CONTEMPORARY FILM THEORY: THE COGNITIVIST APPROACH

A CASE FOR COGNITIVISM

The essay, which gives a summary of a broader body of work, argues that a cognitive perspective can be a useful guide when researching various aspects of film. It also serves to introduce film scholars to cognitive theory, i.e. a cognitive frame of reference. The text not only focuses on doctrine but on the particular assumptions and questions characteristic to the cognitive perspective as well. At the very outset, David Bordwell states that he is aware of the fact that no single »Grand Theory« can fully comprehend the diversity of cinematic phenomena, and that the most fruitful research usually tackles mid-range problems, e.g. in cognitivism, sharply distinct explanatory models crystallize around particular questions.

Thus, the essay first describes the »core« of cognitivist research (in the »The Cognitive Core« section), i.e. the attempt to understand such human mental activities as recognition, comprehension, inference-making, interpretation, judgment, memory, and imagination. Subsequently (in the »Good Naturalization« section), the essay points out that cognitive theory continues the tradition of »naturalistic« investigations of mental processes that are based on empirical research, experiments and findings from the field. Chief among the prominent empirical data under consideration are the increasingly precise findings about the biological properties of the brain, the associated sensory system, and the artificial intelligence research of the »software« side of human mentation. The basic motivation of the cognitive perspective is to search for explanations rather then explications, which is in sharp contrast to the hermeneutic bent of film studies that have led to the practice of descriptive texts written in an informal metalanguage derived from a theoretical doctrine.

The third section (»Constructivism«), points out that the cognitivist approach is committed to constructivist explanations in terms of mental representations that function in the context of social action, i.e. perception is not the passive recording of sensory stimulation. On the contrary, sensory input is filtered, transformed, filled in and compared with other input to build, through inference, a consistent and stable world. Consequently, both bottom-up and top-down processes shape human activity.

This approach assumes the pre-existence of the components necessary for any type of cognitive processing, either conceptual or physical, i.e. the existence of principles of building according to a particular purpose or goal. Based on such research guidelines, the constructivist account has the advantage of seeking to fit together physical, physiological, psychic, and social processes. In cinema studies the approach can be applied both to the research of neurophysiological processes that underlie film cognition (e.g. apparent motion, shape perception), universal cognitive processes (e.g. the identification of the human agents of the visual track), and culturally variable cognitive processes (e.g. the historically variable strategies of constructing a narrative). One of the advantages of adopting explicit constructivism is that empirical research within a broad domain of specialties becomes relevant to film studies.

The fifth section (»Mental Representation«) of the essay points out that the cognitive frame of reference hypothesizes that mental representations play a determinate role in organizing and executing action. In spite of the differences on some issues of representation, cognitive researchers typically examine three aspects of mental representation: the semantic content of the representation (what it is »about«), the structure of representation and the processing of mental representations. A description of Marr’s theory of vision is given as an example of processing account. Next, the concept of schema and prototype is introduced as a cognitivist concept aimed at explaining the structural aspect of representation and processing (specifically applicable to the study of film narration).

The sixth section (»Social Action«) of the essay stresses cognitivism as a perspective which, though outside the core field of cognitivist research, still produces useful insights, especially in anthropology and social theory. Many types of cultural knowledge are organized according to intersubjective schemata, scripts, or »mental models«, and some of the research in this domain is dealt with in this section. This type of approach offers cinema theoreticians a new perspective on understanding how spectators use shared schemata in order to make sense of a character’s behavior and the presented events. Surprisingly, in the final section (»Conclusion«) of the essay, Bordwell warns the reader that the whole cognitive enterprise could turn out to be wrongheaded and useless, since most theories are.

However, there is a possibility that a few lucky theories among them will prove to be a little bit right and somewhat useful here and there, and even if the cognitive enterprise proves hopelessly muddled, film scholars will inevitably have discovered other things along the way that will make them think hard for a while about important and intriguing matters.

David Bordwell