pt. II. Observation and recall as a function of age.--pt. III. Fidelity of report as a measure of adult intelligence.--pt. IV. The technique of mental-test surveys among adults.

An in-depth study of several films and television shows to demonstrate the difficulties of conveying the experience of viewing cinema.

The success of movies like The Artist and Hugo recreated the wonder and magic of silent film for modern audiences, many of whom might never have experienced a movie without sound. But while the American silent movie was one of the most significant popular art forms of the modern age, it is also one that is largely lost to us, as more than eighty percent of silent films have disappeared, the victims of age, disaster, and neglect. We now know (...) about many of these cinematic masterpieces only from the collections of still portraits and production photographs that were originally created for publicity and reference. Capturing the beauty, horror, and moodiness of silent motion pictures, these images are remarkable pieces of art in their own right. In the first history of still camera work generated by the American silent motion picture industry, David S. Shields chronicles the evolution of silent film aesthetics, glamour, and publicity, and provides unparalleled insight into this influential body of popular imagery. Exploring the work of over sixty camera artists, Still recovers the stories of the photographers who descended on early Hollywood and the stars and starlets who sat for them between 1908 and 1928. Focusing on the most culturally influential types of photographs—the performer portrait and the scene still—Shields follows photographers such as Albert Witzel and W. F. Seely as they devised the poses that newspapers and magazines would bring to Americans, who mimicked the sultry stares and dangerous glances of silent stars. He uncovers scene shots of unprecedented splendor—visions that would ignite the popular imagination. And he details how still photographs changed the film industry, whose growing preoccupation with artistry in imagery caused directors and stars to hire celebrated stage photographers and transformed cameramen into bankable names. Reproducing over one hundred and fifty of these gorgeous black-and-white photographs, Still brings to life an entire long-lost visual culture that a century later still has the power to enchant. (shrink)

This article sets up a neurophenomenological approach to understanding cinema spectatorship in order to investigate how embodied engagement with technologies of sound and motion can foster a sense of experiential realism. It takes as a starting point the idea that the empirical study of emotive, perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes involved in film spectatorship is impoverished without a phenomenological account of the lived experience under investigation. Correspondingly, engaging with neuroscientific studies enriches the scope of phenomenological inquiry and offers new (...) insights into the film experience. Analysis of diverse films including Interstellar, Leviathan, San Andreas and The Thin Red Line reveals how technological innovations dating from Hale’s Tours to contemporary D-BOX and Dolby Atmos systems have enhanced the audience’s sense of immersion and corporeal investment in the film experience. Building on the research of Vivian Sobchack and Vittorio Gallese, I argue that aesthetic techniques including the use of low frequency sound effects and wearable cameras facilitate shared affective engagement and a form of embodied simulation associated with kinaesthetic empathy and augmented narrative involvement. (shrink)

"The main spine of this book stems from a comprehensive series of interviews with subjects recalling their experiences of 1930s cinemagoing. Your feel the breath of life in these spectators, a rarity in film studies, thanks to the painstaking work contracting the interview subjects and recording and tabulating their testimony."- JUMPCUT In the 1930s, Britain had the highest annual per capita cinema attendance in the world, far surpassing ballroom dancing as the nation's favorite pastime. It was, as historian A.J.P. Taylor (...) said, the "essential social habit of the age." And yet, although we know something about the demographics of British cinemagoers, we know almost nothing of their experience of film, how film affected them, how it fit into their daily lives, what role cinema played in the larger culture of the time, and in what ways cinemagoing shaped the generation that came of age in the 1930s. In Dreaming of Fred and Ginger , Annette Kuhn draws upon contemporary publications, extensive interviews with cinemagoers themselves, and readings of selected film, to produce a provocative and perspective-altering ethno-historical study. Taking cinemagoers' accounts of their own experiences as both "the engine and product of investigation," Kuhn enters imaginatively into the world of 1930s cinema culture and analyzes its place in popular memory. Among the topics she examines are the physical space of the cinemas; the role film played in growing up; the experience of being a member of a cinema audience; film-inspired fantasies of American life; the importance of cinema to adolescence in offering role models, ideals of romance, as well as practical opportunities for courtship; and the sheer pleasure of watching such film stars as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Nelson Eddy, Ronald Colman, and many others. Engagingly written and painstakingly researched, with contributions to film history, cultural studies, and social history, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger offers an illuminating account of a key moment in British cultural memory. (shrink)

