Cutting, James E. 2021. Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement. (original) (raw)

Cutting, James E. 2021. Movies on Our Minds:
The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement.
New York: Oxford University Press. 400 pages. 70 color illustrations.
Hardcover 45.0045.00\45.00 45.00; Kindle edition 21.4021.40\21.40 21.40.

Marc Hye-Knudsen

“[H]umanity didn’t evolve to watch popular movies; instead, popular cinema has evolved to match our cognitive and perceptual proclivities” (xi). This is the central thesis of James E. Cutting’s Movies on Our Minds, a book that summarizes the most interesting findings from his more than two decades of research into the cultural evolution of popular movie form. Cutting is a psychologist by training and an empiricist at heart, so he is particularly interested in how the form of popular movies reflects the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional propensities of the human mind, and in how this can be quantified and empirically tested. His book serves as an undeniable testament to the quantitative approach and everything it has to offer biocultural scholars who are interested in understanding how human nature shapes and gives rise to the kinds of cultural products we produce and consume.

For Cutting, the stylistic and narrative traits that characterize popular Hollywood movies are the product of a Darwinian process that is in some ways akin to genetic evolution, entailing “random variation across filmmakers and their movies with selection of bits of their craft by other practitioners and audience response” (xii). Filmmakers continually try out new narrational techniques, and when an innovation of theirs is successful it is more likely to be copied by future filmmakers. Success here means that the resultant movie must ultimately appeal to audiences. As Cutting puts it, “the grim reaper during the development of cinema was the viewer’s eye and mind” (7). Consequently, popular Hollywood
cinema has evolved during its century-long history to serve audience engagement, “like a persistent but benign creature nuzzling through crannies and half-shut doors, searching out new ways to co-opt our perceptual, cognitive, and emotional faculties evolved for different purposes” (4).

Taking inspiration from Busselle and Bilandzic (2009), Cutting sees narrative engagement as having four distinct though interrelated psychological aspects: presence (the viewer’s subjective sense of being in the presence of what they see onscreen), sustained focus (prolonged commitment to the narrative), diegetic understanding (story comprehension), and emotional commitment (empathy with characters in their contexts). Throughout his book’s 14 chapters, Cutting marshals empirical evidence from his own comprehensive research on the subject to demonstrate that popular Hollywood movies have gradually evolved to enable each of these four tenets of narrative engagement. Along the way, he contextualizes his findings with ample film theory and research from the relevant psychological subfields, assuming no familiarity with the literature on the part of his reader. His book thus also functions as a good primer on how movies fundamentally work.

The term presence is taken from the field of virtual reality research, and Cutting uses it to refer to “the feeling that we are in the presence of what we see, like a theatregoer feels present at a play” (24). A lot of the technological innovations of the film medium’s early decades, and the conventions

that were established at this time, served presence. The standard frame rate gradually settling on 24 frames per second, and the subsequent elimination of the distracting between-shot flicker that had earned movies the nickname “flicks,” made movie action appear smoother and more real. The addition of sound to the medium gave immediacy to action in that audiences could now directly hear what actors were saying instead of having to wait for intertitles. The addition of color lent naturalism to the image.

For Cutting, even the very shape of movies has evolved to serve presence. In the 1930s, the standard aspect ratio became 1.37 (now called “Academy ratio”), slightly wider than tall, possibly because our field of view is similarly wider than tall. This ratio characterized almost all popular movies until the 1950s, when aspect ratios gradually started to expand. By the 1980s, the industry settled on two formats: 1.85 (widescreen) and 2.35 (cinemascope), with the latter increasingly gaining traction. Since their slimmer beginnings, movies have thus grown progressively wider, expanding into the peripheries of our vision. Cutting argues that this has been in the service of enlisting our peripheral visual system, which is intimately connected to our systems of balance and which is central to monitoring self-motion. This helps viewers forget their immediate surroundings (e.g., a dark movie theatre) to instead become absorbed in the world of the movie, momentarily losing their sense of self.

