Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Cognitivist Film Theory“

ABSTRACT This article appraises the contributions of what has been called cognitivism or the cognitive approach to film studies, and suggests the means by which the cognitive approach can become more central to film studies than it has been so far. The author first shows that much of what has been called "cognitivist" film studies is only cognitivist in a broad sense, and could just as well be called "analytic." He then argues that the cognitive approach would be most useful when it is thus broadly applied, becoming then more a commitment to the rationality of discourse and human thought than a narrow project within psychology. The article then goes on to appraise the utility of the cognitive approach in our understanding of the psychological power of film and film aesthetics.

Since the early 1990s, phenomenology and cognitivism have become influential strands of inquiry in film theory. Phenomenological approaches remain focused on descriptive accounts of the embodied subject’s experiential engagement with film, whereas cognitivist approaches attempt to provide explanatory accounts in order to theorize cognitively relevant aspects of our experience of movies. Both approaches, however, are faced with certain challenges. Phenomenology remains a descriptive theory that turns speculative once it ventures to “explain” the phenomena upon which it focuses. Cognitivism deploys naturalistic explanatory theories that can risk reductively distorting the phenomena upon which it focuses by not having an adequate phenomenology of subjective experience. Phenomenology and cognitivism could work together, I suggest, to ground a pluralistic philosophy of film that is both descriptively rich and theoretically productive. From this perspective, we would be better placed to integrate the cultural and historical horizons of meaning that mediate our subjective experience of cinema.

The ‘turn’ to emotion and affect in film and media studies may take its distance from earlier ways of understanding spectatorial involvement (modelled on psychoanalytic notions of identification). But such approaches, whether cognitivist in intent, or inspired by phenomenology, also return to an earlier interest in bodily sensations and somatic responses when exposed to sudden motion and moving images (associated with ideas such as innervation, shock and over-stimulation). The essay proposes to bring Walter Benjamin into the debate, with a term central to his idea of modernity, namely ‘experience’, and to revive his distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Noting certain features of excess and liminiality in contemporary cinema, and mapping them across the three distinct domains of body, time and agency, Benjamin's own attempt to locate the emotional core of the technical media is reappraised. Grounded in the peculiar variability but also interdependence of place, narration and perception, the cinema would then appear to provide Erlebnis without Erfahrung, a state formerly associated with trauma, but now the very definition of the media event.

It is well known that, despite his close engagement with cinema, Gilles Deleuze was less concerned with animated film, being somewhat dismissive of its capabilities. In recent years, however, a number of attempts have been made – most notably by William Schaffer, Thomas Lamarre and Dan Torre – to construct Deleuzian positions in animation theory. This article outlines some of these approaches, whilst engaging critically with Torre’s writings. In particular, it foregrounds Torre’s neglect of the post-structural, political dimension of Deleuzian thought through an examination of the concepts of faciality, the close-up, and relation as they occur in Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy. This is in part facilitated through a comparison of Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) – a work directly addressed by Torre, and Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) – a work which he largely passes by. It is claimed here that, despite a number of apparent similarities, the animations of Cohl and Blackton express a radically divergent series of ontological commitments. Cohl offers the audience an experience of chaotic, mutable, relational complexity that revels in its incoherence, whilst Blackton presents a series of more straightforward set pieces, dwelling for the most part upon object-centric representational form. The tension between representation and becoming that occurs between these works is employed to facilitate a critical engagement with Torre’s process-cognitivism. It is suggested that Torre’s work, though exceptional in its pedagogic value, is likewise expressive of this tension, and that in its effort firstly to combine a series of process-philosophical and cognitivist ideas, and secondly to unpack the radical ideas of Deleuze through the more conservative philosophy of Nicholas Rescher, it runs the risk of falling back into a quasi-Kantian philosophy of generality and representation.

The research was conducted to know: how are the educational values on the learning process contained in the film Dangerous Minds. The use of research methods that are seen from the type of research that uses a qualitative study/approach is to observe and direct the film. As for analyzing the authors using a qualitative descriptive analysis technique, that describes the values contained in the film. The results of this research show that there are learning values in Film Dangerous Minds, which are various theories of learning namely, theories of learning behaviorism, learning Theory of cognitivism, learning theory of constructivism, learning theory of humanism. Then several methods of learning are methods of learning questions and answers, methods of learning recitation (giving assignments), methods of learning lectures, learning methods of discussion.

In this article I argue for criteria in evaluating the persuasiveness of interpretative work: propositional factuality, argumentative validity and conceptual coherence. With the above criteria in mind I analyze Slavoj Źižek's work on film—overall rhetorical strategy employed, film theories supported and interpretative work undertaken. I demonstrate that Źižek's film theory is plagued by hasty generalizations and inaccurate formal analyses which make it fail to compete with its main rival—cognitivism. I point to the conceptual incoherence of the key philosophical term Źižek near-ubiquitously resorts to in his interpretative work—the Real. Finally, the identification of repetition as a key rhetorical strategy allows me to dismiss numerous interpretative and theoretical claims Źižek bases on a limited set of fixed examples by demonstrating that their descriptions are factually incorrect.

