Welcome to the first issue of our first three-issue volume of Projections. We begin this issue with a truly exciting collaboration between a filmmaker (and scholar), Karen Pearlman, and a psychologist, James E. Cutting. Cutting and Pearlman analyze a number of formal features, including shot duration, across successive cuts of Pearlman's 2016 short film, Woman with an Editing Bench. They find that the intuitive revisions that Pearlman made actually track a progression toward fractal structures – complex patterns that also happen to mark three central pulses of human existence (heartbeat, breathing, walking).
Julia Vassilieva's article tracing the collaborations between filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, cultural psychologist Lev Vygotsky, and neuropsychologist Alexander Luria picks up and progresses a number of threads from the pages of the 2018 volume of Projections. Like Maria Belodubrovskaya in her article published last year, “The Cine-Fist:
Eisenstein's Attractions, Mirror Neurons, and Contemporary Action Cinema,” Vassilieva probes Eisenstein's influences, connections, and collaborations with his contemporaries working in the sciences of the mind, noting an anticipation of some important contemporary trends in the field. Vassilieva argues that Eisenstein's collaboration with Vygotsky and Luria anticipated a number of ideas in the research area known as 4E cognition (that is, embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended cognition) as well as the notions of a “third culture” (combining the sciences and the humanities) and the triangulation of experiential, psychological, and neuroscientific research, which were both advanced and defended by Murray Smith in our previous issue's symposium on his Film, Art, and the Third Culture.
Although it is not explicit, Eisenstein's influence is also present in Valerio Sbravatti's article in this issue, which outlines a “neurofilmological approach” to acoustic startles in horror films. Like Eisenstein, Sbravatti is interested in the ways in which film engages the audience both consciously and on a preconscious, automatic, bodily level. In Sbravatti's article, the specific topic of focus is how “acoustic blasts” elicit the startle response that, in the context of horror films, is colloquially referred to as the “jump scare.” One of the most interesting points of Sbravatti's article is that the jump scare is not achieved solely by preconscious, automatic means; rather, it is cued by the various ways in which a film first establishes a (conscious) anticipatory state in the viewer, which is something that makes the startle all the more effective.
In the same interdisciplinary spirit as the previous articles, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen's article draws upon cognitive film theory and moral psychology to develop an account of our engagement with antipathetic characters in narrative film – that is, with villains. Again, Smith's work is an especial influence here; Kjeldgaard-Christiansen takes Smith's well-known “structure of sympathy” as a starting point for constructing an analogous “structure of antipathy.” Our issue is rounded out with four reviews of important and exciting new books, but Kjeldgaard-Christiansen's discussion of the cinematic construction of moral agency and moral responsibility serves as a nice thematic conclusion because similar topics will be the focus of our next issue, a special issue on cinema and ethics that will be guest edited by Robert Sinnerbrink.
Finally, the publication of this issue marks the first anniversary of my commencement as editor of Projections, which means that I have the honor and privilege of publicly acknowledging everyone who has served as a referee over the past year. My hope is that the publication of this list will start a new tradition to be continued annually in the first issue of every volume of Projections. Looking over the list, I am amazed and inspired by what an extensive, diverse, and impressive group of scholars it comprises. Projections is fortunate to have its success sustained by such a dedicated group of referees, authors, board members, and subscribers. If you have not done so already, please take this opportunity to request that your institution subscribe to our journal.
Ted Nannicelli
And now, thank you:
Richard Allen, City University of Hong Kong
Erica Bailey, Angelo State University
Katalin Bálint, Vrije University, Amsterdam
Daniel Barratt, Copenhagen Business School
Anne Bartsch, University of Leipzig
David Bashwiner, University of New Mexico
Maria Belodubrovskaya, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Todd Berliner, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Matt Bezdek, Washington University in St. Louis
Helena Bilandzic, University of Augsburg
Julia Blau, Central Connecticut State University
Ib Bondebjerg, University of Copenhagen
William Brown, Roehampton University
Jeremy Butler, University of Alabama
Allan Cameron, University of Auckland
Annabel Cohen, University of Prince Edward Island
Stephen Davies, University of Auckland
Allison Eden, Michigan State University
Dirk Eitzen, Franklin and Marshall College
Jason Gendler, California State University, Long Beach
Michele Guerra, University of Parma
Steven Hinde, University of Bristol
Berthold Hoeckner, University of Chicago
Patrick Hogan, University of Connecticut
Nick Holliman, Newcastle University
Steffen Hven, Bauhaus University Weimar
Åse Innes-Ker, Lund University
Mark Kerins, Southern Methodist University
Hanna Kubicka, University of Glasgow
Jerrold Levinson, University of Maryland
Paisley Livingston, Lingnan University
Karla Oeler, Stanford University
Stephen Prince, Virginia Tech
Nick Redfern, Leeds Trinity University
William Rothman, University of Miami
Alaina Schempp, University of Kent
William P. Seeley, Boston College
Robert Sinnerbrink, Macquarie University
Jeff Smith, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Murray Smith, University of Kent
Tim Smith, Birkbeck, University of London
Jane Stadler, Swinburne University of Technology
Monika Suckfüll, Berlin University of the Arts
Ed Tan, University of Amsterdam
Siu-Lan Tan, Kalamazoo College
Pia Tikka, Tallinn University
Yuri Tsivian, University of Chicago
Malcolm Turvey, Tufts University
Margrethe Bruun Vaage, University of Kent
Janina Wildfeuer, University of Bremen
Denise J. Youngblood, University of Vermont
Jeffrey Zacks, Washington University in St. Louis
