Very interesting post (I refer to the blog.oup.com).

One question / doubt: you say:

“The obvious one is that actions recorded at more rapid frame rates, such as a car chase shot at 48 fps vs 24 fps, would reduce by half the distance objects move across successive frames. With HFR we are presented shorter increments of movement, and our brains need not work as hard to extrapolate apparent motion across frames, which may result in a smoother sense of motion. ”

I do not quite understand that, because the eye/brain need “readout” time, even though I do not exactly know how much it is. So, feeding the system with more frames per second will not necessary decrease the brain’s working task. In the end it will not make any difference, when the frame rate of the information fed > frame read of readout?!

Best wishes

Maarten

Further, the way in which Denby places blame on the digital fx technology for formulaic or unintelligent stories reminds me of the ideas about cinema being inferior to theatre which were prevalent when cinema was younger, or television being inferior to cinema, which have only really been soundly refuted, though the consistent creation of brilliant and intelligent TV, in the last 10 to 20 years. Each of these media have shining examples and indifferent or poor examples of ideas and artistry within them and to claim that the quality of the ideas is generated or prescribed by the technology in which they are realised seems to me to be naive. (Shilo McLean made this argument very emphatically, particularly in relation to digital fx her book Digital Storytelling (MIT Press, 2007)). Digital effects are not necessarily the cause nor the effect of formulaic or incoherent stories, even though they may be, at this point in time and their evolution, coincidental in many cases.

In my own research I am particularly interested time and in an attitude which I will characterise, in an essay I am currently working on called ‘Time and Punishment’, that fast is bad. This implies that slow is good. Neither of course is necessarily the case! However, there is a question which I do not have the resources to research properly and which I would be very interested to know if anyone in the SCSMI has looked into, which is: Is the capacity of brains that have been raised on “intensified continuity” to recognise, make inferences about and have emotional responses to speedy, or spatially chaotic sequences different to the capacities of brains that have been ‘trained’ so to speak on slower, calmer movies?

I was aware as I was juxtaposing psychoanalytic interpretations, content analyses of psychologists in film, experiments on the effects of film, etc., that these approaches had little contact with each other outside of my book. Interdisciplinarity (particularly between the humanities and the sciences) is hard to pull off these days. It is for that reason that I am so impressed with the work of Bordwell and the many others he summarizes in his essay. The cognitive turn in film studies represents a genuine interdisciplinary success story.

As a clinical psychologist however I am curious about the potential for this movement to shed light on what I call “movies as equipment for living” (stealing from Kenneth Burke). Cognitive science sometimes stops short of psychological issues like identity construction and personal growth. This is understandable as it gets into the very murky area of meaning making (the same murky area Bordwell has understandably criticized when it comes to film studies). Still, I think movies are ultimately interesting to people because particular movies really matter to us as individuals. As I mention in another thread, I am therefore extremely interested in Carroll’s key note address at the SCSMI conference where he looks at the role of movie viewing and the development of virtuous behavior. I am hopeful that the interdisciplinary vision that has developed in film studies over the past 20 years can be fruitfully applied to humanities end of the psychological spectrum (e.g., self, experience, symbols, etc).

Fictional representations are a way in/by which cultures perpetuate themselves. One reason we attend to fictional representations is that they let us take pleasure in learning about others (social knowledge, new social worlds)–an adaptive process driven by our innate curiosity that cultivates insight and understanding.

Following Aristotle, Noel distinguishes between the poet and the historian; the poet describes what MIGHT have happened (universality statement, versus the historian’s singularity statement). The poet’s “might-have-happened” is rooted in character; in fiction, it’s character that’s determinative (largely, not necessarily entirely) of behavior and the course of events (narrative).

Acknowledging character as well as narrative to be constructs, Noel asserts a “new common view” that, although literary/fictional characters are “not like” real people, we–as a part of the perpetuation of culture and its ethos–seek functional, accessible and TRANSFERRABLE models from/in them. As models of how we’re SUPPOSED to behave, “aspirational” normative characters like McKay in The Big Country are also useful by providing a basis for judgment/evaluation.

But McKay doesn’t stand alone; he’s part of narrative fiction’s “wheel of virtue”–one spoke in a wheel containing a structured set of attention-directing comparisons and contrasts.

I can’t remember if Noel stated it directly or not, but he seemed to me to be suggesting that one reason why and how we (spectators) are able to “read” (and subsequently discuss) a film like The Big Country at all (though necessarily in the same, but instead proximate, ways) is that we DO sufficiently share the very cultural perpetuation he concluded with.
It stands to reason that a certain measure of that culture, having some measure of stability, informs human behavior in certain normative ways, even across a variety of encountered situations.

Even at the risk of invoking concepts from cultural studies, one could say that Noel’s “wheel of virtue” in narrative fiction characters also allows/explains negotiated and oppositional readings.

Following from this, Noel seems to suggest that spectators (for the most part) are, indeed, able to distinguish between the normative and the epistemic with respect to fictional character. (Of course, as Malcolm suggested, empirical confirmation of this is another matter; but the logic of Noel’s theory, based as it is in the “ultimate” asserted effect of cultural/ethical reproduction, is pretty compelling…)

So, with fictional models like McKay in discursive circulation, can the situationism prevalent in the social psychology literature suffice to explain human behavior? Are experiments like Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s also fictional constructs?

A few questions I’d pose to Noel: Can you provide an example of situationism from literature or narrative fiction film? Or is this an impossibility, as films/literature have to have fixed/stable characters in order for their behavior to drive the narrative situation? Obviously, “authored” events framed as beyond characters’ control impacts them, and they in turn respond–both drive a narrative. Also obvious is that not all artistic representation is narrative or temporal; how does/can the “wheel of virtue” obtain in painting or non-narrative works?

Everyone is very welcome to join this group:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/175716329122592/

I know that this discussion was likely focused primarily on adults, but I want bring children into the conversation, since we are talking about learning from movies. I think this is especially relevant if you look at the latest statistics on how much time children are spending in front of a television. We do know that children are looking for and learning from the messages that they are receiving in various story formats. We also know that school-aged children are still working on distinguishing fiction from reality in TV and Movies. It does seem that many children (in my experience as a Child and Family Therapist) are learning more from TV and movies than they are directly from their parents. I wonder if this could also have implications for how these children, once they become adults, interpret or are affected by the movies they watch. I would love to hear more discussion from filmmakers about being intentional, even from a moral perspective, with the messages that they are trying to share.

Michelle Ellisor
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Associate
Austin Psychotherapy Associates- Austin, TX

As a clinical psychologist however, my interests tend to be at the levels of meaning making, identity, and therapy (as opposed to the majority of the work being done here that attempts to establish connections between certain cognitive concepts and narrative comphrehension).

I therefore found Dirk’s summary of Carrolls’ speech very exciting. While it makes sense that a philosopher is interested in virtue, it is a bit of a departure from the things that I most often see associated with SCSMI.

The way I have characterized an approach to film that would encompass the impact of film on virtue is “Movies as Equipment for Living” (stealing a phrase from the rhetorician, Kenneth Burke; I use the phrase from the culminating chapter of my recent book, Psychology at the Movies {Wiley-Blackwell} and in a blog I recently started for Psychology Today {http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/movies-and-the-mind}). Following Burke, I would tend to see films as containing potentialities for virtuous (or non-virtuous) action that are played out in the lives of individual viewers.

There is a bit of a gap between the relatively precise and discrete approach to the mental processes of interest to cognitivists and the fuzzier concepts of identity development, but I hope Carroll’s presentation indicates a renewed willingness among film scholars to work in that space.

Skip Dine Young
Professor of Psychology
Hanover College