Cognitive Theory in Film Studies: Three Recent Books

By Plantinga, Carl

Cognitive Theory in Film Studies: Three Recent Books

Carroll, Nol. 2003. Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven: Yale University Press. $45.00 he. 448 pp.

Smith, Greg M. 2003. Film Structure and the Emotion System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $65.00 he. 230 pp.

Persson, Per. 2003. Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $75.00 hc. 296 pp.

I

In 1988, Nol Carroll, then a professor of philosophy at the University ofWisconsinMadison, dropped a “bombshell” on the discipline of film studies. Carroll had earlier earned a PhD. in film studies from New York University, but found the disciplinary conversation unsatisfying, and soon returned to graduate school, this time in philosophical aesthetics. Some years and another PhD. later, the bombshell came with the publication of Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Film Studies, a book which critiqued and ultimately dismissed the then-reigning paradigm of film theory, a meld of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and Barthesian semiotics. After systematically dismantling the tenets of this Theory, Carroll s conclusion was uncompromising. The Theory, he writes, has “impeded research and reduced film analysis to the repetition of fashionable slogans and unexamined assumptions” (234). It should be wholly discarded, he argues, and film theorists need to begin anew.

Together with his colleague, professor of film studies David Bordwell, Carroll continued his assault on the received Theory with a collection of essays entitled Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, an anthology of essays with a frontispiece featuring a publicity still from Laurel and Hardy’s film, A Chump at Oxford. In the photograph Laurel and Hardy stand visibly confused before a blackboard covered with three-letter words and faulty arithmetic. The cover suggested to some Bordwell and Carroll’s estimation of contemporary film theory, but one could also interpret the two comedians as standins for Bordwell and Carroll as they attempt to make sense of arcane academic systems. In either interpretation, however, the book is clearly designed to mark a decisive intervention in the field.

It could be argued that “psycho-semiotic” film theory had already run its course, but Carroll’s and others’ critiques hastened the demise of such film theory, or at least its demotion from Official Theory to one theory among many. Film studies today enjoys a more healthy pluralism. Although bad feelings from the theory wars still linger in the discipline, the field is no longer monolithic in its methodological assumptions. Psycho-semiotics has lost its grip.

Carroll and Bordwell are not opposed to theorizing, but do reject broadbased Theory which poses as an account of everything and is accepted as doctrine rather than subjected to critical scrutiny. Carroll and Bordwell propose a cognitive approach to film theory as an alternative but emphasize that it is an approach rather than a theory, and one that is able to contain many disparate positions. Cognitive film theory has since become a significant methodology in film studies, one that can no longer be ignored in any comprehensive account of film theory.

The cognitive approach is not a unified methodology, and even Carroll’s characterization of cognitive film theory is open to question. As Carroll writes in Engaging the Moving Image, cognitive film theory derives its name “from the tendency to look for alternative answers to many of the questions addressed by or raised by psychoanalytic film theories … in terms of cognitive and rational processes rather than unconscious or irrational ones” (384). Yet many cognitive theorists would balk at the claim that the theory confines itself to conscious processes, since much of human mental processing occurs unconsciously. Cognitive approaches tend to be interdisciplinary, some favoring the philosophical method, some an empirical psychological approach, and some a meld of the two. Carroll approaches the questions asked by cognitive theory from the standpoint of analytic philosophy, while others, such as the young scholars Greg M. Smith and Per Persson, find cognitive psychology to be more useful. Moreover, cognitive film theory can be quite eclectic, drawing not merely on cognitive science narrowly construed, but on philosophy, J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and even pre-psychoanalytic semiotics.

II

Carroll’s Engaging the Moving Image collects eighteen essays on film, originally published in various books and journals between 1996 and 2001. In many ways a successor to his Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge University Press, 1996), Engaging the Moving Image is wide-ranging and eclectic, and includes both theoretical and interpretive essays. Cognitive film theory tends to be interested primarily in the film spectator, or to put it in other words, in the relationship between text, context, and viewer psychology. In this book, however, Carroll is far more wide-ranging, theorizing about medium specificity, the nature of documentary, film and emotion, film evaluation, and naturalistic accounts of mainstream film form. He also provides critical analyses of Sergei Eisenstein’s Old and New, Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of the Performers, and the “professional western.”

Carroll has long been arguing against “medium foundationalism,” and he extends his argument here in several essays. Early critics of film did not believe that film was a unique and important medium, but was merely mechanical reproduction of material that was parasitic on the traditional art forms. For example, some called film “canned theater.” The classical film theorists responded by attempting to demonstrate that film is a unique art form with its own rules. These rules were elaborated as positive and negative laws that emerged from the nature of the medium itself, and that could be used to explain why some films fail and others succeed.