AbstractThe study of mainstream consumers of fiction is still limited, as is research of naturalistic reading situations. In this paper I argue that a combination of reception theory and discursive psychology – discursive reception research – can be a fruitful method for empirical literary studies. Reception theory gains both a way to adequately analyze conversations about literature (and other aesthetic products), and the opportunity to study how the reception is done and how literature is used, while discursive psychology, in turn, gains the opportunity to »dementalize« a practice that has previously been surrounded by a strict cognitivist paradigm. Literature and other aesthetic products such as film and theater often deal with existential questions. In this way, conversation data on aesthetic reception provides a greater breadth of such content than does other natural conversation data. I argue that discursive psychology provides systematic tools and concepts for analyzing talk that can be useful for literary scholars who mostly deal with fiction. In addition, discourse analysis of conversation transcripts resembles the analysis of literary texts, making talk seem less alien to analyze for those who are accustomed to studying written text. The analytical tools used in discursive psychology thus provide literary scholars with adequate help for the analysis of conversations. The advantage of using discursive psychology and discourse analysis when researching reception is that a detailed analysis of the interaction reveals how participants create a shared reading of literature (Fish 1998). In much of the previous reception research, the researcher has only considered the respondent’s answer and not how the answer, or the reading, emerges in the conversation. In some examples, I show how an interactional focus on booktalk enables us to highlight children’s voices as part of a common social practice, for example in a discussion about withdrawing when one is feeling sad. I also show how the booktalk participants refer to traditional gender positions in a conversation about the characters in a book. I show how a teacher presents his own hypothesis about people from other parts of the world in booktalk. My hope is to add another dimension and in this way highlight the importance of teachers taking careful consideration when they use fiction – books as well as film – in an attempt to create contrasting images to undemocratic conditions, as the Swedish school curriculum requires. In addition to the experiences conveyed in the conversations, I also show examples of how people in conversation about literature can position themselves as, e. g., a booklover, a guy or as enlightened. This type of analysis also gives insights into how booktalk reception is done. Detailed analyses of conversations about books provide opportunities to study the connection between fiction and life. In this way, our knowledge of literature in practice increases, allowing us to address questions such as: How is literature used to create ourselves and position others, to portray us as good or well-read, as belonging to the cultural elite or as not being a snob? How can discussions about literature be used to quarrel, flirt, make friendships, etc.? How are the concepts ›reader‹ and ›non-reader‹ construed in young people’s identity work?

RESUMENEl presente trabajo trata de exponer el trasfondo (neo)kantiano de la filosofía del cine de Hugo Munsterberg. Nuestro autor, reputado psicólogo experimental y profesor de Harvard, elaboró en 1916 una obra que está considerada la primera manifestación sistemática de la filosofía del cine: The photoplay: a psychological study. Nos centraremos en este libro y lo pondremos en relación con otros textos de Munsterberg en los que su teoría estética aparece. Por otro lado, y sin perder de vista la intención de rescatar los aspectos kantianos de su posición, intentaremos ofrecer un contexto teórico e intelectual de las motivaciones y temáticas de nuestro autor. PALABRAS CLAVEFILOSOFÍA DEL CINE; TEORÍA DEL CINE; MUNSTERBERG; KANTISMO; ESTÉTICA; COGNITIVISMOABSTRACTThis paper aims to explain the Kantian background of Hugo Munsterberg’s philosophy of film. Our author, who was a renowned experimental psychologist and professor at Harvard, in 1916 produced a work that is considered the first systematic manifestation of film theory: The photoplay: a psychological study . We will focus on this book but also we’ll relate it to other Munsterberg’s texts in which his aesthetic theory appears. On the other hand, we will try to offer a theoretical and intellectual context in order to contextualize all his motivations and themes. KEY WORDSPHILOSOPHY OF FILM; THEORY OF FILM; MUNSTERBERG; KANTIANISM; AESTHETICS; COGNITIVISM

