New Mediation, New Films, New Experiments

This chapter presents the authors’ view of the future, discussing new digital technologies and mediations and their impact on film and its reception. The subheadings are: “New positioning,” a discussion of the future of film and cinema in the light of new and emerging technologies and the few empirical studies addressing these issues; “Digital presences,” an overview of how the authors’ model can help in formulating new theoretical and empirical approaches; “Death by chat,” an analysis of the film Unfriended with a discussion of how new mediations of filmic content reshape the spectator’s relation to film; “A new film grammar,” which introduces action cams and their impact on film viewing; and “Goodbye to the screen?” which envisions how the new filmic mediation may generate a new form of film reception.

Face and Hands

This chapter discusses close-ups of the face and body in relation to film and neuroscience. The subheadings are “Touching in the mirror,” which introduces and discusses the opening scenes of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona; “The somatosensory system and multimodality,” which addresses the notion of multimodality, and explains how the brain processes touch and pain; “The social perception of touch,” provides an overview of how the brain processes the vision of touch; “Feeling the film,” in which scenes from Jean Luc Godard’s Une Femme Mariée are analyzed and a suggestion provided for approaching the notion of “haptic vision,” discussed by film theorists, from a neuroscientific perspective; and “Animations,” in which the authors propose that their model of embodied simulation can be used to explain the sense of presence generated by animation films, analyzing Jan Švankmajer’s films and Pixar’s Toy Story.

Camera Movements and Motor Cognition

This chapter addresses the role of camera movement in generating the spectator’s immersion in the narrated film plot. The subheadings are “Style,” in which the origins of the notion of style are explained, with a review of how filmic style has been addressed by film scholars; “Moving the camera,” addressing the stylistic role of camera movements in film history; “Intermezzo,” dedicated to a discussion from the authors’ perspective of a selection of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpieces, including Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket, and introducing the Steadicam; and “Moving mirrors,” in which the empirical results concerning the role of camera movements in generating the spectators’ immersion, empathy, and identification with film characters are presented.

Stilted Movements and Improbable Stares

This chapter discusses how cinema is able to produce the sense of body immanence, allowing audiences to identify with the characters they see on the screen. The subheadings are “Someone moved, but who?”, in which famous scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake, and Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage are analyzed, with a discussion of how cinema creates a subjective perspective; “Resonating with movement” discusses the pertinence of neuroscience to the issues introduced in the preceding pages; “Positions” addresses the mind–movie problem; lastly, “Sherlock Jr.” analyzes the problem of spatial segregation between screen and audience, discussing scenes from Buster Keaton’s film Sherlock Jr.

Cut and Harmony

This chapter deals with montage. The subheadings are “Calumet City,” a discussion of parallel montage in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs from the authors’ perspective; “Continuity,” in which continuity editing is addressed in relation to several film scholars and authors, including Joseph Anderson, Lev Kuleshov, and Jean Epstein; “Action, action, action!,” where the role of action in montage is addressed by referring to early American film theory, introducing and discussing authors such as Victor Freeburg, Hugo Münstenberg, Henry Albert Phillips, and Epes Winthrop Sargent; and “The mirror crack’d,” which introduces and discusses the empirical neuroscientific results of the authors’ high-density electroencephalography experiment on montage, where continuity editing and jump-cuts are compared.

Embodied Simulation

This chapter provides the key neuroscientific data that enable the reader to follow the case studies. The subheadings are “Cinema, brain and empathy,” in which the reception of film is discussed, and the notion of empathy is introduced with an outline of its history; “Body, brain and neuroscience,” provides a critical account of neuroscience and details of the specific approach used; “From classic cognitivism to embodied cognition,” discusses two mainstream approaches to social cognition, classic cognitivism, and evolutionary psychology; “Motor cognition: Movements and motor goals,” explains why and how the cognitive role of the motor system and its role in visual perception should be reconceived; “Motor cognition: Area F4 and peri-personal space,” provides evidence for the role of the motor system in mapping space; “Motor cognition: Canonical neurons and objects ‘close to hand’,” discusses canonical neurons and their role in object perception; “Motor cognition: Mirror neurons and mirroring mechanisms,” introduces mirror neurons in macaques and mirror mechanisms in humans, and outlines their role in social perception; “Emotions, sensations and embodied simulation,” describes the role of embodied simulation in the perception of the emotions and sensations of others; “The person as a corporeal form between the real world and the world of fiction: Liberated simulation,” introduces the aesthetic specificity of the visual perception model with an explanation of how it could be applied to film viewing in particular and more generally to fiction; and “Brain–body and cinema,” discusses how neuroscience has been applied to the study of film and cinema.