventually simulate a response in identification with the seen. This mental
flow may be blocked in any of its phases, and the important film genres
center on one of these phases. Some abstract films center on processes
in eye and visual cortex, lyrical films centres on associative functions,
whereas action films let the flow proceed to frontal premotor and motor
areas. Passive melodramas block this response and induce autonomic responses
like tears, shivers and laughter. The cognitive assessment of coping potential
will therefore mold the film-induced emotions. Film genres like comedies
and metafilms will furthermore transform the emotional impact of given
films. I finally discuss some of the evolutionary and functional reasons
for certain representational patterns like canonical narratives, comedies,
and melodramas. Central generic patterns correspond to central ways in
which perceptions, cognitions, emotions and autonomic reactions, and motor
actions are linked to each other.
For more detailed information about the papers
presented at the symposium, you may contact the authors at the e-mail
addresses provided below.
Barbara Fisher Anderson -- jdanderson5@earthlink.net
Stephen Prince -- sprince@vt.edu
Edward Branigan -- branigan@humanitas.ucsb.edu
Murray Smith -- mss@ukc.ac.uk
Wayne Munson (moderator) -- wmunson@fsc.edu
Ed Tan -- tane@jet.let.vu.nl
Carl Plantinga -- plantinga@minnie.hollins.edu
Charles Eidsvik -- eidsvik@uga.cc.uga.edu
Torben Grodal -- coco.ihi.ku.dk
Joseph Anderson -- jdanderson5@earthlink.net
Martha Hensley -- hensleym@eagle.cc.ukans.edu ics@falcon.cc.ukans.edu
For additional information about the Institute for
Cognitive Studies in Film and Video:
e-mail: jdanderson5@earthlink.net
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