Projections

As the subtitle of the journal indicates, the intersection of movies and mind is a key theme of our coverage. First up in this issue is Jeffrey Zacks’s wide-ranging discussion of how our brains process the sights and sounds of motion pictures. He gives us a précis of his new book, Flicker: Your Brain on Movies, which aims to introduce a wide audience to the psychology and neuroscience that underlie our experience of motion pictures. He discusses the ways viewers parse narratives and build models of story events, perceive shot changes,

respond emotionally to fictional situations, and recall filmic information, and he ends by speculating about the future of virtual entertainment. In some not-too-distant future, will movies jack directly into our central nervous system? The readership of Projections is a key constituency of the research that guides Zacks’s discussion. His contribution differs a little from our usual style. Because it derives from a book that he has aimed at a broad audience, the tone of the writing is a bit more informal than is the norm in scholarly venues. Our readers should find the discussion both lively and fascinating. I am grateful to Jeff for providing us with this overview of his work.

This article is a précis of the book Flicker: Your Brain on Movies (Zacks 2014). Flicker aims to introduce a broad readership to the psychology and neuroscience that underlies their experience in the movie theater. The book covers a range of topics, including emotional experience, adaptation from texts to films, memory and propaganda, movie violence, film editing, and brain stimulation. Cutting across the specific topics are a few broad themes: the evolution of the brain and mind, the role of automatically evoked responses in film viewing, and the role of behavioral and neural plasticity in everyday experience.

The connection between film elements and brain responses has been suggested by a number of neurocognitive studies. The studies of event segmentation, in particular, support that film editing conditions cognitive responses. After discussing the findings of these studies, this article draws on Münsterberg and Arnheim's classical cognitive approaches to film as well as on poststructuralist film theory to argue that the event segmentation approach still falls short of accounting for the impact of noncontinuous film stimuli on the brain's event segmentation, while it shares with other neurocognitive film research the tendency to naturalize narrative and continuity editing. Finally, the article points out that by approaching the findings of event segmentation studies from the perspective of complex systems neuroscience, new hypotheses can be drawn on how noncontinuous and complex film stimuli condition our brains by mediating (enabling or disrupting) event segmentation and cognitive patterning.

Director Steve McQueen's 2008 film Hunger employs strategies of narrative fracture in its account of the 1981 Northern Irish hunger strikes. Through the formal devices of ellipsis and descriptive pause, the film creates space for viewer reflection on, and immersion in, the emotions associated with trauma and loss. Looking at these formal devices as emotion cues, and considering the film as a case study in the cognitive study of film, this article offers an 'emotional reading' of Hunger.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp's theory of SEEKING offers a fundamental insight into why film spectators are engaged by what they see on screen. This article offers a new reading of Panksepp's SEEKING theory and how it applies to spectatorship, a reading informed by two months of the author's personal exchange with the scientist. The article states that the SEEKING impulse—defined as the emotional instinct to seek resources—applies not only to how the spectator identifies with the main character and his search for resources, but to how the spectator responds to visual and aural cues regardless of the story or characters. The article provides a corrective to spectator theories which focus too narrowly on narrative as a cue for viewer mental activity. An examination of two scenes from The Bicycle Thief and Stalker shows how SEEKING can occur on both the primary and tertiary level, thus breaking the emotion-cognition divide.

This article at once celebrates and puts at cautionary arm's length the tremendous advances made in the cognitive and neurosciences as research that can deepen our understanding of creating and consuming of literature, films, comic books. After providing an overview of recent insights by scholars with one foot in the humanities and the other in the cognitive and neurosciences, the article reflects on some key precepts that might be useful in our continued shaping of a humanities and cognitive based research program. For instance, the article explores the way authors, film directors, and artists generally not only construct artifacts that elicit positive emotions but also negative emotions. It also proposes a model for understanding how the “aesthetic” is a relation and not a property nor an essence of the object (a film) nor something to be found in the subject (us viewing the film).

ELEGY FOR THEORY by D.N. RODOWICK

Malcolm Turvey

COGNITIVE MEDIA THEORY by TED NANNICELLI AND PAUL TABERHAM (EDS.)

Mette Hjort

THE FORMS OF THE AFFECTS by EUGENIE BRINKEMA

Julian Hanich

MEX-CINÉ: MEXICAN FILMMAKING, PRODUCTION, AND CONSUMPTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY by FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA

Christopher T. Gonzalez