Film adaptation is an ambiguous term, both semantically and conceptually. Among its multiple connotations, the word “adaptation” may signify an artistic composition that has been recast in a new form, an alteration in the structure or function of an organism to make it better fitted for survival, or a modification in individual or social activity in adjustment to social surroundings. What all these definitions have in common is a tacitly implied hierarchy and valorisation: they presume the existence of an origin to which the recast work of art is indebted, or of biological or societal constraints to which the individual should conform in order to survive. The bias implied in the very connotations of the word has affected the theory and study of film adaptation. This bias is most noticeably reflected in the criterion of fidelity, which has been the major standard for evaluating film adaptations ever since George Bluestone’s 1957 pivotal Novels into Films. “Fidelity criticism,” observes McFarlane, “depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the film-maker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with” (7). But such an approach, Leitch argues, is rooted in several unacknowledged but entrenched misconceptions. It privileges literature over film, casts a false aura of originality on the precursor text, and ignores the fact that all texts, whether literary or cinematic, are essentially intertexts. As Kristeva, along with other poststructuralist theorists, has taught us, any text is an amalgam of others, a part of a larger fabric of cultural discourse (64-91). “A text is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash”, writes Barthes in 1977 (146), and 15 years later film theoretician Robert Stam elaborates: “The text feeds on and is fed into an infinitely permutating intertext, which is seen through evershifting grids of interpretation” (57). The poststructuralists’ view of texts draws on the structuralists’ view of language, which is conceived as a system that pre-exists the individual speaker and determines subjectivity. These assumptions counter the Romantic ideology of individualism, with its associated concepts of authorial originality and a text’s single, unified meaning, based on the author’s intention. “It is language which speaks, not the author,” declares Barthes, “to write is to reach the point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not me” (143). In consequence, the fidelity criterion of film adaptation may be regarded as an outdated vestige of the Romantic world-view. If all texts quote or embed fragments of earlier texts, the notion of an authoritative literary source, which the cinematic version should faithfully reproduce, is no longer valid. Film adaptation should rather be perceived as an intertextual practice, contributing to a dynamic interpretive exchange between the literary and cinematic texts, an exchange in which each text can be enriched, modified or subverted. The relationship between Jonathan Nolan’s short story “Memento Mori” and Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2001) is a case in point. Here there was no source text, as the writing of the story did not precede the making of the film. The two processes were concurrent, and were triggered by the same basic idea, which Jonathan discussed with his brother during a road trip from Chicago to LA. Christopher developed the idea into a film and Jonathan turned it into a short story; he also collaborated in the film script. Moreover, Jonathan designed otnemem> (memento in reverse), the official Website, which contextualises the film’s fictional world, while increasing its ambiguity. What was adapted here was an idea, and each text explores in different ways the narrative, ontological and epistemological implications of that idea. The story, the film and the Website produce a multi-layered intertextual fabric, in which each thread potentially unravels the narrative possibilities suggested by the other threads. Intertextuality functions to increase ambiguity, and is therefore thematically relevant, for “Memento Mori”, Memento and otnemem> are three fragmented texts in search of a coherent narrative. The concept of narrative may arguably be one of the most overused and under-defined terms in academic discourse. In the context of the present paper, the most productive approach is that of Wilkens, Hughes, Wildemuth and Marchionini, who define narrative as a chain of events related by cause and effect, occurring in time and space, and involving agency and intention. In fiction or in film, intention is usually associated with human agents, who can be either the characters or the narrator. It is these agents who move along the chain of causes and effects, so that cause-effect and agency work together to make the narrative. This narrative paradigm underpins mainstream Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960. In Narration in the Fiction Film, David Bordwell writes: The classical Hollywood film presents psychologically defined individuals who struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or to attain specific goals. … The story ends with a decisive victory or defeat, a resolution of the problem, and a clear achievement, or non achievement, of the goals. The principal causal agency is thus the character … . In classical fabula construction, causality is the prime unifying principle. (157) The large body of films flourishing in America between the years 1941 and 1958 collectively dubbed film noir subvert this narrative formula, but only partially. As accurately observed by Telotte, the devices of flashback and voice-over associated with the genre implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth and foregrounds the rift between reality and perception (3, 20). Yet in spite of the narrative experimentation that characterises the genre, the viewer of a classical film noir film can still figure out what happened in the fictional world and why, and can still reconstruct the story line according to sequential and causal schemata. This does not hold true for the intertextual composite consisting of Memento, “Memento Mori” and otnemem>. The basic idea that generated the project was that of a self-appointed detective who obsessively investigates and seeks to revenge his wife’s rape and murder, while suffering from a total loss of short term memory. The loss of memory precludes learning and the acquisition of knowledge, so the protagonist uses scribbled notes, Polaroid photos and information tattooed onto his skin, in an effort to reconstruct his fragmented reality into a coherent and meaningful narrative. Narrativity is visually foregrounded: the protagonist reads his body to make sense of his predicament. To recap, the narrative paradigm relies on a triad of terms: connectedness (a chain of events), causality, and intentionality. The basic situation in Memento and “Memento Mori”, which involves a rupture in the protagonist’s/narrator’s psychological time, entails a breakdown of all three pre-requisites of narrativity. Since the protagonists of both story and film are condemned, by their memory deficiency, to living in an eternal present, they are unable to experience the continuity of time and the connectedness of events. The disruption of temporality inevitably entails the breakdown of causality: the central character’s inability to determine the proper sequence of events prevents him from being able to distinguish between cause and effect. Finally, the notion of agency is also problematised, because agency implies the existence of a stable, identifiable subject, and identity is contingent on the subject’s uninterrupted continuity across time and change. The subversive potential of the basic narrative situation is heightened by the fact that both Memento and “Memento Mori” are focalised through the consciousness and perception of the main character. This means that the story, as well as the film, is conveyed from the point of view of a narrator who is constitutionally unable to experience his life as a narrative. This conundrum is addressed differently in the story and in the film, both thematically and formally. “Memento Mori” presents, in a way, the backdrop to Memento. It focuses on the figure of Earl, a brain damaged protagonist suffering from anterograde amnesia, who is staying in a blank, anonymous room, that we assume to be a part of a mental institution. We also assume that Earl’s brain damage results from a blow to the head that he received while witnessing the rape and murder of his wife. Earl is bent on avenging his wife’s death. To remind himself to do so, he writes messages to himself, which he affixes on the walls of his room. Leonard Shelby is Memento’s cinematic version of Earl. By Leonard’s own account, he has an inability to form memories. This, he claims, is the result of neurological damage sustained during an attack on him and his wife, an attack in which his wife was raped and killed. To be able to pursue his wife’s killers, he has recourse to various complex and bizarre devices—Polaroid photos, a quasi-police file, a wall chart, and inscriptions tattooed onto his skin—in order to replace his memory. Hampered by his affliction, Leonard trawls the motels and bars of Southern California in an effort to gather evidence against the killer he believes to be named “John G.” Leonard’s faulty memory is deviously manipulated by various people he encounters, of whom the most crucial are a bartender called Natalie and an undercover cop named Teddy, both involved in a lucrative drug deal. So far for a straightforward account of the short story and the film. But there is nothing straightforward about either Memento or “Memento Mori”. The basic narrative premise, consisting of a protagonist/narrator suffering from a severe memory deficit, is a condition entailing far-reaching psychological and philosophical implications. In the following discussion, I would like to focus on these two implications and to tie them in to the notions of narrativity, intertextuality, and eventually, adaptation. The first implication of memory loss is the dissolution of identity. Our sense of identity is contingent on our ability to construct an uninterrupted personal narrative, a narrative in which the present self is continuous with the past self. In Oneself as Another, his philosophical treatise on the concept of selfhood, Paul Ricoeur queries: “do we not consider human lives to be more readable when they have been interpreted in terms of the stories that people tell about them?” He concludes by observing that “interpretation of the self … finds in narrative, among others signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation” (ft. 114). Ricoeur further suggests that the sense of selfhood is contingent on four attributes: numerical identity, qualitative identity, uninterrupted continuity across time and change, and finally, permanence in time that defines sameness. The loss of memory subverts the last two attributes of personal identity, the sense of continuity and permanence over time, and thereby also ruptures the first two. In “Memento Mori” and Memento, the disintegration of identity is formally rendered through the fragmentation of the literary and cinematic narratives, respectively. In Jonathan Nolan’s short story, traditional linear narrative is disrupted by shifts in point of view and by graphic differences in the shape of the print on the page. “Memento Mori” is alternately narrated in the first and in the third person. The first person segments, which constitute the present of the story, are written by Earl to