Triangulation Revisited
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Abstract
What is the relationship between detailed critical analysis and the background assumptions made by a given theory of film spectatorship? In this article, I approach this question by looking at Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra's The Empathic Screen in the light of the method of triangulation—the coordination and integration of phenomenological, psychological, and neuroscientific evidence, as set out in my Film, Art, and the Third Culture. In particular, I examine Gallese and Guerra's arguments concerning the role of camera movement in prompting immersive, embodied simulation, as well as critiques of these arguments from David Bordwell and Malcolm Turvey. I focus on the special, irreducible role of critical analysis in these arguments. Detailed analysis of film form and style plays an essential role, I argue, in demonstrating the plausibility (or otherwise) of the thesis advanced by Gallese and Guerra. Such analysis is where the rubber of theoretical assumptions meets the road of the material work.
Contributor Notes
Murray Smith is Professor of Film and Director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at the University of Kent. He was President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image from 2014 to 2017, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values in 2017–18. He has published widely on film, art, and aesthetics. His publications include Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Oxford, 2017; revised paperback 2020) and Trainspotting (BFI, revised edition 2021). A new, revised edition of his Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford) is due this summer.