This handbook brings together essays in the philosophy of film and motion pictures from authorities across the spectrum. It boasts contributions from philosophers and film theorists alike, with many essays employing pluralist approaches to this interdisciplinary subject. Core areas treated include film ontology, film structure, psychology, authorship, narrative, and viewer emotion. Emerging areas of interest, including virtual reality, video games, and nonfictional and autobiographical film also have dedicated chapters. Other areas of focus include the film medium’s intersection with contemporary (...) social issues, film’s kinship to other art forms, and the influence of historically seminal schools of thought in the philosophy of film. Of emphasis in many of the essays is the relationship and overlap of analytic and continental perspectives in this subject. (shrink)

As the development of artificial intelligence technology, the deep-learning -based Virtual Reality technology, and DL technology are applied in human-computer interaction, and their impacts on modern film and TV works production and audience psychology are analyzed. In film and TV production, audiences have a higher demand for the verisimilitude and immersion of the works, especially in film production. Based on this, a 2D image recognition system for human body motions and a 3D recognition system for human body motions based (...) on the convolutional neural network algorithm of DL are proposed, and an analysis framework is established. The proposed systems are simulated on practical and professional datasets, respectively. The results show that the algorithm's computing performance in 2D image recognition is 7–9 times higher than that of the Open Pose method. It runs at 44.3 ms in 3D motion recognition, significantly lower than the Open Pose method's 794.5 and 138.7 ms. Although the detection accuracy has dropped by 2.4%, it is more efficient and convenient without limitations of scenarios in practical applications. The AI-based VR and DL enriches and expands the role and application of computer graphics in film and TV production using HCI technology theoretically and practically. (shrink)

Introduction -- Closed mindedness in movies -- Failed alternatives to optional thinking -- Optional thinking in movies -- Conclusion.

The most powerful films have an afterlife. Their sensory appeal and their capacity to elicit involvement in story, character and conflict reaches beyond the screen to subtly reframe the way spectators view ethical issues and agents. This book questions how cinematic narratives relate to and affect ethical life.

The way we communicate with each other is vital to preserving the cultural ecology, or wellbeing, of a place and time. Do we listen to each other? Do we ask the right questions? Do we speak about each other with respect or disdain? The stories that we convey on screens, or what author Carl Plantinga calls 'screen stories,' are one powerful and pervasive means by which we communicate with each other. Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement argues that (...) film and media studies needs to move toward an an approach to ethics that is more appropriate for mass consumer culture and the lives of its citizens. Primarily concerned with the relationship between media and viewers, this book considers ethical criticism and the emotional power of screen stories that makes such criticism necessary. The content we consume-- from television shows and movies to advertisements-- can significantly affect our welfare on a personal and societal level, and thus, this content is subject to praise and celebration, or questioning and even condemnation. The types of screen stories that circulate contribute to the cultural ecology of a time and place; through shared attention they influence what individuals think and feel. Plantinga develops a theory of the power of screen stories to affect both individuals and cultures, asserting that we can better respond ethically to such media if we understand the sources of its influence on us. (shrink)

Global airspace, global cinemaspace -- Aerial perceptions: the visuality of the airplane -- Airborne cinema: the emergence of inflight entertainment -- Executive flight: attention, gender and the seatback screen -- Networked transport: neoliberalism and digital entertainments -- Disastrous speed: thrill rides, screens and fear of flying -- Live in air: aerial circuits of television -- Conclusion: cinema as infrastructure.

