(2013) Seeing/ Perceiving in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, Routledge (original) (raw)

Movies, evolution, and mind: From fragmentation to continuity

Evolutionary Review, 2013

Popular movies are curiosities from the standpoints of perception and human evolution. To be sure, static pictures—particularly photographs— are also curiosities since they flatten, shrink, and photometrically change the three-dimensional world around us and yet they satisfactorily present two-dimensional naturalistic depictions of scenes and events that we might not otherwise be able to see. That too is something of a puzzle, but for our purposes here we will take the perceptual adequacy of pictures and photographs for granted. But even granting this and going beyond the fact that most movies add motion to photography, they are still odd when compared to the natural world. In this article we explore three oddities—movies’ visual physical discontinuity, the fluctuations in the pattern of those discontinuities, and their overall structure as it is partly defragmented by these discontinuities. Ironically, all of this is for the purpose of presenting a psychologically coherent and continuous narrative flow.

Perceptual artifacts and phenomena: Gibson's role in the 20th century

Foundations of perceptual theory, 1993

One of the most influential frameworks for the study of perception has been James J. Gibson's ecological approach. This approach is not a theory, but a meta theory, of how we perceive and understand the world around us through our senses. As a meta theory it dissolves old problems and creates new ones, fostering new ways to think about perception and creating new antinomies to ponder. This essay outlines the successes of the approach, some of its new problems, and traces some of its more and less fruitful leads.

Should I See What I Believe? Audiovisual Ostranenie and Evolutionary-Cognitive Film Theory

In my contribution to this book, I aim at exploring the potential contribution of evolutionary-cognitive psychology in the study of defamiliarization in cinema. Interdisciplinarity being at the core of the study, an epistemological preamble is necessary before analyzing what cognitive psychology has to say about the question of perception. The findings will then be transposed to the question of perception of the cinematographic spectacle: before being able to know what may be defamiliarizing in a film, one has to wonder whether the whole cinematographic process itself is not defamiliarizing. Three sections will then be devoted to audiovisual ostranenie, based on three common distinctions in perception psychology: defamiliarizations dealing with the processes of automatic recognition of visual forms (bottom-up); defamiliarizations dealing with the routines associated with the exploration of the environment by the whole body; defamiliarizations dealing with high-level cognitive processes such as opinions and beliefs (top-down).

Historicizing Perception: Film Theory, Neuroscience, and the Philosophy of Mind

Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 2018

In the discipline of fi lm studies, there has long remained a standoff between two important yet perpetually estranged research programs. On the one hand, the dominant mode of contemporary fi lm scholarship fi nds much of its roots in the political and theoretical conversations associated with twentieth-century German and French thought-namely, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, semiotics, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School-and the shared concern over the historical and cultural modes of producing knowledge and subjectivity. That cinema is always already confi gured into the broader discursive and affective formations of the self and community is a conceptual commitment that continues to remain pervasive in, among other areas, studies on the politics of identity and intersectionality, postcolonial and oppositional cinemas, and the social and material economy of fi lm production and consumption. On the other hand, a strong challenge to this paradigm that gained distinction in the 1980s 84 John Rhym has sought to ground explanations of cinematic composition and spectatorship on methods and insights offered by analytic philosophy and cognitive research. Broadly construed, what binds the rich variety of writings that is now most widely recognized as "cognitive fi lm or media studies" has been to employ the best available theories to explain how the constructions of a narrative or scene and the viewer's engagement are rationally motivated-where the standards by which to measure the viability of a theory and the veracity of rationality are rooted in naturalistic discourse. Because much of the exchange between the two camps has been steeped in disputes over the incompatibilities of differing methodological commitments, the debates have been historically marked by attacks on either the politically reactionary inclinations of "scientifi c imperialism" or the empirically unverifi able and thus impressionistic speculations of "cultural relativism." 2 Among the most vitriolic of such sentiments is perhaps Bill Nichols's assertion that "the most regressive current in contemporary fi lm study is the nomination of analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology as global theoretical frameworks" that are incompatible with the "politics of multiculturalism and social representation" so crucial to cultural studies. 3 As a result, David Bordwell has recently assessed that "a sustained conversation between the cognitive and Cultural Studies approaches has yet to occur." 4 Indeed, what began around specifi c points of contention that quickly led to acrimonious dispute has now given way to institutional compartmentalization whereby neither side substantially engages much with the other. 5 This essay seeks to address this discursive impasse by shifting the emphasis away from methodology and placing it on the more moderate level of specifi c claims. Thus, by returning to the last major debate between culturalist and cognitivist fi lm scholars, which centers on the arguments surrounding the historicity of perception (HP), I will elucidate and critically engage with arguments about perception and consciousness on which the opposing positions have been staked.

(2014) Avant-Garde Film in an Evolutionary Context. In Cognitive Media Theory

The evolutionary approach to aesthetics, I shall demonstrate, often dismisses the value of avant--garde and modernist art -sometimes inadvertently, and other times consciously. Exploring some of the major evolutionary accounts of the origins and functions of art, I will advance an alternative to existing theories, which will frame the avant--garde as a valuable phenomenon which develops aesthetic sensitivities and skills of engagement. Where scholars engaged with the avant--garde typically focus on the historical and social conditions that fostered its emergence, 1 I will focus on the evolutionary--psychological conditions that may have enabled its existence.

A personal view of James Gibson’s approach to perception

2008

This commentary argues that James Gibson’s contribution to the field of perception can be best understood as a set of heuristics that directs researchers to describe the stimulus information that makes it possible for animals to function effectively in the environment in which they evolved. He argued that the description of stimulation provided by traditional physics could not account for veridical perception and needed to be replaced by a new, biologically relevant ecological description of the input for perceptual functioning. (Cog Crit 1: 31-41, 2008)

How film genres are a product of biology, evolution and culture—an embodied approach

The article describes how basic cognitive and emotional systems of the embodied brain are products of a long evolutionary history and how this determines the way in which the major film genres are constructed. It synthesizes research from evolutionary psychology and cognitive film studies, as well as moral psychology. It explains how the film experience is embodied: experienced not only cognitively but with the whole body and its interaction with the world. Also discussed is how the biological underpinning of genres are based on three major types of emotions: a group of reptilian emotions central to action and adventure; a group of mammalian emotions related to offspring of care; and separation panic/ grief. A special human development to enhance group living has expanded emotions of care to also underpin emotions linked to group living such as loyalty to tribe, aggression towards out-groups and submission to tribal hierarchy, central in war, sci-fi and fantasy films, and also emotions related to social rituals such as comedy, tragedy and musical. A discussion is also offered of how the historical development from hunter-gatherers via societies based on agriculture to the present post-agrarian society has moulded moral emotions; this is exemplified in relation to crime films. Finally, also considered is how age and gender influence genre preferences.