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*

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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.

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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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