If narrating—the feeling of stories, fictional or otherwise—is an inherent possibility of motion pictures , then Kracauer's distinction between the realist and formative tendencies must be questioned and, in effect, the two must be synthesized. Wasn't the practical problem for the earliest films how to construct a formative sequence of events within an absolutely real-looking visual context? Wasn't the paradox of film narrative the combination of an obviously unreal sequence of events with an obviously real visual and social setting? (...) And isn't that paradox the most intriguing and complex problem of narrative film today, when the visual and social setting have become increasingly real-seeming? And doesn't this paradox have something to do with the fact that narrative film today seems richer and more important than it did a decade ago, at a time when various admirers of both cinéma vérité and cinéma pur had announced the death of fictional filmed narrative? Kracauer's realist aesthetic, concentrating exclusively on the photographic surfaces of things in the material world , overlooks this paradox altogether. It overlooks the fact—extremely relevant to the cinema—that the term "realist" means one thing in its common application to a painting or photograph and quite another thing in its equally common application to a novel or play. A realistic visual image is one that is said to "look like," "resemble," "reproduce," "iconically represent" the surfaces of the visual world. We see—or think we see—in a painting what we see—or think we see—in the real world.1 But a realistic story is one that is said to chronicle "credibly," "probably," and "believably" the way we think people feel, think, or act, the way things happen, and the reasons they happen, all of which are consistent with the reader-audience-society's beliefs about psychology, motivation, and probability. The standard of one sense of realism is primarily visual while the standard of the other is primarily psychological. One might see the early films groping, then, toward a synthesis of the visual realism of late-nineteenth-century painting/photography with the psychological realism of late-nineteenth-century novel/drama. · 1. This equivocation deliberately avoids the question of whether there is anything actually real about what one sees in a painting or photograph. The fact is that a very large number of viewers operate in this assumption because they think there is something real about what they see, despite the theoretical imprecision of their holding such a belief. Gerald Mast is the author of, among other works, A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, and Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "What Isn't Cinema?," appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

In the opening chapter of this groundbreaking work, Bruce Kawin asks: can a film which is already the dream of its maker and its audience, and which can present itself as the dream of one of its characters appear, finally, to dream itself? Contrary to the classic assumption that all film narration is third person, the author contends that a movie can be narrated in first person through a consciousness that originates either on screen or off. Through a discussion of (...) Keaton, Welles, Resnais, Bergman, Godard, and even Chuck Jones, Kawin shows how the self-reflexivity of film stimulates the aesthetic, political, and psychological processes of the audience, making possible a greater knowledge and acceptance of ourselves.". (shrink)

For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier's influential thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier's intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator's engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved ever since their publication in French in 1969.

Given that numerous critics have complained about Saw’s apparently confused sense of ethics, it is surprising that little attention has been paid to how morality operates in narrative itself. Coming from a Nietzschean perspective - specifically questioning whether the lead torturer Jigsaw is a passive or a radical nihilist - I seek to rectify that oversight. This philosophical reading of the series explores Jigsaw’s moral stance, which is complicated by his hypocrisy: I contend that this underpins critical complaints regarding the (...) films’ (and frequently the audience’s) "muddled" morality. My narrative analysis reveals that Jigsaw’s values are not as confused as they may first appear to be. Despite explicitly proclaiming that his quest is to save others, his actions reveal another story (and not only because his schema is homicidal). Following the loss of his unborn son and his failed suicide attempt, Jigsaw seeks to symbolically eradicate himself: the victims he selects reflect and reify his own obsessive personality traits. In keeping with the franchises’ narrative twists – which are designed to reverse initially "obvious" meanings – I argue that Jigsaw’s proclamations have misdirected critics. His nihilism may be manifested as coerced suffering and articulated as distaste with the world, yet the series’ symbolic target is Jigsaw himself. (shrink)

Dynamically transforming the elements of any performing artist’s craft, this practical guide is a must-have for musicians, dancers, and actors. The handbook shows how artistic performance is embodied in the unification of three critical elements—motion, emotion, and love—demonstrating how it offers experiences and opportunities distinct from the nonperforming arts. Step-by-step guidelines are provided for building intentional and inspirational practice time, thereby enhancing the relationships between the source, the performer, and the audience. Illustrating how intentional movement invokes emotions from both (...) the performer and the audience and how the concept of love gives a performance humanity and life, this eye-opening exploration creates pathways for achieving true artistry. (shrink)

How have popular American films influenced film criticism and intellectual thinking. This book shows that critics, beginning in the 1940s, turned to the movies as raw material to be moulded into a more radical modernism.