In “Forget the Medium,” Carroll argues that not all art forms have a distinct medium; in fact, film has more than one medium, since those artifacts we call films are made on film stock, analogue video, and now in digital form. Carroll prefers to use the term “moving image media” over “film” since, strictly speaking, our primary interest is in a particular use of several distinct media, that use being the creation of moving, images. Moreover, even if it were true that film embodied a unique medium, claims for filmic excellence should not be rooted in the supposed nature of the medium. That is, the critic cannot say in advance what will or will not be successful based on the purported nature of the medium itself. This is all the more true for the fact that media-makers will actually alter the medium in the course of experimentation.

Carroll also continues long-standing discussions of the documentary film. In “Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism,” he defends notions of documentary objectivity and truth against postmodernist and poststructuralist attacks, systematically demonstrating flaws in the arguments of film theorists and defending the documentary against those who are skeptical of its very claims to assert or embody truths. Then, in “Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion,” Carroll develops a definition of the documentary rooted in speech act theory, in which he calls the documentary a “film of presumptive assertion,” in which (to put it simply) the filmmaker intends the film to be taken as an assertion of its propositional content, and the audience presumes the film to be one which makes such propositional assertions. Thus, the definition of the documentary is rooted in the idea that a documentary is a conventional artifact which is designed, then identified or “indexed” as one which performs certain communicative functions, leading to audience presumptions about such functions.

Readers who desire a statement of Carroll s overarching approach to film theory should turn to “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” originally published in Post-Tlieory: Reconstructing Film Studies as a polemical challenge to dominant film theory. Here Carroll distinguishes his position from those of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theorists and provides a compelling argument for what he calls the “piecemeal” approach to theorizing about film. Dominant theory, Carroll claims, had been prone to several methodological impediments, among them a tendency to conflate film interpretation with film theory, in which theorists mistakenly assume that film interpretation can do the work of theory building. As Carroll points out, theory requires “evolving categories and hypothesizing the existence of general patterns; but finding that those categories and hypotheses are instantiated in a particular case is not a matter of theory” (363). As Carroll concludes, it is like “the difference between discovering the existence of a viral syndrome and finding that Henry has it” (363).

Carroll suggests that productive film theory should be fallibilist, governed by the constraints of rationalist discourse and dialectical in considering alternative explanations of the phenomena at hand. Moreover, Carroll advocate\s a “piecemeal” approach to film theorizing. A significant impediment to productive theory, he writes, has been “monolithic” conceptions of the scope of film theory, in which theory was thought to be a “comprehensive instrument that was supposed to answer virtually every legitimate question you might have about film” (359). Instead, piecemeal theory would break down some of the presiding questions of Theory into more manageable bits. Then, as we gradually develop answers to small- scale questions, “we may be in a position to think about whether these answers can be unified in a more comprehensive theoretical framework” (381).

III

Cognitive film theorists have been primarily concerned with understanding the relationship between films and spectators and have produced a good deal of work exploring the means by which film narration cues spectator activity and response. Carroll has been at the forefront of the study of film and emotion, having most thoroughly explored the nature of “art horror” in The Philosophy of Horror (1990), but also writing (in Engaging the Moving Image) about film suspense, humor, melodrama, and the elicitation of emotion in film generally.

Greg M. Smith, in Film Structure and the Emotion System, develops a theory of emotion-elicitation in film that contrasts starkly with that of Carroll. Smith writes that films are “invitations to feel” and calls his approach the “mood-cue approach.” Smith’s theory differs from other broadly cognitive theories of emotion in film in fundamental ways. Most importantly, Smith argues that the “primary emotive effect of film is to create mood” (42). Where emotions are intense, brief, and intermittent, moods have longer duration and are elicited consistently throughout most films. Emotions also depend on moods as “orienting states” that prepare the viewer for specific emotional responses.

Most theorists of filmic emotions see narrative and character engagement as central to the spectator’s emotional response to a film. That is, the spectator’s concern for a character within an evolving narrative situation is typically seen as the backbone of spectator emotion. Thus, emotional response is typically rooted in the spectator’s appraisal of the evolving situation of the character, in conjunction with what the character wishes or desires. In an essay in Engaging the Moving Image,”Film, Emotion, and Genre,” Carroll argues that narrative films are “criterially pre-focused,” and that such focusing, together with spectator “pro-attitudes” toward favored characters, is primarily responsible for the elicitation of spectator emotion.

Smith rejects this, claiming that a strength of the mood-cue approach in its focus on the cues offered by film style rather than primarily by narrative and character. Stylistic elements cue emotions by way of associations rather than the appraisals associated with narrative and character, and it is affective experience via association and other less prototypical means that most interests Smith. Thus Smith pays far more attention to stylistic cues designed to elicit emotion than Carroll tends to do.