Beyond evoking presence, movies also need to command and hold the audience’s attention. This is Cutting’s second tenet of narrative engagement, sustained focus. One way that a movie commands its audience’s attention is by directing the viewer’s gaze, controlling where they look on the screen. Generally, filmmakers place what they want audiences to look at near the middle of the screen, but color, motion, and form also play a role in where people look. Contrast is what matters here: all else being equal, viewers will look at a bright object on a darker background and motion against a static background, and they find it easier to pick out what is of interest onscreen if there are not too
many objects cluttering the image. Cutting shows that contrast-in terms of image brightness and onscreen motion-has increased in movies over the years, and that shots have become less cluttered, thus allowing directors more effectively to control where audiences look on the screen, and thereby the viewer’s attention and gaze.

To sustain viewers’ attention, however, a movie must ultimately offer them a good story. Kristin Thompson (1999) has argued that popular Hollywood movies are characterized by a four-part structure consisting of a setup, a complication, a development, and a climax, with each part being of roughly equal duration, between 20 and 30 minutes for a typical featurelength movie. In a large sample of Hollywood movies, Cutting finds evidence of this four-part structure by looking at patterns in formal characteristics like shot duration, onscreen motion, image brightness, and music volume. Popular Hollywood movies take a turn every 20-30 minutes, he argues, to serve sustained focus. Psychological studies of vigilance-that is, how long people can concentrate-suggest that a healthy adult’s attention span is about 25 minutes. To sustain viewers’ attention, Cutting argues, popular Hollywood movies consequently change narrative course at such intervals.

To be engaging, a movie also has to be understood. This is Cutting’s third tenet of narrative engagement, diegetic understanding. Psychologically speaking, the scene is the most basic narrative structure in movies, and Cutting shows that movies signal to audiences when a given scene ends and another begins through variable shot scales and durations. Scenes begin with longer takes and longer shots, and then transition to shorter takes and shorter shots before ending how they started, with longer takes and longer shots. Visually demarcating the beginning and end of a scene like this helps viewers figure out which shots belong together, promoting memory and comprehension. At the same time, Cutting notes how the structure of a scene mimics for viewers the sense of approaching it from a distance, then going closer

to inspect the situation and hear what people are saying, and then finally backing away again. This may also help enhance viewers’ sense of presence.

Throughout the film medium’s history, audiences have become increasingly familiar with the logic and structure of movies, which means that movies have to provide fewer such visual cues for viewers to make sense of them. Cutting details how, throughout the 1930s, a system of betweenshot transitions developed to signal story structure to audiences: cuts went between shots within the same scene, dissolves between different scenes, and fades between major narrative sections. By the 1960s, this system had completely died out, with simple cuts becoming the default transition between virtually all shots. As viewers had become familiar with the structure of movies, they no longer needed transitions to demarcate it for them, leaving filmmakers free instead to consistently opt for the quickest and thus most efficient transition, the cut. The fact that viewers have similarly gotten faster at extracting visual information from images is, in turn, Cutting’s explanation for why shots have been able to grow progressively shorter in their average duration throughout the years. This highlights how popular movies are not just adapted to the biological constraints of human perception and cognition but also to cultural constraints hereupon, the “period eye,” as it were.

All of the other tenets of narrative engagement being in place sets the stage for movies to engage us emotionally. This is Cutting’s fourth and final tenet of narrative engagement, emotional commitment. Clearly, narrative content is central here, something which Cutting does not concern himself with at length, but many of the technical and formal aspects of movies that he surveys are important too. Aspect ratios growing wider, thereby engaging our peripheral visual system, offered greater presence while also enhancing movies’ emotional impact since larger images “engage the viewer more with the potential of increasing attention, arousal, and heart rate” (34). Similarly, the formal patterns of popular Hollywood movies, which Cutting
shows reflect their four-part structure, all serve to guide and enhance viewers’ emotional responses: shot duration, onscreen motion, image brightness, and music all influence viewers’ mood, affecting how they feel about what they see unfolding onscreen.

