application/pdf
2036-461X
16352
22-23
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Arthur P. Shimamura (ed.) Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, pp. 385
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
14
Reviews / Comptes rendus
2014-10-01
2021-09-10
2014-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Charles Forceville
2014/10/01
Universiteit van Amsterdam
2036-461X
22-23
en
Arthur P. Shimamura (ed.) Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, pp. 385
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16352/17032
14
Arthur P. Shimamura (ed.)
Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies
Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, pp. 385




   “Psychocinematics,” according to Shimamura, “is grounded on a scientific anal-
ysis of our aesthetic response to movies” (p. 2, emphasis in original). It takes as a
starting point that the processing of film is firmly rooted in psychological and bio-
logical characteristics of our species, and favours empirical research. Moreover, it
aims to contribute to a better comprehension of film as well as of human cognition.
   For cognitivists, Part One (“Philosophical Foundations”) covers familiar
territory. David Bordwell presents a historical tour d’horizon of assorted theo-
ries offering explanations of how movies communicate information and affect
viewers. A key idea in the cognitivist theories that are central in this volume is
that “the spectator draws on real-world knowledge and awareness of narrative
conventions in order to go beyond the information given directly in the film”
(p. 49). Noël Carroll and William Seeley’s chapter adds that films trigger our
attention by various means (e.g., motion, brightness), explaining that our brains
are preconditioned to pick up these cues. This makes sense as, in the cognitivist
view, human beings are fundamentally goal-driven creatures, and their everyday
audiovisual monitoring of the environment serves them equally well in the inter-
pretation of film, a medium which requires only a minimal degree of learning.
Joseph Anderson sings the praise of cognitivism over the ideological and politi-
cal biases of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Cultural Studies (“Grand Theory”).
Drawing on Gibson’s1 “affordances,” he ends with a plea for more sustained
research into the evolutionary role of art. Carl Plantinga discusses how film
spectators’ moods, emotions, and body reflexes are almost invariably related
to their thinking: the narrative motors of suspense, curiosity, anticipation, and
interest rarely run without eliciting affective states.
   The rest of the book investigates implications of these assumptions for how
to study film viewers’ bodily and mental activities. Part Two, “Sensory and At-
tentional Features of Movies,” begins with Katherine Thomson-Jones’ philo-
sophical “Sensing motion in movies” – a chapter whose evaluation is beyond my
competence. Kaitlin Brunick, James Cutting, and Jordan DeLong show how film


1
    James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1979.

                                               Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIV, no. 22/23, Spring/Fall 2014
                             Reviews / Comptes-rendus


narratives are much enhanced by “low-level” building blocks such as shot dura-
tion, editing rhythm, movement, luminance, and colour. All of these features
can be quantified, and may help cue genres, segment films, or steer the charac-
terisation of protagonists. Sheena Rogers warns that slow-motion screening of
documentary (unlike fictional) footage can be highly dubious, as for instance
hitting and falling seem less hard and serious than when seen at normal speed.
Participants in her experiments were not able to detect marginal slow-downs,
which however had strong effects on their evaluations. Rogers firmly concludes:
“the jurors in the trial of the police officers who beat Rodney King were lied to
when they were shown George Holliday’s home video in slow motion” (p. 157).
Tim Smith explains with reference to his own Attentional Theory of Cinematic
Continuity how eye-tracking technology, cueing viewers’ continually shifting at-
tention – particularly to motion – helps assess what is going on in their minds.
Since spectators can take in only a very small part of what is visible in a shot at
any moment, directors need to ensure they immediately focus attention on the
pertinent part of the screen (by and large: on faces and task-relevant objects). In-
deed, in an experiment in which viewers watched key Hollywood movie scenes,
they almost all looked at the same screen area at any given moment.
   Part Three pertains to “Knowledge, Imagination, and Narratives.” Human
beings always seek a good balance between the reliably familiar and the excit-
ingly new. Too much of the former bores us, yet too much of the latter bewil-
ders us. Todd Berliner argues that Hollywood films, contrary to the stereo-
typical view of catering only for unity and equilibrium, in fact counterbalance
this with a healthy dose of disunity. This latter surfaces in the form of “gaps,
discontinuities, incongruities, and other elements that do not operate in strict
harmony with story logic” (p. 198).
   A feature film of course constantly needs to condense real-time events and
actions. Stephan Schwan reports experimental research on how well viewers re-
membered a sequence depending on whether they saw it in full, in a version fea-
turing natural “breakpoints,” or in a version featuring “unnatural breakpoints.”
Viewers did considerably better on the version with natural than on the ver-
sion with unnatural breakpoints. However, even from the well-edited version
participants recalled only 58% of the actions presented. Other experiments
demonstrated that viewers are indeed helped by cinematic conventions such as
the 180° rule. Jeffrey Zacks, too, reports experimental findings on how viewers
segment films. The key driver for locating breaks, as in real life, is “change in
the features of the depicted situation” (p. 231, emphasis in original), which is
construed in light of top-down interpretations of such mechanisms as charac-
ters’ relations and goals. Thus, while changes often coincide with cuts this is by
no means always the case. Importance of change overrules importance of cuts
when the task for participants is: “indicate event boundaries.” fMRI scans of
brain activity seem to confirm this pattern and also show that mental simula-
tion beyond vision and hearing (such as smell, taste) occurred specifically when
there were changes in objects and in spatial locations.