himself. As his memory span is ten-minute long, his existence consists of “just the same ten minutes, over and over again” (Nolan, 187). Fully aware of the impending fading away of memory, Earl’s present-version self leaves notes to his future-version self, in an effort to situate him in time and space and to motivate him to the final action of revenge. The literary device of alternating points of view formally subverts the notion of identity as a stable unity. Paradoxically, rather than setting him apart from the rest of us, Earl’s brain damage foregrounds his similarity. “Every man is broken into twenty-four-hour fractions,” observes Earl, comforting his future self by affirming his basic humanity, “Your problem is a little more acute, maybe, but fundamentally the same thing” (Nolan, 189). His observation echoes Beckett’s description of the individual as “the seat of a constant process of decantation … to the vessel containing the fluid of past time” (Beckett, 4-5). Identity, suggests Jonathan Nolan, following Beckett, among other things, is a theoretical construct. Human beings are works in progress, existing in a state of constant flux. We are all fragmented beings—the ten-minute man is only more so. A second strategy employed by Jonathan to convey the discontinuity of the self is the creation of visual graphic disunity. As noted by Yellowlees Douglas, among others, the static, fixed nature of the printed page and its austere linearity make it ideal for the representation of our mental construct of narrative. The text of “Memento Mori” appears on the page in three different font types: the first person segments, Earl’s admonitions to himself, appear in italics; the third person segments are written in regular type; and the notes and signs are capitalised. Christopher Nolan obviously has recourse to different strategies to reach the same ends. His principal technique, and the film’s most striking aspect, is its reversed time sequence. The film begins with a crude Polaroid flash photograph of a man’s body lying on a decaying wooden floor. The image in the photo gradually fades, until the camera sucks the picture up. The photograph presents the last chronological event; the film then skips backwards in ten-minute increments, mirroring the protagonist’s memory span. But the film’s time sequence is not simply a reversed linear structure. It is a triple-decker narrative, mirroring the three-part organisation of the story. In the opening scene, one comes to realise that the film-spool is running backwards. After several minutes the film suddenly reverses and runs forward for a few seconds. Then there is a sudden cut to a different scene, in black and white, where the protagonist (who we have just learned is called Leonard) begins to talk, out of the blue, about his confusion. Soon the film switches to a color scene, again unconnected, in which the “action” of the film begins. In the black and white scenes, which from then on are interspersed with the main action, Leonard attempts to understand what is happening to him and to explain (to an unseen listener) the nature of his condition. The “main action” of the film follows a double temporal structure: while each scene, as a unit of action, runs normally forward, each scene is triggered by the following, rather than by the preceding scene, so that we are witnessing a story whose main action goes back in time as the film progresses (Hutchinson and Read, 79). A third narrative thread, interspersed with the other two, is a story that functions as a foil to the film’s main action. It is the story of Sammy Jankis: one of the cases that Leonard worked on in his past career as an insurance investigator. Sammy was apparently suffering from anterograde amnesia, the same condition that Leonard is suffering from now. Sammy’s wife filed an insurance claim on his behalf, a claim that Leonard rejected on the grounds that Sammy’s condition was merely psychosomatic. Hoping to confirm Leonard’s diagnosis, Sammy’s diabetic wife puts her husband to the test. He fails the test as he tenderly administers multiple insulin injections to her, thereby causing her death. As Leonard’s beloved wife also suffered from diabetes, and as Teddy (the undercover cop) eventually tells Leonard that Sammy never had a wife, the Sammy Jankis parable functions as a mise en abyme, which can either corroborate or subvert the narrative that Leonard is attempting to construct of his own life. Sammy may be seen as Leonard’s symbolic double in that his form of amnesia foreshadows the condition with which Leonard will eventually be afflicted. This interpretation corroborates Leonard’s personal narrative of his memory loss, while tainting him with the blame for the death of Sammy’s wife. But the camera also suggests a more unsettling possibility—Leonard may ultimately be responsible for the death of his own wife. The scene in which Sammy, condemned by his amnesia, administers to his wife a repeated and fatal shot of insulin, is briefly followed by a scene of Leonard pinching his own wife’s thigh before her insulin shot, a scene recurring in the film like a leitmotif. The juxtaposition of the two scenes suggests that it is Leonard who, mistakenly or deliberately, has killed his wife, and that ever since he has been projecting his guilt onto others: the innocent victims of his trail of revenge. In this ironic interpretive twist, it is Leonard, rather than Sammy, who has been faking his amnesia. The parable of Sammy Jankis highlights another central concern of Memento and “Memento Mori”: the precarious nature of truth. This is the second psychological and philosophical implication of what Leonard persistently calls his “condition”, namely his loss of memory. The question explicitly raised in the film is whether memory records or creates, if it retains the lived life or reshapes it into a narrative that will confer on it unity and meaning. The answer is metaphorically suggested by the recurring shots of a mirror, which Leonard must use to read his body inscriptions. The mirror, as Lacan describes it, offers the infant his first recognition as a coherent, unique self. But this recognition is a mis-recognition, for the reflection has a coherence and unity that the subject both lacks and desires. The body inscriptions that Leonard can read only in the mirror do not necessarily testify to the truth. But they do enable him to create a narrative that makes his life worth living. A Lacanian reading of the mirror image has two profoundly unsettling implications. It establishes Leonard as a morally deficient, rather than neurologically deficient, human being, and it suggests that we are not fundamentally different from him. Leonard’s intricate system of notes and body inscriptions builds up an inventory of set representations to which he can refer in all his future experiences. Thus when he wakes up naked in bed with a woman lying beside him, he looks among his Polaroid photographs for a picture which he can match with her, which will tell him what the woman’s name is and what he can expect from her on the basis of past experience. But this, suggest Hutchinson and Read, is an external representation of operations that all of us perform mentally (89). We all respond to sensory input by constructing internal representations that form the foundations of our psyche. This view underpins current theories of language and of the mind. Semioticians tell us that the word, the signifier, refers to a mental representation of an object rather than to the object itself. Cognitivists assume that cognition consists in the operation of mental items which are symbols for real entities. Leonard’s apparently bizarre method of apprehending reality is thus essentially an externalisation of memory. But if, cognitively and epistemologically speaking, Lennie is less different from us than we would like to think, this implication may also extend to our moral nature. Our complicity with Leonard is mainly established through the film’s complex temporal structure, which makes us viscerally share the protagonist’s/narrator’s confusion and disorientation. We become as unable as he is to construct a single, coherent and meaningful narrative: the film’s obscurity is built in. Memento’s ambiguity is enhanced by the film’s Website, which presents a newspaper clipping about the attack on Leonard and his wife, torn pages from police and psychiatric reports, and a number of notes from Leonard to himself. While blurring the boundaries between story and film by suggesting that Leonard, like Earl, may have escaped from a mental institution, otnemem> also provides evidence that can either confirm or confound our interpretive efforts, such as a doctor’s report suggesting that “John G.” may be a figment of Leonard’s imagination. The precarious nature of truth is foregrounded by the fact that the narrative Leonard is trying to construct, as well as the narrative in which Christopher Nolan has embedded him, is a detective story. The traditional detective story proceeds from a two-fold assumption: truth exists, and it can be known. But Memento and “Memento Mori” undermine this epistemological confidence. They suggest that truth, like identity, is a fictional construct, derived from the tales we tell ourselves and recount to others. These tales do not coincide with objective reality; they are the prisms we create in order to understand reality, to make our lives bearable and worth living. Narratives are cognitive patterns that we construct to make sense of the world. They convey our yearning for coherence, closure, and a single unified meaning. The overlapping and conflicting threads interweaving Memento, “Memento Mori” and the Website otnemem> simultaneously expose and resist our nostalgia for unity, by evoking a multiplicity of meanings and creating an intertextual web that is the essence of all adaptation. References Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, 1977. Beckett, Samuel. Proust. London: Chatto and Windus, 1931. Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. Berkley and Los Angeles: California UP, 1957. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Hutchinson, Phil, and Rupert Read. “Memento: A Philosophical Investigation.” Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell. Ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough. Hampshire: Palgrave, 2005. 72-93. Kristeva, Julia. “World, Dialogue and Novel.” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon S. Rudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora. New York: Columbia UP, 1980. 64-91. Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” Ēcrits: A Selection. New York: Norton 1977. 1-7. Leitch, Thomas. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (2003): 149-71. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Nolan, Jonathan. “Memento Mori.” The Making of Memento. Ed. James Mottram. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 183-95. Nolan, Jonathan. otnemem. 24 April 2007 http://otnemem.com>. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. 54-76. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP, 1989. Wilkens, T., A. Hughes, B.M. Wildemuth, and G. Marchionini. “The Role of Narrative in Understanding Digital Video.” 24 April 2007 http://www.open-video.org/papers/Wilkens_Asist_2003.pdf>. Yellowlees Douglass, J. “Gaps, Maps and Perception: What Hypertext Readers (Don’t) Do.” 24 April 2007 http://www.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf3/douglas_p3.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (May 2007) "Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>.

