CONTEMPORARY FILM THEORY: THE COGNITIVIST APPROACH

WHAT IS THE BASIS FOR A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO FILM?

There is, without a doubt, the unavoidable possibility that the recent, highly promoted proposal for a cognitivist approach to film may be considered merely a new »fad«. However, this approach, based on certain well-founded intuitions and on common sense, has opened up new and very promising avenues of empirically oriented and empirically checked theoretical developments. In the end, the »fad« could prove to be based on sound foundations. The initial insight that lends support to the cognitive stance is in fact a very common one: A film is, basically, addressed to our cognitive faculties and skills, and activating them is the crucial function of most strategies applied in filmmaking and in film reception. We typically go to see films in order to have complex »experiences«, i.e. »mind-reactions« and »cognitive answers«, that are aroused and guided by a given film structure, and films are made with the purpose of evoking such experiences.

It is common knowledge that these experiential (cognition guiding) resources of films have been conductive to the social rise and survival of »moving pictures«. The second point can be deduced from the first one though it is not so intuitively obvious: As a rule, whatever is done with film in order to arouse and guide viewer’s experiences, draws upon the experiential or cognitive abilities that humans already possess. The experiences aroused by a scene represented in a film draw upon our ability to recognize ambience layout, to recognize things and people and their spatial placements within the environment, their actions and the events going on in the scene; they draw upon our ability to determine our viewing position and our viewing interest in the scene, to recognize the emotions and intentions of other people, etc. The confounding problem that plagues these obvious and accepted points is that cognition of a film scene, though drawing upon our cognitive abilities from everyday life, and eliciting a cognitive reaction as complex as that from any life scene, may not be considered anything like the cognition of a life scene.

In actuality, standard cognitive reactions to film scenes are activated within the very nonstandard conditions of film projection/emission. A film scene is perceived as an »inserted« scene within a life scene (a movie theater; a room in our home where we watch films on TV). It is »semantically« discontinuous from the life-scene and »out of context« within it. It is not possible, nor is it usually intended for the audience to manage the situations within the film scene in the same manner that it manages situations in the surrounding life scene: the film scene typically permits and requires only the use of our cognitive processing. There is no need for any other kind of activity that is possible in, or required by, the surrounding life scene, e.g. bodily navigating through the scene, the physical handling of things within the scene, communicating with other people present in the scene, etc. The »inserted« film-scene is not comprehended by us, who are bodily placed within it, on the basis of »affordances« (Gibson, 1987) presented by the surrounding life scene layout, but rather on the basis of restricted and reduced affordances offered by spatially limited specks of a shaded light pattern reflected/emitted from the uniform material surface of a local object within the surrounding life-scene. This difference between the affordances of »inserted scene« and »surrounding scene« is at the basis of our comprehension of the film scene as artifact based, i.e. its perception as a kind of external representation (Clark 1997) whose basic aim and ability is — the elaboration of internal representations far beyond the requirements of ordinary life.

Constructing an external representation boils down to securing conditions within the artifact »affordances« that will elicit particular cognitive reactions (internal representations) within the viewer. Because filmmakers experiment with production procedures in order to evoke particular cognitive responses, they can be viewed as practical cognitivists. Since the cognitive effects that can be elicited by filmmaking (by film artifact) are frequently not obvious at first and not »imaginable« in advance, the workability of particular effects is frequently learned post factum, on the basis of recognizably novel »side-effect« experiences evoked by a particular part of the produced film, or by the whole film. Film »conventions«, or routines established to elicit particular types of experiences in viewer, are frequently a consequence of »reverse engineering« (Dennett 1995), i.e. finding out what regularities govern the relationship between particular production moves and particular aspects of evoked response, and then customizing the particular moves and the particular cognitive effects they typically evoke.

Albeit that such »cognitive experimentation« is partially constrained by preexisting cognitive abilities, and by some (culturally and personally) pre-established experiential aims, it is basically open-ended. The history of filmmaking can be seen as an unending exploration into the possibilities and nuances of artifact based experiences. On the same token, cognitive students of film can be seen as metacognitivists, who have to discover the cognitive basis of filmmaker’s achievements, i.e. the achievements of practical cognitivists. Although the experimental bend of cognitive psychology is highly valuable, an observational approach has greater research possibilities at the present moment: the film corpus offered by film history can be utilized as a source for a multitude of performed, and richly replicated experiments which can be — in a comparative and reverse-engineering manner — systematically reassessed by cognitive film students.

Hrvoje Turković