One useful element of Smith’s book is its clear summaries of previous cognitive theories of emotion-elicitation in film. It is here that Smith sets out his differences with Carroll’s theory of the filmic elicitation of emotion. To put it simply, Smith argues that Carroll, in relying on the logician’s thought experiments rather than on the empirical data of experimental psychology, is well able to articulate prototypical emotions, but is unable to deal with the “nonprototypical” emotions. In fact, Smith implies, the messiness of human emotion leaves philosophical methodologies at a loss, and Smith prefers the empirical findings of psychology to the thought experiments of philosophy.

Smith does not mention the philosophical studies of emotion that refuse to define an emotion in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, as Carroll does. Here one thinks of the work of Ronald de Sousa and Robert C. Roberts, for example, who do not define emotions, but consider emotions as complex phenomena that escape traditional definitions. Smith’s suggestions about the weaknesses of philosophy in understanding emotion would be stronger were he more familiar with the philosophical literature.

It seems right that some affects do not have the clear objects that “cognitive fundamentalism” would posit, but have a rather diffuse causality. Some emotions may be caused by associations, as Smith claims. To be fair, Carroll is careful to distinguish between “emotions” and “affects,” the former defined as all of those affective experiences that have a clear cognitive genesis in appraisal, and the latter consisting of all the rest: moods, reflex actions, “kinesthetic turbulence,” sexual arousal, pleasures, and desires. Thus, one might quibble with Carroll’s parsing of the terms, but it isn’t right to claim that Carroll ignores all but prototypical emotions. (Elsewhere, for example, Carroll writes about moods and also about how film music contributes to the elicitation of emotion).

Smith is far less interested in making distinctions and drawing boundaries between types of emotional phenomena, but as a consequence his categories are sometimes confusing. If Carroll makes his definitions too stipulative, Smith’s use of terminology is sometimes muddled and unclear, even in the case of his theory’s central concepts. This is best seen in Smiths description of a mood: an “orienting emotional state” that serves an adaptive function by orienting us toward particular stimuli, creating expectations and priming us to experience certain kinds of emotions. Moods, then, are not emotions themselves but “orienting emotion states” and “tendencies toward expressing emotion.” A mood is “a predisposition that makes it more likely that we will experience emotion” (39).The filmmaker elicits a mood, then, to better enable the elicitation of brief “bursts of emotion.” And an emotion episode consists of a mood (emotional orientation) and “external circumstances” (39) or narrative situations.

Smith’s great insight is the importance of such orienting states in the elicitation of emotion in film. On this score his book is immensely useful and is sure to generate a good deal of productive scholarship in response. Yet to call such orienting states “moods” is problematic. Smith writes of “cheerful” (38),”suspenseful” (45), “comic” (50), and “fearful” (51) moods. He describes the mood elicited at the beginning of Stella Dallas as “embarrassment for Stella” and “anticipation of impending class-based catastrophe” (89). Yet suspense, fear, humor, embarrassment, and anticipation are most often thought of as emotions rather than moods. And in the case of Stella Dallas, the embarrassment and anticipation are clearly the result of the spectator’s appraisal of character and narrative situation, rather than the result of stylistic cues or associations ostensibly favored by Smith.

Thus, Smith convincingly demonstrates that many films create a strong orienting state that is relatively long-lasting and that the affective appeal of films extends beyond prototypical emotions. More work needs to be done, however, to fully understand the nature of such orienting states in film viewing. Smith’s book is suggestive and marks a step forward in our thinking about film-elicited emotion. One isn’t confident, however, that Smith’s account of “mood” is either accurate or sufficient in this regard. Perhaps such orienting states are complex, consisting of emotions, emotional residue or “spillover,” moods, and a range of other sorts of affect.

IV

Persson, like Smith, is a young scholar intent on understanding cinema psychology from a broadly cognitive perspective. His Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery is perhaps most useful in establishing a fertile methodology for the study of the psychology of film spectatorship. The title suggests a complete psychological theory of the cinema, but Persson’s aims are actually more modest. The book investigates three specific psychological issues: (1) how spectators make inferences about point- of-view editing, (2) how viewers make inferences about fictional characters, and (3) how viewers respond to variable framing. In Persson’s scheme, the word “disposition” plays a lead role. Dispositions are “the totality of expectations, assumptions, hypotheses, theories, rules, codes, and prejudices that individuals project onto the world.”"Through these capacities,” Persson writes, “humans are disposed to understand the world in a certain preconfigured way, already prepared for some regularities of the world” (13). Dispositions have their roots in more or less universal human characteristics and in cultural specificity; for Persson, it is not necessary to choose between nature and nurture. Both are at work.

