Projections

Contemporary theories of narrative comprehension assume that people build mental models for narrative experiences that are structured around situational relationships such as time, space, and causality. The dominance of this perspective in cognitive psychology arguably emerged in the mid-1990s. Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film is remarkable in how well it dovetails with contemporary theory and the fact that it was written at least ten years before this theoretical perspective became dominant in the psychological literature on narrative comprehension. In this paper, we discuss the relationship and influence of Bordwell’s masterpiece of research focusing on the comprehension of narrative film.

These comments concern Bordwell’s explicit and implicit claims about cinematic authorship in his 1985 Narration in the Fiction Film. Distinctions are drawn between causal and attributionist conceptions of authorship, and between actualist and fictionalist views about the spectator’s attitude toward authorship. A key question concerns the autonomy or independence of a viewer’s competent uptake of story and narration, as opposed to its dependence on knowledge of authorship or authorial design. The example of cinematic quotation in Resnais’s Mon oncle d’Amérique is used to illustrate the pertinence of the latter option.

David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film is a uniquely valuable overview of narration in one medium, lucid, rigorous, rational, broadly comprehensive and finely detailed, and unequalled in any other narrative medium. But Bordwell proposes that the cognitive activity of the viewer of a fiction film is to construct the story from the film. While true, and brilliantly analyzed by Bordwell, this omits an important part of our cognitive activity: our engagement with the “author” or filmmaker, an essential part of our engagement with any fiction (or for that matter non-fiction), a response not confined to films by auteurs or to high literary fiction. Our compulsion and capacity to engage with characters, actors, and filmmakers reflects our sophisticated cognition, including our ability to respond to multiple levels of intentionality and our swift emotional attunement.

This article addresses how television narratives create psychologically rich situations, those moments where viewers are able to make many distinctive and sophisticated inferences about the mental states of characters. Focusing on season five of Mad Men, it examines the extent to which individual episodes create rich situations through the information established within an individual episode, versus the degree to which rich situations are created by relying on information accrued over the course of previous episodes, as well as the extent to which these two kinds of information are blended together in a given situation. While it is easy to assume that serial narratives routinely call upon accumulated character knowledge in order to enrich viewer inferences, somewhat surprisingly, most episodes in Mad Men season five are actually largely enriched through episodic rather than serial information. The article also analyzes interesting patterns that emerge in these qualities across the entire season.

This article examines the relationship between boredom and cinema, particularly by attending to the ways in which it has been used as an aesthetic strategy in contemporary slow films. These films use long takes and dedramatization to create dead time, where narrative causality and progress are abandoned to facilitate contemplative viewing. The article argues that this mode of spectatorship exhibits close affinities to underlying features of boredom, and that filmmakers mute dramatic intensity and foreground idleness and ambiguity for a more aesthetically rewarding cinematic experience. The article explores this question through examining different types of boredom and dedramatization, before concluding with an extended analysis of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011).

The haptic turn in film studies, which has been growing in currency since the late 1990s, is gaining support from recent studies in cognitive neuroscience. This article draws on this convergence, as a productive route to investigating experimental cinema. Phil Solomon’s concept of “the physical anxiety of form itself” is taken up as a point of departure for close analysis of three films: The Secret Garden (1988), The Snowman (1995), and Walking Distance (1999). The article investigates the artist’s optical, chemical, and manual working processes, as well as the specific choice of found footage. Relying primarily on Embodied Simulation theory, the focal argument pivots on Solomon’s “physical anxiety” as it is instantiated in somatosensory arousal. Solomon’s films are analyzed as effective mediators of intersubjective engagement, of the particular “haptic” type. Experimental cinema is thus approached from outside the discursive frame of avant-garde poetics, drawing attention to new perspectives that are currently opening up for moving image studies.

This article examines the role of situational (dis)continuity and conceptual metaphor in the cinematic construal of complex cases of character perception. It claims that filmed events of the script “a character S seeing something O” can impede the continuity of real-life perception by eliciting discontinuity along two situational dimensions—the temporal dimension (i.e., one cannot directly see events in the past or the future), and the entity dimension (i.e., one cannot see oneself in the act of looking). The article concludes with a case study of Christopher Smith’s Triangle (2009) as an example of contemporary complex narrative cinema.