Bodily Sensation in Contemporary Extreme Horror Film provides a theory of horror film spectatorship rooted in the physiology of the viewer. In a novel contribution to the field of film studies research, it seeks to integrate contemporary scientific theories of mind with psychological paradigms of film interpretation. Proceeding from a connectionist model of brain function that proposes psychological processes are underpinned by neurology, this thesis contends that whilst conscious engagement with film often appears to be driven by psychosocial conditions – including cultural influence, gender dynamics and social situation – it is physiology and bodily sensation that provide the infrastructure upon which this superstructure rests. Drawing upon the philosophical works of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Alain Berthoz, the argument concentrates upon explicating the specific bodily sensations and experiences that contribute to the creation of implicit structures of understanding, or embodied schemata, that we apply to the world round us. Integrating philosophy with contemporary neurological research in the spheres of cognition and neurocinematics, a number of correspondences are drawn between physiological states and the concomitant psychological states often perceived to arise simultaneously alongside them. The thesis offers detailed analysis of a selection of extreme horror films that, it is contended, conscientiously incorporate the body of the viewer in the process of spectatorship through manipulation of visual, auditory, vestibular, gustatory and nociceptive sensory stimulations, simulations and the embodied schemata that arise from everyday physiological experience. The phenomenological film criticism of Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks is adopted and expanded upon in order to suggest that the organicity of the human body guides and structures the psychosocial engagement with, and interpretation of, contemporary extreme horror film. This project thus exposes the body as the architectural foundation upon which conscious interaction with film texts occurs.

