Carl Plantinga explores how new approaches to cognition are changing how we understand film

Plantinga, Carl

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Moving PicturesCarl Plantinga explores how new approaches to cognition are changing how we understand filmAt the end of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the Replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) decidesto save his enemy Deckard (Harrison Ford), rather than allow him to fall to his death. As Deckardlies injured in the rain, he sees the formidable Batty deliver his dying soliloquy, where Batty grievesthe fact that all of his memories will be lost, ‘like tears in rain’. The camera rests on Batty’ssorrowful face in close-up. ‘Time to die’, he says, and then expires. What is going on in ourresponse to this scene?For more than one hundred years, scholars have been attempting to make sense of the humanexperience of movies; Hugo Munsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study was ﬁrstpublished in 1916. Munsterberg, along with William James, Henry Bergson, and, more recently,Oliver Sacks have all remarked on the similarity of ﬁlms to human streams of consciousness.Movies are carefully constructed to provide an evolving series of represented events, conveyed toaudiences through complex streams of images and sounds. As ﬁlm theorist V. F. Perkins put it,movies are like ‘mind recorders’: they mimic human consciousness.Since the 1980s, the central approach to understanding movies psychologically has been cognitiveﬁlm and media theory, practiced by both ﬁlm scholars and philosophers interested in aesthetics.The cognitivists have formed a lively scholarly organization (The Society for Cognitive Studies ofthe Moving Image) with an associated annual conference and professional journal (Projections:The Journal for Movies and Mind).Early cognitive theory modelled thought on computer-like information processing. This kind ofcognitive approach is not without its detractors, however. Recent times have witnessed anincreased attention to emotion and to the body. Film and media theorists have turned to thesenses, the body, and body metaphors, moods, features of brains such as mirror neurons, andneurological activity as measured by fMRIs. This turn may be interpreted as threatening to eclipsean interest in (what is taken to be) cognition.To understand what’s at stake here, consider the Blade Runner example above. Early cognitiveapproaches would have pointed to the ‘computational’ aspects of audience response, such asinference-making and the testing of hypotheses about the narrative. Yet as I have arguedelsewhere, this ‘scene of empathy’ is designed to elicit strong empathetic reactions and powerfulemotions. How can we make sense of the experience of this scene while taking both mental‘computation’ and emotion into account?At the heart of these debates, in my opinion, is a fundamental misunderstanding of just whatcognition is. We experience movies with our bodies, as we sway with the action, erupt in laughter,or feel that knot of suspense in our stomach. These sorts of observations about the bodily natureof our experience sometimes lead theorists to conclude that certain theories or accounts of ﬁlmsare ‘too cognitive’. How can the word ‘cognition’, with its suggestion of logic-like informationprocessing, account for moods, emotions, and bodily experiences such as ﬂinching, swaying, andweeping? Furthermore, ‘cognition’ seems to imply conscious, self-directed mental activity, ratherthan the automatic and involuntary processing that dominates our bodily responses to the worldand to movies in particular.Once we understand what cognition is and how it is studied, however, these objections fail toapply. Cognition, simply put, is the mental activities of gaining knowledge and understandingthrough thought, experience, and the senses, plus the results of such activities—comprehension,intuition, insight, perception, and so on. Cognition is neither singular nor linear, with multiplecognitive processes occurring simultaneously and connected in complex ways. Neither is cognitionnecessarily either conscious or rational. Psychologists write of the ‘cognitive unconscious’ todifferentiate it from the Freudian unconscious. Much of cognition occurs beneath consciousness,and is seemingly automatic rather than voluntary. Moreover, cognition is neutral with respect topractical rationality, just as emotion is; in themselves, cognition and emotion are neither rationalnor irrational.The word ‘cognition’ has two different senses that ought to be differentiated at this point.Sometimes ‘cognition’ is used to designate rational and deliberative mental processes, such asinference-making, hypothesis-testing, and more generally, thinking. As such, cognition can inprinciple be separated from affects such as moods and emotions; it can be conceived of as a ‘cool’phenomenon. Increasingly, however, we are coming to understand that cognition itself is affectedby emotions and moods, for example, and has a ﬁrm grounding in bodily experience. With this inmind, cognition ‘proper’ is ‘hot’. Making sense of the world around us, we employ body metaphors,we gauge physiological feedback, and we are inﬂuenced by emotion.The viewer’s understanding of characters, narrative events and progression, and narrational pointof view is fundamentally cognitive in nature. What we should say now is not that cognition isseparate from affect, the unconscious, and bodily and automatic processes; rather, a full accountof cognition encompasses them. Cognition itself is infused with