Neurofilmology

[Hearing fear, feeling fear: "The Evil Dead" and its remake.]
Through the comparative analysis of the film The Evil Dead (1981) and its remake Evil Dead (2013), this article aims at demonstrating that sound in horror films has a substantial role in eliciting fear in the perceiver, by prompting both primordial responses and higher-order inferences. I examine the biological bases that favor the fearfulness of the genre’s typical acoustical elements, such as the use of very low and very high frequencies, of strong dynamic contrasts, of crude timbres, of noisiness, and – as regards the second film – of an aggressive surround sound spatialization.

A walk suspended in mid-air, a fall at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground, an upside-down flip into space, the drift of an astronaut in the void… Analysing a wide range of films, this book brings to light a series of recurrent aesthetic motifs through which contemporary cinema destabilizes and then restores the spectator’s sense of equilibrium. The 'tensive motifs' of acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift reflect our fears and dreams and offer embodied forms of transcendence of the limits of our human condition along with an awareness of their insurmountable nature. Adopting the approach of 'Neurofilmology'—an interdisciplinary method that puts filmology, perceptual psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience into dialogue—this book implements the paradigm of embodied cognition in a new ecological epistemology of the moving-image experience.

Teorie del cinema. Il dibattito contemporaneo, a cura di Adriano D'Aloia e Ruggero Eugeni, Raffaello Cortina, Milano 2017.

Il cinema è morto. Eppure i film continuano ad alimentare le nostre visioni e le nostre emozioni sulle piattaforme web, nelle serie televisive, nelle installazioni museali. Anche la teoria del cinema è morta, sostiene qualcuno. Eppure un’appassionata riflessione sui mezzi audiovisivi continua a nutrire pratiche di ricerca e discussioni critiche. Il punto è che la teoria del cinema, come il cinema stesso, si sono geneticamente modificati. La riflessione teorica si è fatta oggi interstiziale e si produce essenzialmente nel dialogo con altre discipline: con la filosofia, intorno al concetto di esperienza; con le scienze neurocognitive, a proposito del concetto di organismo; con la teoria dei media in relazione al concetto di dispositivo. Questo libro raccoglie i contributi dei più autorevoli e originali rappresentanti dei film studies degli ultimi quindici anni, tradotti per la prima volta in italiano.

Contributi di François Albera, Raymond Bellour, Giuliana Bruno, Francesco Casetti, Antonio Damasio, Uri Hasson, Erkki Huhtamo, Friedrich Kittler, Jussi Parikka, Patricia Pisters, Carl Plantinga, Murray Smith, Tim Smith, Vivian Sobchack, Maria Tortajada

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 humanities and social sciences. This special issue of Cinéma & Cie focuses on major conceptual and epistemological arguments arising from the dialogue between audiovisual studies and neurosciences. In the context of this intersection, Neurofilmology is an interdisciplinary 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.

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.

The vivid and engaging nature of the audiovisual experience, particularly in character-driven narrative films, is specifically functional to the creation of a relationship between the spectator and the world of the film based on the perception of observed intentional actions. This essay explores the idea that the film spectator experiences a tangible relationship with the filmic objects, subjects, and environments by simulating the character’s actions and bodily postures. The hypothesis is evaluated in a theoretical neurophenomenological framework, with the aim of rethinking film spectatorship in the light of a perspective created by combining the results of neurocognitive and neurophysiological experiments with a phenomenological interpretation of the human experience.

An incipient neurofilmological turn in film and media studies promises to reframe the study of the film experience into a post-cognitive episteme that stresses the idea that the perception of visual and acoustic stimuli implies the activation of embodied forms of simulation. According to the “embodied simulation” hypothesis, the significance of the film experience emerges from the interactive mutuality of an agent (or organism) and environment, and perception evokes internal forms of action that support an empathic understanding of the character’s gestures, intentions, and emotions. These dynamics can be extended to the film’s low-level features (e.g. cinematography, camera movements, editing) and allow one to rethink the aesthetics of the film experience in the light of multimodal sensory perception.