198
                        Arthur P. Shimamura (ed.), Psychocinematics


   Daniel Levin, Alicia Hymel, and Lewis Baker point out that the study of “The-
ory of Mind” (TOM, humans’ – and some animals’ – ability to infer conspecifics’
mental states, emotions, and intentions) strongly depends on visual perception.
Findings echo those in Zacks’ chapter: automatic TOM subprocesses such as
gaze detection and joint attention are important, but may be revised in light of
higher cognitive, narrative processes. The authors further speculate how TOM
interacts or competes with other systems (e.g., numerical cognition) and suggest
that genre-attribution strongly drives appraisal of events in films.
   Keith Oatley’s chapter opens Part Four, which centres on emotion in film.
He distinguishes between spectators’ emotions based on (1) imagining they are
themselves present at the film scene; (2) their sympathy with the characters; (3)
and events in the film world that trigger the simulation of experiences in a spec-
tator’s own life. Art typically gives people a fair degree of freedom to experi-
ence emotions tailored to their personal needs. Gal Raz, Boaz Hagin, and Talma
Hendler see film as a particularly attractive medium for affective neuroscience,
provided “we take into account the contemporary understanding of emotion
as an interactive, dynamic process unfolding over time” (p. 286). They discuss
major experimental techniques (technical labels: activity contrasts, SSRA, ISC,
FC, ICA, NCI). Fully aware of the richness of filmic cues, the authors consider
strengths and limitations of the different types of techniques.
   Monika Suckfüll’s experiments test emotion regulation in light of the “mode”
in which viewers watch a film, since this can help explain why individuals are af-
fected so vastly differently by the same filmic passage. Suckfüll distinguishes four
receptive modes, pertaining to viewers’ (i) self-identity-creation; (ii) sympathy
and empathy with characters; (iii) spurring of their imagination; and (iv) interest
in production issues. Viewers may switch between modes as a way of “regain-
ing control through cognitive change” (p. 328); for instance, when the movie
becomes too scary, they may switch from empathy mode to production mode.
Ed Tan reviews pertinent literature on man’s response to film as that of an “em-
pathic animal” (p. 344), emphasising the central role of the perception-action
mechanism (PAM), introduced by the primatologist de Waal: we perceive others’
actions (particularly those involving facial expressions and hand movements),
which in turn trigger real or virtual empathic actions of our own.
   The volume convincingly shows how cognitivist approaches and psychocin-
ematics are natural allies, and demonstrates fine opportunities for collaboration
between film scholars, psychologists and brain researchers. Let me end with
three general points.
   First, it is telling that Raz et al.’s seemingly robustly cognitivism-oriented chap-
ter is the only one that quotes Deleuze – father of an approach that vies with
cognitivism in claiming to contribute to neuroscience.2 More generally Raz et al.
emphasise that Cultural Studies, routinely maligned or ignored by cognitivists,

2
 See Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture,
Stanford University Press, Stanford 2012.

                                                                                          199
                                 Reviews / Comptes-rendus


actually provides important insights for psychocinematics. It is perhaps worrying
that only these relative outsiders try to build bridges across the chasm separating
cognitivist and Cultural Studies approaches.
   Second, the chapters reporting experimental research on low-level percep-
tion, editing patterns, and automatic empathy persuaded me that the biologi-
cal contribution to understanding film needs to be part and parcel of intro-
ductory film courses. Film students are to be made aware of this dimension
of the medium from day one.
   Finally, the pervasive references to TOM, attention, empathy, intentionality
and modes of reception show that the book has actually less to say (pace Shima-
mura) on the aesthetics of film viewing than on how film is understood. They also
show that we need an overall communication and cognition theory to accommo-
date all of these dimensions. I think Relevance Theory3 can fulfill this role.


                                   [Charles Forceville, Universiteit van Amsterdam]




3
 See Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson, Relevance Theory (2nd ed.), Blackwell, Oxford 1995; Charles
Forceville, Relevance Theory as a Model for Multimodal Communication, in David Machin (ed.),
Visual Communication, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin 2014, pp. 51-70.

200