Este trabalho relata aspectos do processo criativo da redação de um roteiro cinematográfico de longa metragem. Procurou-se investigar, durante o fazer do roteiro, o modo como a narrativa pode ser utilizada para despertar emoções e interesse no espectador. Através da revisão de obras de teóricos cognitivistas do cinema e de manuais de roteiro, levanta-se considerações sobre possíveis estratégias para se envolver emocionalmente o espectador. Para ilustrar estas estratégias, é apresentada uma análise da obra Aconteceu naquela Noite (1934). A partir destas considerações, realiza-se a descrição do processo de escrita do roteiro, procurando demonstrar de que forma as considerações teóricas influenciaram neste processo e no produto final, o roteiro completo.
This dissertation reports some aspects of the creative process on writing a feature movie script. During the screenwriting, it was attempted to investigate how the narrative can be used to elicit emotions and interest in the spectatorship. Through the review of Cognitivist Film Theory Scholars and Screenwriting Guides, considerations were raised on possible strategies to emotionally involve the viewer while telling the story. To elucidate these strategies, the analysis of the movie It happened one night (1934) follows. Having reached these considerations, the script is presented along with the trajectory of its writing.

This thesis addresses a methodological impasse within film studies which is of ongoing concern because of the way that it demonstrates the discipline’s conflicting approaches to ideology. This impasse arises because proponents of poststructuralism and cognitivism utilise methodologies which not only make internally consistent interpretations of films, but are also able to discount the theoretical criticisms of the rival paradigm. Attempts to debate and transcend these divisions have been unsuccessful. This thesis contributes to this gap in knowledge by arguing that both academic theories (such as poststructuralism and cognitivism) and filmmaking practice are influenced by the same historically contingent socio-cultural determinants. Academic claims about film’s effects can then be conceptualised as aggregates of thought which are analogous to the dramatic manipulations that filmmakers unconsciously work into their films, with both forms of cultural activity (academic theorising and filmmaking practice) influenced by the same diachronic socio-cultural contexts. The term that I use for these specific forms of filmmaking practice is writing formations. A filmic writing formation is a form of filmmaking practice influenced by the same cultural ideas which also inform academic hermeneutics. The thesis does not undertake a conventional extended literature review as a means to identify the gap in the literature. This is because contested theoretical discourses are part of the thesis’ subject matter. I analyse academic literature in the same way that I analyse film, conceptualising both 3 activities as being determined by the same specific historical and socio-cultural contexts. The thesis analyses Shakespearean films because they offer multiple diachronic texts which are foregrounded as interpretations, and in which different approaches to filmmaking can be clearly compared and contrasted across time. They clarify the complex and often unconscious relationships between academic theorising and filmic writing formations by facilitating an investigation of how the historic development of academic discourse relates to the historic development of filmmaking practice. The corpus of texts for analysis has been confined to Anglo-American realist film adaptations, and European and American debates about, and criticism of, realist film from the advent of poststructuralism in the late 1960s to the present day. The thesis is structured as an investigation into the current theoretical impasse and the unsatisfactory attempts to transcend it, the articulation of a new methodology relating to filmic writing formations, the elaboration of how different filmic writing formations operate within realist film adaptation, and a close case study of the unfolding historical processes whereby academic theory and filmmaking practice relate to the same socio-cultural determinants using four adaptations of Hamlet from different time periods. It concludes by explaining how filmmakers exploit and manipulate forms of filmic grammar which correspond to academic theories about those forms of filmic grammar, with both activities influenced by the same underlying diachronic culture. The thesis argues, then, that academic poststructuralism and cognitivism can be 4 conceptualised as explanations for different but contiguous aspects of filmmaking practice, rather than as mutually exclusive claims about film’s effects.