Syntactic templates serve as schemas, allowing speakers to describe complex events in a systematic fashion. Motion events have long served as a prime example of how different languages favor different syntactic frames, in turn biasing their speakers toward different event conceptualizations. However, there is also variability in how motion events are syntactically framed within languages. Here, we measure the consistency in event encoding in two languages, Spanish and Swedish. We test a dominant account in the literature, namely that (...) variability within a language can be explained by specific properties of the events. This event-properties account predicts that descriptions of one and the same event should be consistent within a language, even in languages where there is overall variability in the use of syntactic frames. Spanish and Swedish speakers (N= 84) described 32 caused motion events. While the most frequent syntactic framing in each language was as expected based on typology (Spanish: verb-framed, Swedish: satellite-framed, cf. Talmy,2000), Swedish descriptions were substantially more consistent than Spanish descriptions. Swedish speakers almost invariably encoded all events with a single syntactic frame and systematically conveyed manner of motion. Spanish descriptions, in contrast, varied much more regarding syntactic framing and expression of manner. Crucially, variability in Spanish descriptions was not mainly a function of differences between events, as predicted by the event-properties account. Rather, Spanish variability in syntactic framing was driven by speaker biases. A similar picture arose for whether Spanish descriptions expressed manner information or not: Even after accounting for the effect of syntactic choice, a large portion of the variance in Spanish manner encoding remained attributable to differences among speakers. The results show that consistency in motion event encoding starkly differs across languages: Some languages (like Swedish) bias their speakers toward a particular linguistic event schema much more than others (like Spanish). Implications of these findings are discussed with respect to the typology of event framing, theories on the relationship between language and thought, and speech planning. In addition, the tools employed here to quantify variability can be applied to other domains of language. (shrink)

Recovering largely forgotten and untranslated texts, Endless Intervals makes the case that cinema, rather than being a technology assaulting the psyche, is in fact the technology that produced the modern psyche. It considers the ways machines can create meaning, offering a fascinating theory of how the discontinuous intervals of soulless mechanisms ultimately produced a rich continuous experience of inner life.

What is Aristotle's considered view of animal self-motion? According to several scholars, Aristotle ends up rejecting this very notion as a result of his criticism of Plato's theory of a self-moving soul. Contrary to this still widespread assumption, the present study argues that his critical engagement with Plato is not confined to negative results, but achieves largely positive outcomes, which add up to a rich and nuanced picture of self-motion. Ferro makes his case by offering a novel (...) reading of a handful of controversial passages from De Anima and Physics VIII, where Aristotle reacts to three aspects of Plato's theory of self-motion: the claim that soul itself is a self-mover, the assumption that self-movers enjoy strong causal autonomy, and the link between motion, desire and soul partition. Through a careful reading of the relevant passages, which does justice to their proper context and significance, Ferro shows that Aristotle's critical re-appropriation of self-motion results in a largely coherent doctrine with major repercussions for Aristotelian psychology and philosophy of nature. (shrink)

Expecting Saving Mr. Banks to be a jolly jaunt about the creative development of the movie Mary Poppins (1964), I found myself waiting endlessly for the “jolliness” to begin—it never did. In fact, rather than joy, there was an ever-present sensation of tension as I watched the film. Having moved house myself in recent days (during a Queensland heat wave), the scenes of the Goff family leaving their home and trekking across hot, dusty Queensland were very emotional. However, seeing the (...) family patriarch Travers Goff (played by Colin Farrell) swig from an alcohol flask in a desperate manner told me that his was no “routine” family move. And, certainly, arriving at their destination—a dilapidated ranch home—shed even more light on the Goff family’s predicament: alcoholism and the cycle of employment and unemployment. Further, it is the downstream consequences of the family predicament that fuel the identity and behaviour of Mary Poppins—a fictional character created by Travers’ daughter, a. (shrink)

Previous research has demonstrated that duration of implied motion (IM) was dilated, whereas hMT+ activity related to perceptual processes on IM stimuli could be modulated by their motion coherence. Based on these findings, the present study aimed to examine whether subjective time perception of IM stimuli would be influenced by varying coherence levels. A temporal bisection task was used to measure the subjective experience of time, in which photographic stimuli showing a human moving in four directions (left, right, (...) toward, or away from the viewer) were presented as probe stimuli. The varying coherence of these IM stimuli was manipulated by changing the percentage of pictures implying movement in one direction. Participants were required to judge whether the duration of probe stimulus was more similar to the long or short pre-presented standard duration. As predicted, the point of subjective equality was significantly modulated by the varying coherence of the IM stimuli, but not for no-IM stimuli. This finding suggests that coherence level might be a key mediating factor for perceived duration of IM images, and top-down perceptual stream from inferred motion could influence subjective experience of time perception. (shrink)

