Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database

Book review of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database \ud Author: Lev Manovich, Andreas Kratky\ud Publisher: Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 200

Finding Meaning in All the Right Places: A Novel Measurement of Dramatic Structure in Film and Television Narratives

This article summarizes an evidence-based study that adapts a breakpoint approach to investigate how elements of television narratives (two half-hour episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “The Case of Mr. Pelham”) were considered meaningful to viewers. Actions considered meaningful were found to be high in informational and emotional content, and primarily consisted of plot points where changes in narrative direction and protagonist's goals were perceived as interpretively salient. Viewers also registered as meaningful those scenes that were character centered and provided subjective access to the main characters. The article reviews segmentation behavior in the relevant film theory literature to contextualize study, and concludes by summarizing other potential applications of an adapted breakpoint approach beyond the investigation of dramatic structure

Spectatorship and Social Cognition: Per Persson's Understanding Cinema

This paper places Per Persson's book Understanding Cinema in relation to cognitive film theory and the increasing necessity of it to further engage with the psychological and anthropological literature on social cognition. This paper focuses upon Persson's ability to integrate cognitive and cultural perspectives when explaining a spectator's comprehension of point‐of‐view editing, variable framing and character psychology. It is argued that Persson's theoretical framework would have been more explanatorily complete if it had adopted an analytical dualist stance as a means to theorise the ontologically mixed nature of the psychological processes in question

Visual Author-ship: Creativity and Intentionality in Media

Book review of Torben Grodal (ed.): Visual Author-ship: Creativity and Intentionality in Media Northern Lights, vol. 3, 2004, Museum Tusculanum Press/University of Copenhage

From auteur to filmmaking institution

This book proposes that the concept of meaning production can transcend the theoretical divide between the interpretive and explanatory stances found within film studies. Its central contention is the recognition of the need to construct process-oriented accounts of meaning to shift interpretive practice onto the very terrain on which causal explanations tend to operate. On this account, it is argued that such models of meaning production should approximate the best conceptions of social causality that have been advanced within social theory, and that such conceptions are to be found in the work of certain leading social theorists, such as Margaret Archer and Roy Bhaskar, who have proposed frameworks by which to conceptualise the interactions between social structures and human agency in a non-reductive fashion. Four dominant approaches on film studies are identified, each of which is based upon an underlying model of meaning production. I then demonstrate that the institutional approach is the most viable approach given its non-reductive negotiation of the structure/agency debate