Projections

We celebrate the Society of the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image’s new sponsorship of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind with a special issue devoted to writing from cognitive and affiliated approaches. We invite our readers from various disciplines to take a look and further open their minds to this type of film studies. The readers will immediately find how accessible and reasonable these articles are. They will also find how cognitive film studies is itself interdisciplinary and willing to integrate what is compatible and useful.

Understanding how spectators interact with films requires some theory of filmic representation. This article reviews three such theories. The first, a communication model, assumes that an artwork constitutes or contains a message passed from a sender to a receiver. The second, a signification model, assumes that the film operates within a system of codes and that the perceiver applies codes to signs in the text in order to arrive at meanings. This conception of film as signification may be found in both classic structuralist and post-structuralist accounts. The third, an empirical-experiential model, assumes that an artwork is designed to create an experience for the spectator. This article argues that the cognitive approach to film studies is founded on the third model of representation. The article also traces the strengths and limits of cognitive film theory and its theory of representation.

Digital visual effects bridge art and science in ways that have expanded the expressive tools available to filmmakers. Digital imaging also has enlarged a domain for realism in cinema based on indexical and perceptual factors. Examining these factors, the article questions the visual skepticism that often surrounds discussion of visual effects in film studies. A conjunction of art and science has characterized cinema throughout its history, especially in the era of “philosophical toys” from which the medium originated. The article examines that era in light of what it suggests about digital imaging today and the aesthetic forms that it enables.

This article investigates the effects of films on an audience, using an interdisciplinary empirical approach connecting film analysis and psychophysiological measurement. It discusses the animated short film Father and Daughter (2000) directed by Michael Dudok de Wit. The features of the film that are relevant to the reception process, the so-called moments of narrative impact, are determined on the basis of Wuss's analytical film model. The model postulates that films can be described as a combination of different kinds of narrative structures that predetermine the reception, which is conceptualized as a process of problem solving. This article defines five moments of narrative impact. Three of these moments establish the main conflict and its possible solution while the other two combine reoccurring motives, the so-called topic lines. Heart rate and skin conductance reactions were examined for thirty participants. The results of heart rate measurements demonstrate a clear significance for a combination of topic lines. The establishment of the central conflict also evokes significant reactions.

This article analyzes the psychological and neurological underpinnings of crime fiction and discusses the interrelation between cultural and biological-evolutionary determinants of fictions of detection. It argues that although crime fiction is a product of modern life conditions, it is also centrally fueled in the minds of viewers and readers by the mammalian dopamine seeking/wanting system developed for seeking out resources by foraging and hunting and important for focused mental and physical goal-directed activities. The article describes the way the working of the seeking system explains how crime fiction activates strong salience (in some respects similar to the effect of dopamine-drugs like cocaine, Ritalin, and amphetamine) and discusses the role of social intelligence in crime fiction. It further contrasts the unempathic classical detector fictions with two subtypes of crime fiction that blend seeking with other emotions: the hardboiled crime fiction that blends detection with action and hot emotions like anger and bonding, and the moral crime fiction that strongly evokes moral disgust and contempt, often in conjunction with detectors that perform hard to fake signals of moral commitment that make them role models for modern work ethics. The article is part of bio-cultural research that describes how biology and culture interact as argued in Grodal's Embodied Visions.

Most films, most of the time, are affectively unified. What I call “synesthetic affects” are orchestrated in an attempt to provide a holistic affective experience congruent with the film's unfolding narrative and thematic concerns. Yet Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line elicits contradictory or incongruent affects, such incongruence neither being justified by genre conventions, “excess,” irony, nor stumbled upon through incompetence. The Thin Red Line elicits incongruent emotions for the purposes of generating an experience of rumination and wonder. The study of such incongruent emotions, still in its infancy, raises important methodological issues about the study of mixed emotions and the conventions for mixing affects in the cinema.

This article explores basic constraints on the nature and appreciation of cinematic adaptations. An adaptation, it is argued, is a work that has been intentionally based on a source work and that faithfully and overtly imitates many of this source's characteristic features, while diverging from it in other respects. Comparisons between an adaptation and its source(s) are essential to the appreciation of adaptations as such. In spite of many adaptation theorists' claims to the contrary, some of the comparisons essential to the appreciation of adaptations as such pertain to various kinds of fidelity and to the ways in which similar types of artistic goals and problems are taken up in an adaptation and its source(s).

This article extends current theorizing in media psychology on audience responses to cinema by examining individuals' perceptions of meaningfulness. Specifically, it presents the results of a study designed to expand upon research on psychological and subjective well-being to experiences and memories of films that are perceived as particularly meaningful by viewers. Characteristics and themes of such films are examined and identified, as well as the specific emotional responses that accompany perceptions of meaningful cinema.