3 In live performances seated audiences have restricted opportunities for response. Some 4 responses are obvious, such as applause and cheering, but there are also many apparently 5 incidental movements including posture shifts, fixing hair, scratching and adjusting glasses. 6 Do these movements provide clues to people’s level of engagement with a performance? Our 7 basic hypothesis is that audience responses are part of a bi-directional system of audience- 8 performer communication. This communication is part of what distinguishes live (...) from recorded 9 performance and underpins live performers’ moment-to-moment sense of how well a performance 10 is going. Here we investigate the range of visible real-time movements of audiences in four live 11 contemporary dance performances. Video recordings of performers and audiences were analysed 12 using computer vision techniques for extracting face, hand and body movement data. The 13 meaning of audience movements were analysed by comparing clips of the audience at moments 14 of maximum and minimum movement to expert and novice judges. The results show that audience 15 clips with the lowest overall movement are judged as displaying the highest engagement. In 16 addition, we found that while there is no systematic relationship between audience and dancers 17 movement, hands seem to play an especially significant role since they move significantly more 18 compared to the rest of the body. We draw on these findings to argue that collective stillness is 19 an especially salient signal of audience engagement. (shrink)

_Philosophy of Motion Pictures_ is a first-of-its-kind, bottom-up introduction to this bourgeoning field of study. Topics include film as art, medium specificity, defining motion pictures, representation, editing, narrative, emotion and evaluation. Clearly written and supported with a wealth of examples Explores characterizations of key elements of motion pictures –the shot, the sequence, the erotetic narrative, and its modes of affective address.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian GrayJoseph CarrollSince the advent of the poststructuralist revolution some thirty years ago, interpretive literary criticism has suppressed two concepts that had informed virtually all previous literary thinking: (1) the idea of the author as an individual person and an originating source for literary meaning, and (2) the idea of "human nature" as the represented subject and common frame (...) of reference for literary depictions. Under the tutelage of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, literary critics learned to speak of authors, characters, settings, and plots not as individuals situated in a natural world but as discursive formations constituted by the circulation of linguistic, cultural, and ideological energies. In the three decades during which poststructuralism has dominated academic literary study, a different kind of revolution—evolutionary, Darwinian, and naturalistic—has been transforming the social sciences. Sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, Darwinian anthropology, behavioral ecology, cognitive archaeology, and behavioral genetics do not all agree with one another in every respect, but they are all nonetheless aspects or phases of a common research program. The central working hypothesis in this program is that the human species, like all other species, has evolved in an adaptive relation to its environment and that as a consequence it has a distinct, genetically transmitted, species-typical set of characteristics—anatomical, physiological, hormonal, neurological, and behavioral. That set of characteristics is what in common language is meant by "human nature." Literature has always given us subjectively evocative depictions of human nature, and Darwinian social science is now giving us a more comprehensive and scientifically precise account of it. The sense of [End Page 286] individual agency is one crucial aspect of human nature, and that aspect is now being explored in complementary ways by personality psychology and by cognitive neuroscience.1Over the past decade or so, a scattered handful of literary scholars has broken away from the dominant poststructuralist paradigm and has sought to make use of the new scientific information on human nature.2 The simplest and most obvious way to use this information is to examine the behavior depicted in literary texts and to correlate that behavior with "human universals," that is, with forms of behavior that appear in every known culture and that thus appear to be embedded in the nature of the species. Seeking depictions of universals has produced valuable results for literary study, but this first move in Darwinian criticism does not exhaust the range of possibility in the analysis of literary meaning. Human nature is complex and sometimes divided against itself; individuals vary, and some variations depart from species-typical patterns, even in the most adaptively crucial aspects of survival and reproduction. Moreover, literary meaning involves more than the represented subject matter. Authors imbue texts with meanings and affects peculiar to themselves; authors engage in communicative transactions with audiences; and texts have formal and aesthetic properties that are not reducible to represented subject matter. All of these aspects of the total literary situation are part of literary meaning, and all of them can and should fall within the range of analysis available to Darwinian literary study.3Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray offers two special challenges to Darwinian criticism. First, the novel is saturated with homoerotic sexual feeling, and it thus defies any simple reading in terms of behavior oriented to reproductive success. Second, the central conflicts in the novel involve two competing visions of human nature, and in their conceptual structure neither of those visions corresponds very closely to the quasi-Darwinian conceptual structure implicit in most realist and naturalist fiction. One vision derives from the aestheticist doctrines of Walter Pater, and the other from a traditional Christian conception of the soul. Pater's ideas about human motives and the human moral character are at variance both with Christianity and with Darwinism. Christianity and Darwinism share certain concepts of the human moral and social character, but they couch those concepts in different idioms, and they would invoke wholly different causal explanations for how human nature came to be the way it is. Wilde does not develop his themes in Darwinian terms, but the novel can still be read [End Page... (shrink)