The general pattern is this: the first quarter of a typical Hollywood movie, its setup, involves a lot of long takes as characters and settings are introduced, and the image starts off bright, signaling a happy state of stasis before a complication occurs. With the complication, the pace picks up as takes get shorter while onscreen motion and music volume increase. Viewers should be roused and concerned. In the development, takes get longer again and motion decreases as the plot becomes more complex, and the image darkens as the protagonist’s chances of success seem increasingly dim. The transition between the development and the climax where all seems lost, often called “the darkest moment,” is literally the darkest moment in terms of image brightness. Then, both brightness, motion, and music volume soar to their crescendo while shot durations plummet in the climax as the movie reaches its excited and, eventually, happy ending. The contrast between the climax and the darkest moment here serves to heighten the emotional satisfaction of the movie’s ending.

These formal patterns are identified by Cutting in a sample of 180 Hollywood movies. Most of Cutting’s studies are based on samples around this size, spanning from two dozen and up to 295 movies. His quantitative approach restricts him to only studying the aspects of movies that can be counted or measured objectively, either by a computer or by his seemingly unlimited supply of dutiful students and interns, but it allows him to identify patterns which even the most rigorous lone film scholar could never manage. Even more impressively, it allows him to show that these patterns have actually evolved, emerging over time and becoming stronger through the years. This is the case for the formal patterns just described which reflect movies’ four-part structure: they do not emerge until the

1960s, and they are strongest for the most recent movies in his sample. This suggests that movies have become more engaging through the years, at least on average, but also more formulaic. It is left for the reader to decide for themselves whether, on balance, this is a good or a bad thing.

I have only offered a taste of the countless aspects of popular movies that Cutting dissects. He also demonstrates that the way conversations are portrayed in Hollywood movies piggybacks off of our innate propensities for turn-taking and joint attention. Moreover, he shows that Hollywood movies have increasingly tended towards ending their conversations with a reaction shot of a character with a cryptic facial expression, inviting viewers to exercise their theory of mind abilities. He even suggests that the polyrhythmic patterns of individual Hollywood movies have become increasingly fractal over the years, thus coming to resemble the rhythms of our bodies, such as our heartbeat or our respiratory rate. In each case, he presents his findings with ample contextualizing film theory and psychology, but without going deeply into his statistical methods or the details of his resultsthere are surprisingly few graphs to be found for a book that praises modern audiences’ ability to visually extract information from images. Readers who want to evaluate the soundness of any given finding themselves will have to look up the individual studies. I hope many will do this, and that the biocultural scholars and traditional film researchers who are introduced to Cutting through this book are inspired to incorporate quantitative methods into their work.

I can think of no better exemplar of the virtues of the quantitative approach than Cutting’s Movies on Our Minds. Throughout the book, he cites David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, and in his preface he notes how much of his work has revolved around “chasing down empirical evidence for things [they] have written” (xiv). One scholar whose research I would have loved to see Cutting deal with at greater length is Torben Grodal, particularly his work on how specific Hollywood genres have evolved to target specific central emotions of ours (2017). This is particularly pertinent to Cutting’s fourth tenet of narrative engagement, emotional commitment, and it is ripe for Cutting’s brand of quantitative investigation. If particular genres have been optimized for engaging specific emotions, surely this is reflected in the kinds of formal characteristics that a quantitative researcher, following in the footsteps of Cutting, can measure and track across time.

Cutting’s book is a treasure trove for anyone interested in movies-in how they work and how they came to be as they are. Cutting makes a persuasive case for the cultural evolution of movies. Beyond this, I hope his book will turn out to be a significant mutation in the cultural evolution of cognitive film studies and biocultural scholarship more generally, with researchers copying some of its many virtues: the ambition of its scope, the ingenuity of its vision, and Cutting’s willingness to do the hard and oftentimes tedious work of quantitative research. It has certainly changed how I will approach research going forward.

WORKS CITED

Busselle, Rick, and Helena Bilandzic. 2009. “Measuring Narrative Engagement.” Media Psychology 12 (4): 321-47. doi:10.1080/15213260903287259.
Grodal, Torben. 2017. “How Film Genres Are a Product of Biology, Evolution and Culture—an Embodied Approach.” Palgrave Communications 3. doi:10.1057/palcomms.2017.79.
Thompson, Kristin. 2001. Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.