Stadler, Jane. “Cinesonic Imagination: The Somatic, the Sonorous, and the Synaesthetic.” Cinephile Special Issue: Philosophy and New Media. 12.1 (2018): 8–15. (original) (raw)
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Imagination and the Cinematic Experience
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PAGE PROOFS (please see Projections for finished article): Murray Smith's book "Film, Art, and the Third Culture" makes a significant contribution to cognitive film theory and philosophical aesthetics, expanding the conceptual tools of film analysis to include perspectives from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Smith probes assumptions about how cinema affects spectators by examining aspects of experience and neurophysiological responses that are unavailable to conscious, systematic reflection on experience and aesthetic techniques. This article interrogates Smith's account of emotion, empathy, and imagination in cinematic representation and film spectatorship, placing his work in dialogue with other recent interventions in the fields of cinema studies and embodied cognition. Smith's contribution to understanding the role of emotion in screen studies is vital, and when read in conjunction with recent publications by Carl Plantinga and Mark Johnson on ethical engagement and the moral imagination, this new work constitutes a notable advance in film theory.
The Role of Sound in Filmic Experience: A Cognitive Semiotics Approach
Proceedings of the 12th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS/AIS), 2017
In the Semiology of Cinema tradition sound was assumed as a particular type of “expression substance” among others, an ingredient of “syncretic” semiotics. From this perspective, films are closed texts made of codes decipherable by the spectator (Metz, 1971, 1974), one of which would be the sound code. After the cognitive turn in film theories (Bordwell, 1987; Branigan, 1992; Currie, 1995; Bordwell & Carroll, 1996; Grodal, 1999, 2009, among others), film (and audiovisual) semiotics is interested in accounting for the viewer’s experience. This experience is now understood under the same parameters of real life experience, to the extent that humans use the same skills to understand movies that to deal with reality. Some researchers have devoted part of their theories to the description of sound and hearing experience in cinema from different approaches: ecological (Anderson, 1998; Anderson, Fischer, Bordwell et al, 2007), socio-historical (Altman et al, 1980, 1992, 2001, 2007) “eclectic” (Chion, 1985, 1991, 1998, 2003) or even cognitive – in a broad sense (Jullier, 1995, 2002, 2012). Nevertheless, the bridge between cognitive theories and film semiotics is still weak, particularly when dealing with the multimodal dimensions of spectatorship experience. To address the role of sound in filmic experience with more powerful tools, in this presentation I propose to follow the current trend of cognitive semiotics and its link with phenomenology and cognitive sciences (Sonesson, 2009). First, I will show the insights of philosophy and phenomenology of sound (Ihde, 2007; O’Callaghan, 2007; Nudds, O’Callaghan et al., 2009): the phenomenological description of the auditory field and sound horizons, and the idea of conceiving sounds as events in hearing experience. Second, I will present some discoveries of cognitive research from an enactive perspective, about the intersubjective exploration of sound spaces (Krueger, 2006, 2000, 200). Third, I will link these ideas with a general description of event perception and conception (Zacks, 2008, 2010: Zacks & et al., 2011), particularly in film comprehension (Zacks, Speer, and Reynolds, 2009; Zacks & Magliano, 2009). Finally, I will integrate all these insights in the context of a new semiotic theory: agentive semiotics (Niño, 2013a, 2013b; Niño, 2014, forthcoming). This theory provides precise criteria to distinguish (but also integrate) the experience of "semiotic scenes" (intentional constructions assumed here as a particular type of events) and the experience of the world. Thus I hope to provide a new approach to understand the role of sound in the (multimodal) experience of film spectatorship.
Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness.
Altered States, 2022
Representing altered states of consciousness, even through the most phantasmal of technical images, is an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body, i.e. objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl considers their very essence. Jean Mitry draws from this assumption when discussing filmic access to mental states from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay reconsiders Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speaking, in the cinematic technique and imagination; this, with the intention of suggesting some crucial questions for the comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual.
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JCLA, 2020
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Cinematic Empathies. Spectator Involvement in the Film Experience
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