emotion, embodied, and in partautomatic. To see how this is true, consider a central means by which viewers experience movies:sympathy and/or empathy with ﬁctional characters. One of the strongest forces in generatingspectator affective responses is through the characters in a story. If one aspect of our everydayconsciousness is an awareness of the people around us, the movies have the capacity to focusand strengthen this kind of attention to others by offering virtual relationships with ﬁctionalcharacters that we can see and hear, as in the Blade Runner example. The kind of spectator–character relation that theorists have been most interested in is sometimes called ‘identiﬁcation’,and typically involves some combination of sympathy (feeling for) and empathy (feeling with) thecharacter.Sympathy and empathy for characters can be driven by pre-conscious, largely automaticpsychological processes. The use of extended close-ups, facial expressions, and various mood-inducing stylistic choices (in the Blade Runner scene, darkness, rain, low-key lighting, andplaintive music, for example) may all have their effect. The use of extended close-ups in such‘scenes of empathy’ may elicit facial feedback and emotional contagion, thus transferring some ofRoy Batty’s supposed sadness to the spectator. The mood of the scene is somber, and theMonday, 21 November 2016spectator may ‘catch’ some of that somber quality merely by viewing the scene. The mysteriousworkings of the brain and its mirror neurons may lead to various mirror effects that partially escapeconscious control. The scene has a ‘feel’, with textural and tonal qualities that strongly affect theaudience. Much recent phenomenological ﬁlm theory attempts to make sense of the spectator’ssensuous, tactile experience of the movies.This attention to the body and to the sensuous ﬁlm experience is absolutely vital. Still, cognition isalso vitally important. As soon as the spectator relates this scene to other scenes, differentiatesone character from another, evaluates a character’s behaviour in relation to narrative context, or inany other way makes sense of the scene in context, cognition becomes the means by which theseimpressions, feelings, and responses are united into an experience of the ﬁlm as a whole.Cognition is ‘hot’, but it is still cognition. Consider The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in which thevillainous Hanibal Lecter matches wits with FBI ingénue Clarice Starling (Jody Foster). During keyscenes of the ﬁlm, Lecter and Starling are ﬁlmed in shot/reverse shot scenes, alternating betweenclose-ups of their two faces. These extended close-ups may initiate various sorts of automaticmirror effects in spectators, such as primitive forms of empathy. Yet the spectator’s more complexresponses to these very different characters are governed by cognition, including the spectators’prior knowledge of the characters and their role in the narrative, evaluation of their motives andbehaviour, and various emotional responses and reactions. Hanibal Lecter may fascinate us, butmost will have stronger sympathy and empathy for Clarice Starling.The second observation is this: Even if we were to consider the Blade Runner scene apart from itsnarrative context (which we typically do not do), cognition would be called into play. In part, thishas to do with cognitive frames or schemas that spectators appeal to, such as characterstereotypes, visual conventions and associations, and even the basic knowledge of the ‘institutionsof ﬁction’—in this case Hollywood’s—and of genre conventions. Beyond this, however, even basicaffects such as moods have cognitive implications, such that the somber mood of the scene canactually inﬂuence thought. For example, the mood of the initial scenes in which Clarice speakswith Hanibal is always carefully calibrated. The cellblock resembles a medieval dungeon, withrough rock walls. The music is suspenseful, the lighting low-key, the ambient sound full ofintimations of unseen horrors that echo in the cave-like setting. Moods have strong associations,and simply having or eliciting a mood can suggest these associations. The mood of these scenesfrom The Silence of the Lambs suggests danger, insanity, violence, and unspeakable horror,leading the viewer to anticipate and fear these sorts of narrative events. Affects, including bothmoods and emotions, are not incidental to cognition, but are an inseparable aspect of how wecome to understand the world around us, including movies.It is this broader sense of cognition—‘hot’ cognition—that characterizes our experience of movies.Cognition, properly conceived, includes emotions and body responses as well as ‘computational’activities. Cognition is at the heart of human experience and at the heart of movie viewing. Weshould not minimize the centrality of cognition, but we do need to consistently monitor evolvingideas about just what cognition is. Both in and outside the movie theater, cognition must accountfor the body and emotion.Carl Plantinga is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Calvin College. This essay is based onhis ‘Putting Cognition in its Place: Affect and the Experience of Narrative Film’ published in CurrentControversies in Philosophy of Film, edited by Katherine Thomson-Jones (Routledge, 2016). Hisresearch centres on the philosophy of ﬁlm, especially the role of affect, as well as documentarytheory and history.Related PostsShare This Story, Choose Your Platform!Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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