Negli ultimi decenni i film studies stanno spostando la propria attenzione sul livello corporeo e affettivo dell’esperienza filmica. Adottando un approccio fenomenologico e focalizzandosi sulla nozione di empatia, la tesi studia le strategie del coinvolgimento dello spettatore cinematografico nei film di successo contemporanei. Il capitolo 1 rintraccia le diverse accezioni di empatia in filosofia, estetica, psicologia e nelle neuroscienze cognitive. Il capitolo 2 traccia una genealogia dell’empatia nelle teorie psicologiche ed estetiche del film. Il capitolo 3 esplora la rilevanza della teoria dell'atto empatico di Edith Stein per la filmologia e ne propone un'applicazione allo studio dell’esperienza filmica contemporanea. Il capitolo 4 analizza un ampio corpus di film contemporanei individuando quattro “figure aree” del coinvolgimento filmico: l’acrobazia, la caduta, il volo e il movimento in assenza di gravità. Attraverso la simulazione empatica dei movimenti nel film e del film, lo spettatore esperisce inavvertitamente l’intenzionalità implicata nelle forme e negli oggetti della rappresentazione, cogliendo con la propria sensibilità il senso di un’esperienza che trascende l’immanenza del film e contribuisce al processo di attribuzione di senso al Mondo, all’Altro e al Sé.
In recent decades film studies have shifted their focus to the emotional and bodily level of film experience. By adopting a phenomenological approach, this dissertation deals with the strategies of the film spectator’s involvement in contemporary mainstream narrative films. Chapter 1 reconstructs the meanings of the notion of empathy in philosophy, aesthetics, psychology and neurocognitive research. Chapter 2 traces a genealogy of empathy in film theories, from Bergsonism to Cognitivism, and evaluates the relevance of Simulation-Theory to film studies. Chapter 3 explores the relevance of Edith Stein’s phenomenological theory of empathy to film theory and assumes it is a theoretical model to investigate the “intensified” nature of both film design style and film reception style. A film is constructed and experienced on the basis of the “circuit of empathy”, a stratified system of different species of empathetic interaction, acting at senso-motorial, perceptual, cognitive and emotional levels with the aim of generating both an aesthetic and an inter-subjective experience. Chapter 4 analyses a vast corpus of contemporary films and focuses on four “aerial figures” of involvement and their combination: acrobatics, falling, flying, and non-gravitational movements, both of the actor’s human body and of the film’s anthropomorphic body. In the Conclusions, it is argued that the spectator internally imitates these “double” movements and inadvertently experiences the intentionality implied in the figures. Contemporary film spectators empathetically “get”, with their own sensibility, the senses of an experience that transcends the immanence of the film and contributes to the process of “giving” sense to the World, the Other, and the Self.

Vu que la modulation multi-porteuses est largement utilisée dans les communications sans fil et la radio cognitive (CR pour “Cognitive Radio”) améliore l’utilisation des ressources radio et du spectre, nous nous concentrons sur les réseaux radio cognitifs (CR) pour faire progresser l’allocation des ressources, le routage, et l’ajustement de la puissance d’émission vers les récepteurs (synthèse de faisceaux ou beamforming) dans cette thèse. Nous étudions deux types de modulations multi-porteuses :Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) à base d’ondelettes (WOFDM pourWavelet OFDM) et OFDM dans sa forme classique ou traditionnelle (OFDM s’appuyant sur la transformation de Fourier pour partager les ressources). WOFDM adopte Wavelet Packet Modulation (WPM) pour obtenir des lobes secondaires beaucoup plus faibles dans la densité spectrale de puissance du signal transmis en comparaison à OFDM. WPM permet de surcroit à WOFDM de s’affranchir du Préfixe Cyclique (indispensable à OFDM) et d’exploiter l’égalisation pour combattre l’Interférence entre Symboles (ISI). Nous évaluons la performance de WOFDM sous différentes conditions du canal radio. Nous comparons la performance de WOFDM, qui s’appuie sur l’égalisation dans le domaine temporel, à celle de OFDM, qui requiert l’utilisation du Préfixe Cyclique et opère dans le domaine fréquentiel
In view of the wide usage of multicarrier modulation in wireless communications and the prominent contribution of Cognitive Radio (CR) to deal with critical shortage of spectrum resource, we focus on multicarrier based cognitive radio networks to investigate general resource allocation issues: subcarrier allocation, power allocation, routing, and beamforming in this thesis. We investigate two types of multicarrier modulation: Wavelet-based Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (WOFDM) and Fourier-based Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). WOFDM adopts Wavelet Packet Modulation (WPM). Compared with fourier-based OFDM, wavelet-based OFDM achieves much lower side lobe in the transmitted signal. Wavelet-based OFDM excludes Cyclic Prefix (CP) which is used in fourier-based OFDM systems. Wavelet-based OFDM turns to exploit equalization to combat Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI). We evaluate the performance of WOFDM under different channel conditions. We compare the performance of wavelet-based OFDM using equalization in the time domain to that of fourier-based OFDM with CP and the equalization in the frequency domain