The central themes of this book, then, are the ways in which visual communication “relies on tacitly shared dispositions and the ways in which the dispositions of the spectator-reader guide the decoding of the discourse” (16). For Persson, textual cues “steer the production of meaning,” but such meaning “requires a disposition- rich spectator who is actively searching for coherence in a film.” Thus, meaning is not contained in the film, but “emerges in the constant negotiation between discourse and the dispositions of the spectator” (23).

The overall project of the book is to identify the dispositions made use of in the spectator’s understanding of point-of-view editing, character psychology, and variable framing, and then to “reconstruct the interaction between text and disposition” (40). Persson is thus in a position to explain why certain cinematic practices look the way they do. He hopes that such psychological explanations will compliment historical studies.

For example, Persson introduces his account of POV editing by describing the natu\re, structure, and function of deictic gaze ability, that is, the ability of persons to follow and gain information from other peoples gazes. Persson provides a history of the development of POV editing, demonstrating that the technique arose not merely to encourage the spectator’s spatial immersion but also to elicit character allegiance, empathy, and identification, and thus narrative immersion. The spectator’s understanding of POV editing is fundamentally “an inferential activity in the cognitive unconscious of the spectator” (66). After providing eight hypotheses on the psychology of POV, Persson is able to gauge the probability that a spectator will identify a structure as a POV structure on the basis of the kinds of cues present. Such a probability, he notes, must take into account not merely the textual cues present but also their narrative, genre, and historical context.

Persson’s account of all spectator psychological processes is constructivist, in that he seems to hold that spectators actually construct textual processes, and that no processes in cinematic discourse take place in the text per se, but only in relation to the “biological, psychological, and cultural dispositions brought to the film by the spectator” (97).This constructivism leads him, like Smith, to favor psychological over philosophical explanations of text-spectator relations. It also raises issues about the universality or cultural specificity of various spectator dispositions. Here Persson nods toward the middle ground, but finds himself more often than not agreeing with Carroll’s naturalist explanations of mainstream film form. Carroll has claimed that filmmakers have exploited POV because such structures fit human tendencies to deictic gazing, and POV structures are thus susceptible to fast pickups by untutored audiences. Persson is sympathetic to such naturalistic claims, but holds a hand out to the cultural relativists. To explain why POV editing is widespread, we must appeal not only to human psychology, but to economic and historical factors, and in addition to concrete production circumstances. In the last analysis, however, POV cannot be described as an arbitrary, accidental, or purely conventional technique because it matches the “ability of the deictic gaze”(99). In addition to whatever contextual factors come into play, POV works because it exploits universally human physical and psychological capacities.

V

During the summer of 2004, the Center for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image held its fourth biennial meeting, a conference entitled “Narration, Imagination, and Emotion in the Moving Image Media.” An interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered from nine different countries to present papers and share their research. The conference was a heartening testimony to the strength and appeal of cognitive approaches to the arts and media. With intelligent and provocative books such as those discussed here appearing on a regular basis, the prognosis for cognitive approaches to the moving image media is positive. The work of the past twenty years has laid a firm foundation, but there is much left to do, and much is being done. Currently, cognitive approaches in film studies have been seriously examining the elicitation of affect and emotion in film; Smith’s book is an example of this. Another potentially valuable research focus will be the investigation of points of contact between cognitive studies and cultural theory. This is where Persson’s methodology, with its emphasis on human dispositions which are universal and/or culturally specific, will be very useful. Meanwhile, Carroll continues to produce work on a wide array of film- related topics, often defining the terms of discourse for younger scholars. As is apparent from Smith and Persson’s responses to Carroll, his work often serves as a touchstone for other scholars, who build on, amend, and/or critique his ideas in true dialectical fashion. May the conversation continue.

Work Cited

A Chump at Oxford. 1940. Released by Hal Roach Studios. Directed by Alfred J. Goulding. Screenplay by Charley Rogers and Felix Adler.

Bordwell, David, and Nol Carroll, eds. 1996. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University ofWisconsin Press.

Caroll, Nol. 1988. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Tlieory. New York: Columbia University Press.

_____ 1990. The Philosphy of Horror. New York: Routledge. de Sousa, Ronald. 1990. The Rationality of the Emotions. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Roberts, Robert C. 2003. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stella Dallas (1937). Released by Samuel Goldwyn Company. Directed by King Vidor. Screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman. Based on the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty.

Carl Plantinga is professor of Film Studies at Calvin College. He is author of Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (1997) and co-editor, with Greg M. Smith, of Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (1999).

Copyright West Chester University Winter 2006