.26613 esic.6.2. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Projections, 2023
Movies on Our Minds (Cutting, 2021) provides structural analyses of popular, English-language cinema and maps them onto biological and psychological bases. It progresses from the details of optics and screen projection; through transitions and shots; on to scenes, montages, and syntagmas; and finally to larger narrative units and the flow of patterns of elements across whole movies. It focuses on changes in all of those patterns across a century, ascribing them to evolution. That evolution, akin to Darwinian evolution, is hallmarked by patterns of reproduction with inheritance, variation, and selection of traits over time. Two forces appear to have guided this evolution: the matching of elements of film form to predilections of the biology of our visual systems, and their matching to predilections of our cognition, particularly as it has been shaped by visual culture. Movies on Our Minds discusses biological and psychological underpinnings that constrain the physical form of popular movies. It summarizes and extends empirical research that my students and I conducted over a dozen years, published in three dozen book chapters and articles in professional outlets across cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, and film and media studies. In those works, we focused on tracking the changes in popular, English-language movies, eventually encompassing those released from 1915 to 2015. Overall, we analyzed three hundred movies, shot-by-shot and often frame-by-frame, sampled from among the most popular and across a wide range of genres. Many analyses were done by hand using digital players and recording results on spread sheets. Many others were done by purpose-written computer algorithms analyzing digital movie files. And some were done with hybrid techniques.
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.
Movies, Mind and Meaning : Studying Audience and Favourite Films
Construction of identity and meaning is becoming increasingly important in both media studies and religion scholarship. (Lövheim, 2004) Meaning construction outside traditional religion has become more interesting for religious studies and what individuals in the audience do with all messages circulated through media in everyday life has attended increasing interest within media studies (Stout and Buddenbaum, 2001). Motion pictures, soap operas and advertising are all examples of media contents which generate ideas among its audience which to a various degree are used as resources within the construction of identity (Jansson, 2001). The investigation of what modern humankind’s world views look like and what components they are composed of, in this context seems to be an important topic of investigation (Holm and Björkqvist, 1996). The ways in which the development of media has effected the daily lives of individuals is interest as is the nature of the self and the ways in which the ...
Palgrave Communications, 2018
The cinema as a cultural institution has been studied by academic researchers in the arts and humanities. At present, cultural media studies are the home to the aesthetics and critical analysis of film, film history and other branches of film scholarship. Probably less known to most is that research psychologists working in social and life science labs have also contributed to the study of the medium. They have examined the particular experience that motion pictures provide to the film audience and the mechanisms that explain the perception and comprehension of film, and how movies move viewers and to what effects. This article reviews achievements in psychological research of the film since its earliest beginnings in the 1910s. A leading issue in the research has been whether understanding films is a bottom-up process, or a top-down one. A bottom-up explanation likens film-viewing to highly automated detection of stimulus features physically given in the supply of images; a top-dow...
Replies to commentators on Movies on Our Minds
Projections, 2023
What a pleasure it is to have colleagues read Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement, to understand it, and to offer some praise and a panoply of diverse and penetrating criticisms. The perspectives and qualms raised in the four commentaries in the special section of this issue are well-worth considering in detail. My first reply concerns relations between cinematic narration and narrative, the second explores constraints on cinematic complexity and its assessment, the third addresses possible consequences of changing movie structure and our increased cognitive processing speed, and the fourth ramifies concepts I use to account for the historical changes in popular cinema. Units, Movies, and Language Maria Belodubrovskaya (2023) frames her commentary in terms of the "language of cinema." I am not fond of the metaphor implied by this idea. Cinema is not much like language. Shots are not like words (each shot is seldom used more than once), scenes are not like sentences (there is nothing visual in a scene analogous to nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the like), and popular movies have spoken language within them, which suggests an unfortunate regress (are scenes with language like language?). Nonetheless, we can all agree that movies are structured, although that structure is elastic in many ways. And perhaps Belodubrovskaya is correct that my book has most thoroughly conceptualized this formal design. Indeed, that was one of my two main goals. The other was to track historical changes in these forms, and suggest possible reasons for them.
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.
(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.
Emotions and film genres: from attitudes to expectations
A cognitive approach suggests that original bodily changes are subject to an assessment of the objects, people and events involved in a situation - this assessment leads to the formation of beliefs that in turn help to recognise the bodily signals as emotions. Emotions at the movies, however, are affected by a pre-arranged context whose emotional impact has largely been foreseen. This impact requires that viewers develop attitudes of sympathy or concern for the movie characters, so that expectations towards the outcome of their situation can be formed and eventually fulfilled. In most cases, such attitudes also involve a moral dimension which makes the emotional involvement even stronger. Film genres generally specialize in staging characters and events that are used to elicit particular kinds of emotions in viewers. This Interactive workshop offers opportunities to analyse film sequences in terms of the beliefs, attitudes and expectations that are elicited by the film itself in order for the viewers to experience a range of emotions.