This article analyzes the theoretical and methodological assumptions which influenced ecocritical writings on film. It evaluates the most pragmatically useful theoretical framework for eco-film criticism and examines the strengths and weaknesses of the different theories and methods that have been employed by ecocritics working in film studies. It considers eco-film criticism and ideological analysis within the psycho-semiotic paradigm and the cognitivist film theory. This article also discusses some potential future developments in eco-film criticism.

In this section of the interview, Raymond Bellour explains why he thinks hypnosis is superior as a model for explaining the effects of cinema, on the grounds that it involves a somatic displacement that comes from outside the spectator. At the same time, he explains his objections to cognitivist film theory. Finally, Bellour recounts how his interest in animals, which began in the 1970s, derived from his perception of the way in which animal figures were being used in American cinema in films like Howard Hawks’s Bringing up Baby and Monkey Business and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, which in turn led him to consider the issue of animality itself.

Cognitive Film and Media Ethics provides a grounding in the use of cognitive science to address key questions in film, television, and screen media ethics. This book extends prior works in cognitive media studies to answer normative and ethically prescriptive questions: what could make media morally good or bad, and what, then, are the respective responsibilities of media producers and consumers? Moss-Wellington makes a primary claim that normative propositions are a kind of rigor, in that they force media theorists to draw more active ought conclusions from descriptive is arguments. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics presents the rigors of normative reasoning, cognitive science, and consequentialist ethics as complementary, arguing that each seeks progressive elaboration on its own models of causality, and causal projections are crucial for any reflection on our moral responsibilities in the world. A hermeneutics of “ethical cognitivism” is applied in the latter half of the book, with each essay addressing a different case study in film, television, news, and social media: cinema that sets out to inspire moral dissonance in the viewer, satirical and humorous depictions of family drama in film and television, the politics of the romantic comedy, formal aspects of screen media bullying in an era dubbed the “television renaissance,” and contemporary problems in the conflation of news and social media. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics synthesizes current research in social psychology, anthropology, memory studies, emotion and cognition, personality and media selection, and evolutionary biology, integrating wide-ranging concepts from the various disciplines that make up cognitive theory to provide new vantages on the applied ethics of film and screen media.

This opening chapter serves to introduce the principal focus of the book, which explores the felt experience of mental image-making while watching film. The introductory discussion positions the book first of all in relation to cognitivist work on imagination within film studies and points to the gap in scholarship on spectatorship regarding the experience of the image-making capacity of the imagination, situating it within a broader debate on mental imagery. The chapter engages with film theory and philosophy that anticipates the kind of image-making that will be focused on throughout the book and introduces what it means to imagine in images. It also justifies the book’s concentration on sound rather than silent cinema, since the verbal dimension and soundtracks are crucial to the kind of direction that produces the most vivid mental images, and the verbal dimension in particular permits introduction of the work of Elaine Scarry on guided imagining. It is the vivacity of such mental images that this first chapter outlines. In conceptual terms, this chapter and the following chapter serve to set up the key notion of ‘dual vision’ – of seeing what is on screen and ‘seeing’ what is in the mind – that informs the entire study.

Chapter 7 explores cognitivism as an alternative to realist and semiotic theories of the nature of film. The chapter develops a diagnostic recognition framework for film derived from a biased competition theory of attention and research on the role played by situation models in narrative comprehension.

Chapter 7 of Style in Narrative parallels chapter 3 in taking up the level of narrational style for the scope of a single work. However, in this case, the narration at issue is visual rather than verbal. In connection with this, the chapter considers an important argument in film studies about point-of-view (PoV) shots. For some time, film theorists took PoV shots to foster identification with the character whose point of view was depicted. Cognitive film theorists argued forcefully that identification was much more likely with the target of observation than with the perspective of the camera. Hogan’s contention here is that, though the cognitivists’ argument is largely correct, there can be some significant emotional effects of PoV editing, especially when it involves certain sorts of camera movement. These effects can be understood by reference to neuroscientific research on embodiment. Lu’s film presents a virtual catalog of the types and emotional functions of PoV shots, also illustrating many of their possible thematic consequences.

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.