Although the theoretical references of the embodied and enactive approach are patent (e.g. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and James Gibson’s ecology of perception), the endless appearance of new ideas risks losing one’s bearings in the traditional commitments of the field. For example: the internal re-production of the observed movements, the empathetic nature of the film-spectator relationship, and the understanding of the external world through imitation recall the principle of isomorphism – one of the central (and debated) ideas of Gestalt psychology; the so called body-mind problem and the enactivist claim that the body in as inseparable part – if not the very origin – of perception and cognition, remind one of the gestaltist fundamental claim that the human subject is able to organize local features into a larger and coherent whole; the centrality of the organism-environment coupling recalls Gestalt figure-ground reversibility and Kurt Lewin’s field theory. A number of theories proposed that are influenced by Gibson’s ecological theory but open to brain research do not countenance that such an approach would be contrary to his theorization.

As a result, their theoretical commitments of phenomenal realism and naturalistic reduction appear a lot like Rudolf Arnheim’s gestalt approach while eschewing or ignoring it. Authors are invited to go beyond Arnheim the situated author (who effectively stopped writing about film in the 1940s) to his grounding theoretical commitments. These come of course from Gestalt psychology and involve phenomenal realism (slippage between live action and animation), priority of expressive over discursive filmic features, and the value of neuroscientific heuristic reduction.

The call for essays for Cinéma&Cie #38 special issue “Gestalt Filmology. Insights on Form and Embodiment in the Film Experience” asks authors to situate their theories not according to genealogies or stated influences but basic meta-theoretical categories like naturalism (explanation) and representationalism (direct vs mediated).

In this article, I will consider the specificity of narrative in VR from the perspective of its embodied, spatial, and participatory nature. For this purpose, I will look at storytelling in VR from a neurofilmological perspective that accounts for both the cognitive and phenomenological and conceptualizes the viewer as an organism, applying an integrative view. I will probe several ideas from cognitive sciences and phenomenological cinema and media studies in order to support the above understanding of narrative in VR. I will apply these theories and ideas to specific VR case studies: Book of Distance (Randall Okita, 2019), Heterotopias (Noa Kaplan and Szilvia Ruszev, 2018), and Carne y Arena (Alejandro Iñárritu, 2017). Finally, this article will discuss the terms “ambient storytelling” (Stein and Fisher 2013), “somatic montage” (Waite 2016), and “embodied narrative” (a term used in cognitive sciences) and their relevance concerning narrative in VR.

The emphasis on immersive sound by the audiovisual industry denotes the will of providing the user with an experience which can make the punctual placement of sounds in different areas of the listening space more malleable and realistic. However a distinction must be made between at least two different models of sound space construction: Chion’s “superfield”, in which the placement of sounds is approximate; Kerins’s “ultrafield”, which implies a strict connection between the visual and the aural perspective. The first model is still dominant in cinema, while VR videos tend to include 360° sound. My current research on this matter aims at understanding the potentiality of these technologies using the embodied simulation framework, because thanks to its spatialization capabilities sound significantly contributes to reduce the segregation from cinematic space and to encourage the possibility for the user to simulate him/herself present in such space. A psychological experiment demonstrated that the difference between the impact of a 2-channel stimulus and that of the same stimulus in 5.1 can be quite different. In order to deepen such investigation, I planned, along with Profs. Gallese and Guerra (Università di Parma), a neuroscientific experiment to evaluate the physiological response of the user to immersive filmic sound.

The acoustic blast is one of the most recurrent sound devices in horror cinema. It is designed to elicit the startle response from the audience, and thus gives them a “jump scare.” It can occur both in the form of a diegetic bang and in the form of a nondiegetic stinger (i.e., a musical blare provided by the score). In this article, I will advance the hypothesis that silence plays a crucial role in contemporary horror fi lms, both perceptually, since it leaves the sound field free for the acoustic blast, and cognitively, since it posits the audience in an aversive anticipatory state that makes the startle more intense. I will analyze the acoustic startle using a neurofilmological approach, which takes into account findings from experimental sciences in order to better understand the relationship between physiological and psychological factors that make such an effect possible during the filmic experience.
Keywords: acoustic blast, auditory cognition, aversive anticipatory state, bang, jump scare, point of audition, stinger, surround sound.