Neurocinema

Nel libro viene ampliamento del raggio di trattazione del campo di indagine del Cool Hunting il quale, oramai a distanza di tempo dal suo momento di esordio, ha mantenuto circoscritto il proprio perimetro di interesse agli occhi degli studiosi qualificandosi pertanto come un filone di nicchia. Il nucleo ideativo del volume si rivolge alla tematizzazione, sino a ora inesplorata, delle modalità e delle fasi tramite le quali il Cool Hunting può essere posto al servizio dello sviluppo delle strategie di di comunicazione di marca orientando e suggerendo la cornice di riferimenti simbolicisu cui queste si fondano e riconducono la propria efficacia.

Libro consultabile all'indirizzo: https://www.armandoeditore.it/catalogo/cool-hunting/

The connection between film elements and brain responses has been suggested by a number of neurocognitive studies. The studies of event segmentation, in particular, support that film editing conditions cognitive responses. After discussing the findings of these studies, this article draws on Münsterberg and Arnheim's classical cognitive approaches to film as well as on poststructuralist film theory to argue that the event segmentation approach still falls short of accounting for the impact of noncontinuous film stimuli on the brain's event segmentation, while it shares with other neurocognitive film research the tendency to naturalize narrative and continuity editing. Finally, the article points out that by approaching the findings of event segmentation studies from the perspective of complex systems neuroscience, new hypotheses can be drawn on how noncontinuous and complex film stimuli condition our brains by mediating (enabling or disrupting) event segmentation and cognitive patterning.

This article offers a close reading and a critique of Hasson et al’s Neurocinematics, focusing on its treatment of the notion of control, meaning a predictable neural and cognitive activation triggered by film stimuli. In the first part of the article I suggest that the use of control in neurocinematics on the one hand relies on a similarly problematic—but still more nuanced—use of the notion in cognitive film theory, and on the other hand reflects a unidirectional model of communication which brackets out noisy cases that diverge from predictable behavior. In the second part, I argue that these “noisy” cases are exactly the ones that pertain the most to a complex and dynamic view of brain activity and film-mind communication. The dialogue between film studies and neuroscience can become more complex too, escaping from a problematic definition of film effectiveness with regards to predictable viewer reactions.

Over the last two decades, discoveries made in the field of cognitive neuroscience have begun to permeate the humanities and social sciences. In the context of this intersection, Neurofilmology is a research program that arises at the encounter between two models of viewer: the viewer-as-mind (deriving from a cognitive/analytical approach) and the viewer-as-body (typical of the phenomenological/continental approach). Accordingly, Neurofilmology focuses on the viewer-as-organism, by investigating with both empirical and speculative epistemological tools the subject of audiovisual experience, postulated as embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, emerging, affective, and relational. This introduction is divided
into three parts. Firstly, it compares the classic filmological approach of the 1940s-50s with contemporary audiovisual media studies devoted to the analysis of viewer experience. Secondly, it outlines an epistemological and conceptual framework for the research: in this sense, it illustrates the theoretical model of the viewer-as-organism, and sketches a general outline of audiovisual experience that allows researchers to rearrange different kinds of research within a unitary framework. Thirdly, it briefly summarizes the contributions to the special issue, which includes essays by Enrico Carocci, Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja, Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, Patricia Pisters, Pia Tikka and Mauri Kaipainen, Maria Poulaki, and Temenuga Trifonova.

This article questions certain assumptions concerning film form made by the recent (neuro)psychological film research and compares them to those of precursors of film psychology like Hugo Münsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim, as well as the principles of Gestalt psychology. It is argued that principles of Gestalt psychology such as those of ‘good form’ and good continuation are still underlying the psychological research of film, becoming particularly apparent in its approach to continuity editing. Following an alternative Gestalt genealogy that links Gestalt theory with more recent dynamic models of brain activity and with accounts of brain complexity and neuronal synchronisation, the article concludes that psychological research on film needs to shift the focus from form to transformation, both in conceiving the perceptual and cognitive processing of films and in approaching film aesthetics more broadly.

This presentation examines the alignment of CG effects with the contemporary aesthetic and trope of superhuman perception and cognition of chemically- and/or computationally-enhanced protagonists. In particular, I consider the ways in which the virtual camera as a mode of revealing physically impossible and/or invisible perspectives (“bullet-time” slow motion, extended and weaving tracking shots, “fractal zooms,” microscopic and macroscopic perspectives, animations of computational code woven into the fabric of reality, etc.) conveys notions of technologically-transcendent consciousness—as well as, perhaps, transmits to the audience itself an affect of post-cinematic perception. As CG animation disregards or transforms indexical cinema, it tends to break from the conventions of representation, continuity, and identification with human characters on screen. Applying Deleuze’s notion of the time-image to such effects, the presentation considers the perhaps paradoxical notion of a Deleuzian “becoming digital” that nevertheless enfolds the enhanced brain in computational control systems. I examine recent films that express (rather than simply represent) the digital plasticity of the medium as well as mind, that embody what Steven Shaviro characterizes as a “post-cinematic affect”: films imbued with a kind of ambient, free-floating sensibility that permeates a culture of pervasive technology and neoliberal economic relations, yet cannot be attributed to any subject in particular. Beginning with The Matrix (Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999), as a seminal film that depicts the brain and world as computer through CG effects, I primarily discuss Limitless (Neil Burger, 2011) and Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014), two films in which the protagonists enhance their cognition through drugs. Limitless evokes the enhanced reality experienced by Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) while under the influence of a secret drug called NZT through a number of multiple camera and computer generated effects, including a number of “infinite” or “fractal” zoom shots that project an out-of-body experience of penetrating and/or collapsing space and time. In Lucy, which has been broadly panned as aggressively (or perhaps satirically) simple-minded about its neuroscience premise, the eponymous heroine (Scarlett Johansson) “levels up” the percentage of her “brain capacity” by absorbing the drug CPH4, which has been implanted in her abdomen. Among her various superhuman powers, Lucy is able to perceive and access streams of telecommunication as they trickle through the atmosphere (like the lines of code in The Matrix) as well as scroll through time with the swipe of her hand as if at an iPad. While these films are representations of enhanced cognition (yet often posit such notions in limited ways), I focus on the ecstatic affects of the transcendent mind as enabled through the medium. The motion picture camera has always reveled in inhuman perspectives, yet digital cinema entirely frees film from its dependence on history and the physical world, and thus invites notions of the brain and screen as infinitely malleable. The CG effects in such films that explore these fantasies of transcendent cognition imply that the mind and world alike—as nodes of information—are legible and thus ultimately programmable and perfectible.

Useful Film in (Neuro) Psychiatry Europe, 1900–1950
Update on Current Research

University of Lausanne 3-4 March 2022

**Abstract submission deadline: October 30, 2021**
A workshop is organized in the framework of the SNSF project
Cinéma et (neuro)psychiatrie en Suisse: autour de la collection Waldau, 1920-1990
https://waldau.hypotheses.org/

Focusing on the study of films shown in medical institutions, in lecture halls and at scientific conferences, this workshop has several goals: to map the state of research on works devoted to useful films in the field of neurology, psychiatry and neuropsychiatry, in Europe between 1900 and 1950; to highlight investigations on poorly known or unknown film collections; to serve as a starting point for one to two publications (journal issues). The main purpose is thus to increase our knowledge on practices that have long been considered “marginal” both in the medical humanities and in the history of cinema (and the media).