Usain Bolt’s Lightning Bolt pose, one arm highly extended to one side, suggests action. Likewise, static pictures of animals, legs extended, show animation. We tested a new cue for motion perception—extension—and in particular extension of dancer’s legs. An experiment with pictures of a dancer finds larger angles between the legs suggest greater movement, especially with in-air poses and in lateral views. Leg positions graded from simply standing to very difficult front and side splits. Liking ratings were more related to (...) Difficulty ratings than Movement ratings. (shrink)

Quel type d'expérience faisons-nous quand " nous regardons un film "? Bien que cette formule consacrée ne prenne pas en compte la complexité du voir/entendre spectatoriel, elle souligne néanmoins une forme d'équivocité à propos de ce qu'on " regarde ", comme de ce qui est ainsi mis en jeu. Le présent essai s'efforce de rendre compte des différentes modalités d'appréhension d'un film par le spectateur. L'auteure a choisi de travailler au plus près de la texture filmique en analysant de courts (...) extraits de films. (shrink)

A COMPANION TO MOTION PICTURES AND PUBLIC VALUE A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value brings together original essays by world-renowned scholars investigating the varied intersections of the moving image and the public good. Covering a wide range of types and genres of cinema, this unprecedented volume explores the past, present, and possible future contributions of motion pictures to public value. With a cross-disciplinary approach, the text presents original conceptual work, global perspectives, philosophical arguments, historical discussion, (...) empirical research, and specific case studies of the direct and indirect public value developed through motion pictures. Organized into seven thematic sections, this Companion identifies and discusses the various kinds of values that motion pictures can deliver, including artistic and aesthetic, ethical and moral, spiritual and religious, cultural, environmental, political, and cognitive. Throughout the text, readers are provided with deep insight into the issue of public value as it relates to cinema and its positive impact on human life and society. A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value is an ideal textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, and is a valuable resource for scholars across a variety of disciplines. (shrink)

In Republic X, the “problem of the irrational part” is this: Greek tragedy interacts with non-reasoning elements of the soul, affecting audiences in ways that undermine their reasoned views about virtue and value. I suggest that the common construal of Socrates’s critique of Greek tragedy is inadequate, in that it belies key elements of Plato’s audience psychology; specifically, the crucial role of the spirited part and the audience’s cognitive contribution to spectatorship. I argue that Socrates’s emphasis on the audience’s (...) cognitive contribution to spectatorship allows him to anticipate a non-authoritarian solution to the problem of the irrational part. (shrink)

Designed for classroom use, this authoritative anthology presents key selections from the best contemporary work in philosophy of film. The featured essays have been specially chosen for their clarity, philosophical depth, and consonance with the current move towards cognitive film theory Eight sections with introductions cover topics such as the nature of film, film as art, documentary cinema, narration and emotion in film, film criticism, and film's relation to knowledge and morality Issues addressed include the objectivity of documentary films, fear (...) of movie monsters, and moral questions surrounding the viewing of pornography Replete with examples and discussion of moving pictures throughout. (shrink)

