application/pdf
2036-461X
16577
29
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Project - Cinema as a Time Lab: Challenging Ordinary Time Perception through Cinematic Representations and Experience
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
17
Projects & Abstracts
2017-10-01
2021-10-06
2017-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Federica Cavaletti
2017/10/01
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
2036-461X
29
en
Ph.D. Thesis Project - Cinema as a Time Lab: Challenging Ordinary Time Perception through Cinematic Representations and Experience
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16577/17302
17
Cinema as a Time Lab: Challenging Ordinary Time Perception
through Cinematic Representations and Experience
Federica Cavaletti / Ph.D. Thesis Project1
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore




   This doctoral project is part of a wider, collective research project on the
subjective perception of time in the context of the audiovisual arts and media.2
Specifically, the present project examines the medium-specific ability of cinema
to expand the borders of the spectators’ ordinary experience of time.
   Cinema can deliberately manipulate time and thus challenge the concept of a
regular and orderly temporal flow. On the one hand, it can alter the spectators’
own experience, triggering desynchronizations between their subjectively
perceived time and an objectively measurable one. On the other hand, it
sometimes gives visible shape to alternative forms of experience, which are
unfamiliar to spectators since they belong to highly unfamiliar subjectivities. By
providing such experiences, cinema turns into a creative time lab that enables
spectators to experiment with their own and alternative ways of living time.
   The project takes advantage of this time lab to address, particularly, two
questions.
   Which aspects of cinematic language are responsible for altering spectators’
own perception of time and making it highly subjective? How can spectators
gain, through cinematic representations, at least partial access to alternative ways
of perceiving time, and what can they learn from them?


    Time Lab 1: Altering our own Temporal Experience

   As remarked above, cinema often alters our temporal experience. A frequent
form of temporal distortion, in the cinematic experience as well as in everyday
life, involves duration.


1
  Ph.D. Thesis supervised by Professor Ruggero Eugeni. For information: federica.cavaletti@
unicatt.it
2
  PRIN 2015: Perception, Performativity, and Cognitive Sciences – Milan Unit: ‘Time Perception and
Performativity in Audiovisual Experiences: Editing, Camera Movements, Action and Narrative
Manipulations. A Neurofilmological Approach’. See https://sites.google.com/view/perception-
performativity/research-units/milano-unit

                                                        Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 29, Fall 2017
                                       Federica Cavaletti


   The ability to estimate duration has been explained with reference to various
models.3
   One that the present research project adopts as a central premises connects the
estimation of duration to the experience of movement. An intrinsic temporality
would permeate our bodily movements and actions, allowing us to interact
effectively with the environment and others.4 This idea seems to resonate with
and receive support from recent analyses of the brain’s supplementary motor
area (SMA): this area appears to regulate not only the planning and execution
of movement, but also the estimation of their duration; this is true even in case
of movements performed by others and merely observed, i.e. third-person
movements.5
   This last observation opens the possibility to export these mechanisms into the
context of cinema. Cinematic representations indeed comprise not only diegetic
movements, but also what my research group and I hypothesize to be medium-
specific instances of third-person movement: editing, camera movements and all
that pertains to the unfolding of the images. We call these formal transformations
‘discourse movements’ and we intend to investigate how they influence spectators’
temporal experience.
   In tackling this issue, we refer to the theoretical and methodological framework
of Neurofilmology, which combines a traditional approach to film analysis with
experimental procedures.6
   We have designed an experiment to clarify how different kinds of represented
action and different styles of editing can alter the perceived duration of a given
audiovisual clip.
   This relies on a 3x3 matrix. The matrix comprises three actions: A) pouring
and drinking water; B) cutting bread; C) moving objects on a table. Each action
is: 1) filmed with a static frontal camera; 2) edited according to a slow-paced
rhythm; 3) edited according to a fast-paced rhythm. The experimental trial
includes three separate phases: first, a pilot phase; second, a behavioural data
collection phase; and third, a physiological data collection phase.
   In the pilot phase (currently in progress) and the first data collection phase,
participants are shown the nine clips and then asked to express duration
judgements. The method is based on a retrospective paradigm and combines

3
  For a synthetic review, see Marc Wittmann, ‘Embodied Time: the Experience of Time, the Body
and the Self’, in Subjective Time: The Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience of Temporality, ed.
by Valtteri Arstila and Dan Lloyd (Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 2014), pp. 507–23.
4
  Shaun Gallagher, ‘Time in Action’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, ed. by Craig
Callender, (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 493–515.
5
  Jennifer T. Coull, Frank Vidal and Boris Burle, ‘When to Act, or Not to Act: That’s the SMA
Question’, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 8 (special issue Time in Perception and Action,
ed. by Warren H. Meck and Richard B. Ivry, April 2016), 14–21.
6
  For an exhaustive introduction to this approach, see Adriano D’Aloia and Ruggero Eugeni,
‘Neurofilmology: An Introduction’, Cinéma & Cie, 22–23 (special issue Neurofilmology: Audiovisual
Studies and the Challenge of Neuroscience, ed. by Adriano D’Aloia and Ruggero Eugeni, Spring/
Fall 2014), 9–26.

