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Roger F. Cook. Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of Moving-Image Media and the Spectator. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020, 240 pp., $27.00 (paperback) ISBN: 9781517907679.

Federico Alvarez Igarzábal. Time and Space in Video Games: A Cognitive-Formalist Approach. Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2020, 220 pp., $45.00 (paperback), ISBN: 9783837647136.

Daniel Reynolds. Media in Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 224 pp., $38.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9780190872526.

Walley, Jonathan. Cinema Expanded. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, 576 pp., $39.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9780190938642.

In this article, a neurohumanistic, “third culture” approach to “gesture” is delineated. Grounded in an exegesis of Eisenstein’s sensorimotor theory and extending to both contemporary and historical thinkers, a “constellation” of the notion of both visual and musical gestures is triangulated and operationalized into empirical research. An overlap between Eisenstein’s model of audio/visual gestures and the contemporary frameworks of embodied simulation theory and embodied music cognition is revealed. Through artistic collaborations with a filmmaker and a film composer, custom-made, naturalistic video clips (filmed with a drone) and musical tracks were created using the film The Cranes Are Flying (Kalatozov 1957) as an aesthetic model. Empirical results demonstrate an increased sense of movement and involvement in the perception of both visual and musical “ascent.”

How do we understand the experiences of characters in a movie? Similar to real life, viewers attribute mental states to characters through a process known as Theory of Mind (ToM). Filmmakers commonly use Dramatic Irony, a narrative device where the audience knows something that at least one characters does not. From a social neuroscience perspective, understanding the cognitive mechanisms that underlie dramatic irony can provide a remarkable opportunity to study ToM in a more ecologically relevant context. While descriptive narrative theories of dramatic irony exist, these have never been studied in relation to contemporary social neuroscience. In this opinion piece, we aim to bring together these two traditionally isolated disciplines to propose a cross-disciplinary research roadmap for investigating the social neuroscience of dramatic irony in cinema.

This article highlights ways to relate psychology, neuroscience, and film theory that are underrepresented in the current debate and that could contribute to a new cognitive media theory. First, we outline how neuroscientific approaches to moving images could be embedded in the embodied, enactive cognition framework and recent predictive processing theories of the brain. Within this framework, we understand filmic engagement as a specific way of worldmaking, which is co-constituted by formal elements such as framing, camerawork, and editing. Second, we address experimental progress. Here we weigh the promises and perils of neuroscientific studies by discussing the motor neuron account to camera movements as an example. Based on the limitations we identify, we advocate for a multi-method study of film experience that brings cognitive science into dialogue with philosophical accounts and qualitative in-depth explorations of subjective experience.

The neurocinematic inquiry is extended in this article to the sparsely studied topic of the filmmaker (author) as an embodied agent. Departing from my concept of second-order authorship, and inspired by the second-person framework of intersubjectivity discussed by Michael Pauen and Vittorio Gallese, I propose a model in which the author simulates the viewer (experient) who further simulates the experience of the protagonist in the film. This chain of relations is described as enactive second-order simulation of the viewer experience. While the author does not have a direct key to influence the experient, there is a relation mediated by the protagonist’s situatedness in the film’s narrative context. I further trust the core assumption of the neurocinematic approach—namely, that film as a narrative medium provides a means to imitate contexts of life that condition the enactive simulation of both the author and the experient.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we tested the hypothesis that cinematic structure shapes variation in social-cognitive brain activity. Using our film, we completed an exploratory analysis of how activations in the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ), and the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) are shaped by variations in insert shots (e.g., shots showing objects that a character has looked at), and by character entrances and exits. We found that IPS and TPJ consistently responded to insert shots, and the correlation between TPJ and IPS responses significantly predicted the prevalence of belief inferences during the sequence. In addition, TPJ responded significantly to entrances and exits of characters. We also completed a qualitative analysis of moments during a sequence that induced relative peaks in TPJ and IPS responding. These analyses not only demonstrate that consistent brain responses can distinguish among meaningful variations in cinematic events but also that these analyses confirm and refine our understanding of the apparent specializations for visual attention and domain-specific event processing in parietal attention networks.

Research in cognitive science and aesthetics is on the rise. The skeptical position called moderate pessimism grants that neuroscience might play a role in theorizing about the nature of film and other arts, but offers little help with thorny conceptual questions key to understanding the nature of the arts. Moderate optimists note that the scope of neuroscientific research in the arts cannot be resolved in advance. I evaluate the debate between these positions, introduce a diagnostic recognition framework for neuroscience of film and, drawing on research from the neurophysiology of attention, explore the role the framework can play in discussions of narrative understanding and character engagement at the movies. I conclude that moderate optimism is a more promising methodological fit to collaborative research in neuroscience of film.

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.

Abstract

The present relations between screens and the human body invoke a genealogy that should help us to understand their status. However, we suggest that this historical-genealogical work shall be matched with a more comprehensive anthropology of screen experiences. By mobilizing the notion of “arche-screen,” we identify the transhistorical principle underlying such experiences with the showing/concealing and the exposing/protecting function pairs—the latter exceeding the visual dimension and involving our bodily relations with the environment. These function pairs, which are rooted in our body and make it into our proto-screen, can be enhanced via their externalization as appropriate technical objects. By highlighting the prostheticization of skin in some prehistoric artistic techniques and the role of the veil from the Old Testament to Leon Battista Alberti's treatise On Painting, we stress that the interweaving of the above-mentioned screen functions is a constant feature of human experiences and that its thematic variations are traceable in more recent screen forms.