We are sometimes led to a different picture of things when something unexpected occurs which needs explaining. The aim of this thesis is to examine a series of related issues in the philosophy of mind in the light of the unusual condition known to psychologists as ‘synaesthesia’. Although the emphasis will be on the philosophical issues a view of synaesthesia itself will also emerge. Synaesthesia is a distinct type of cross-modal association: stimulation of one sensory modality automatically triggers an (...) additional phenomenal character of experience associated with a second sensory modality in the absence of any direct stimulation of the second modality. Chapter 1 introduces synaesthesia to a philosophical audience by outlining the early history of synaesthesia studies, by summarising contemporary research and by indicating areas of philosophical interest to be considered in the rest of the thesis. Chapter 2 uses synaesthesia to examine one important philosophical model of the mind, Fodor’s modularity hypothesis, and, in turn, investigates the nature of synaesthesia in the light of that model. Fodor claims that cognitive modules can be thought of as belonging to a psychological natural kind in virtue of their possession of most or all of nine specified properties. The most common form of synaesthesia possesses Fodor’s nine specified properties of modularity, and hence it should be understood in terms of an extra cognitive module, and thus as belonging to the abovementioned psychological natural kind. Many psychologists believe that synaesthesia involves a breakdown in modularity. A breakdown in modularity would also explain the apparent presence of the nine specified properties in synaesthesia. I discuss the two concepts of function which underlie the respective theories, defending the breakdown thesis, arguing, in any case, that properties deriving from evolutionary history should also be used to decide between the two theses and thus ultimately membership of a psychological natural kind such as Fodor suggests. The argument is then used to respond to two challenges to the notion of a psychological natural kind. Chapter 3 focuses on the phenomenal character of synaesthetic experience. Externalists about the phenomenal character of experience tend to argue that the character of perceptual experience is to be explained either by the properties objects present to percipients, or by the properties objects are represented by percipients as having. Some internalists argue that there is a need to postulate hrther properties of the individual - in other words, qualia - to account for the individuation of the character of perceptual experience. The existence of additional phenomenal characters of experience in synaesthesia, which cannot directly be explained by reference to features of objects, suggests the existence of extra qualia and thus the presence of qualia in normal perception. The aim of this chapter is to meet the challenge presented by synaesthesia and the extra quaZia argument, and contrariwise, use synaesthesia as a way of fbrther clarifjmg the merits of the respective externalist positions. In the previous chapters the locution of ‘coloured hearing’ will have been adopted. Occasionally the process underlying synaesthesia is described as one of ‘hearing colours’. Chapter 4 rejects the latter usage. In so doing it focuses on the place of synaesthesia vis-a-vis normal perceptual processes. Considerations from previous chapters are further developed in order to shed light both on the metaphysical individuation of perceptual modalities and on how we know the distinctive perceptual modalities. Given the actual content of our concepts of perceptual modalities, it is argued that the actual world is one in which even synaesthetes are unable to hear colours. Consideration is given as to whether there is a possible world in which people could hear colours. The justification of the usage of ‘coloured-hearing’ then leads to a discussion of the relative importance of the individuating conditions of modes of perception. The thesis focuses largely on coloured hearing. What merits the preceding considerations have might be supported if they can be generalised. Chapter 5 goes a small way in that direction. (shrink)

Book review of _The Philosophy of Motion Pictures_ by Noël Carroll.

This is a book about the nature of film: about the nature of moving images, about the viewer's relation to film, and about the kinds of narrative that film is capable of presenting. It represents a very decisive break with the semiotic and psychoanalytic theories of film which have dominated discussion. The central thesis is that film is essentially a pictorial medium and that the movement of film images is real rather than illusory. A general theory of pictorial representation is (...) presented, which insists on the realism of pictures and the impossibility of assimilating them to language. It criticizes attempts to explain the psychology of film viewing in terms of the viewer's imaginary occupation of a position within the world of film. On the contrary, film viewing is nearly always impersonal. (shrink)

Emotions play at least three key roles in cinema. First, many motion pictures present highly emotional situations, involving characters who fall in love, who endure unbearable loss, and who become hell-bent on revenge. To make sense of movies, we must identify the emotions that drive their characters. Second, motion pictures seem to arouse emotions. We go to tearjerkers that make us cry, splatter films that make us writhe, and action films that keep us at the edges of our (...) seats. Third, these emotional experiences are, ostensibly, part of cinema’s allure; we value movies that evoke strong feelings. One might summarize these three observations by saying that movie-going involves emotion attribution, arousal, and motivation. Each of these has been a domain of philosophical contestation. How are emotions attributed when experiencing a cinematic fiction? Are genuine emotions really aroused? And do emotional experiences really bring us to the box office? This discussion explores controversies along these three dimensions. (shrink)

Designed for classroom use, this authoritative anthology presentskey selections from the best contemporary work in philosophy offilm. The featured essays have been specially chosen for theirclarity, philosophical depth, and consonance with the current movetowards cognitive film theory Eight sections with introductions cover topics such as thenature of film, film as art, documentary cinema, narration andemotion in film, film criticism, and film's relation to knowledgeand morality Issues addressed include the objectivity of documentary films,fear of movie monsters, and moral questions surrounding the (...) viewingof pornography Replete with examples and discussion of moving picturesthroughout. (shrink)