134
                                    Cinema as a Time Lab


different kinds of tasks, paying particular attention to the distinction between
quantitative (e.g. numerical duration judgements) and qualitative (e.g. Likert
scale) indicators. These indicators provide distinct information about the
participants’ temporal experience in relation to the experimental clips, shedding
light respectively on the perceived amount of time passed and the perceived
speed of the passing of time. Comparing this multifarious data across the whole
3x3 matrix will allow us to isolate the specific relevance of the two variables at
stake, namely the kind of action and the style of editing.
   Behavioural data collected in the pilot and second phases will orient the design
of the final one, in which spectators’ responses to the same clips will be studied
with brain imaging and other physiological monitoring techniques.


Time Lab 2: Representing Alternative Experiences

   Cinema can also provide unfamiliar and normally unavailable forms of
temporal experience.
   The concept of Umwelt, developed by Jakob Von Uexküll, clarifies this point.7
This concept stresses the generative role of living subjects in relation to the
world: each organism, based on its perceptual and motor features, projects its
own idiosyncratic environment (i.e. Umwelt). This also applies to the world’s
structural conditions, such that it is possible to speak of spatial and temporal
Umwelten.
   Many of the imaginable temporal Umwelten can be easily labelled as unfamiliar
and inaccessible: that of animals, but also of human beings that we tend to
perceive as drastically distant from us. All of these subjects live time in a highly
specific way.
   The concept of ‘lived time’ is pivotal to Eugène Minkowski’s work, and laid
the grounds for both his phenomenological and psychopathological research.8
   Each subject’s experience, Minkowski has claimed, is moulded by the way time-
related vital phenomena intertwine harmoniously, defining the subject’s attitude
toward the future, present and past. When this mechanism starts wavering,
psychopathological alterations may arise: the latter are grounded in perturbations
of the subject’s lived time.Although his overtly anti-organicist approach warns
against any easy equation, Minkowski’s insights often prove compatible with
contemporary psychiatric research, confirming a relationship between psychiatric
disorders and distortions in time perception and organization.9 Thus it appears

7
  Jakob Von Uexküll, ‘A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans’, in A Foray into the
Worlds of Animals and Humans, with A Theory of Meaning, ed. by Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 40–135.
8
  See for his major work Eugène Minkowski, Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological
Studies, ed. by Nancy Metzel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
9
  Shaun Gallagher acknowledges both this affinity and this difference in his ‘Time, Emotion, and
Depression’, Emotion Review, 4.2 (2012), 127–32.

                                                                                            135
                                      Federica Cavaletti


to be crucial, in order to understand the experiences of psychiatric patients, to
gain access to their radically alternative ways of living time. In this part of my
project, I intend to clarify whether cinema can contribute to this purpose. How
can cinema ‘represent’ time as it is experienced by psychopathological subjects,
and how can this affect spectators’ understanding of the latter?
   The issue of representation traditionally pertains to analytical image theory
and semiotics. Yet, other domains and intuitions should be surveyed too: notably,
Hugo Münsterberg’s pioneering idea that cinema can objectify mental acts and
states on the screen;10 or contemporary phenomenologists’ observation that
this medium expresses experience through modes of experience itself.11 Thus,
building and skilfully deploying a manifold conceptual toolbox is evidently a
further essential precondition for this part of my project.

   Both time labs are grounded in the hypothesis that marked, unruly strategies
of cinematic representation might be especially relevant to phenomena of
time ‘subjectivization’. Distortions in duration estimation are to be expected
reasonably when editing does not match our perceptual habits (for instance by
being too fast); and effective representations of psychopathological, i.e. non-
normative, experiences seem to require non-normative technical solutions (slow
motion or action fragmentation might serve the purpose). A more general scope
of this project, therefore, could be that of investigating and systematizing the
correlations between alterations of the temporal experience and alterations of
traditional cinematic language, in a contemporary audiovisual scenario that
increasingly seems to complicate and radically transform the latter.




10
   Hugo Münsterberg, The Film: A Psychological Study, ed. by Richard Griffith (Mineola: Dover
Publications, 1970).
11
   See for instance Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: a Phenomenology of Film Experience
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

136
