Projections

This update is my first in two years, having foregone my annual update in the 2022 volume to give as much space as possible to our authors and reviewers. The year 2022 began with a special issue, “The Neuroscience of Film,” guest edited by Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, followed by two issues comprising original research articles and book reviews by authors based in Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States. I am heartened by both the research and the geographical inclusivity of our journal and our society. I'm grateful to all three of our associate editors for their efforts, and I wish to offer special thanks to Aaron Taylor for his work as book review editor—a job he has taken up with a particular focus on outreach to colleagues who share the interests of the journal and society but have not yet attended a conference, become a member, or submitted a manuscript. Building connections within and across disciplines is crucial to the continued success of SCSMI and Projections, so please: do what you can to spread the word by circulating calls, renewing your institution's subscription, and the like.

This article challenges the moniker “the master of suspense” as applied to Alfred Hitchcock. I show that Hitchcock's guiding principle was often not suspense but surprise. The penchant to surprise explains why Hitchcock utilized the surprise plot, as well as why he is often considered a deeply conflicted artist. In addition to standard surprise and suspense, which generate little uncertainty for the audience, Hitchcock developed parallel versions of these structures that incorporated premise uncertainty and allowed telling two stories at once. Double plots, which I term overt, structure some of Hitchcock's most sophisticated works, such as Notorious and Suspicion. The distinction between standard and overt surprise and suspense helps us better understand both Hitchcock's mastery and his enduring relevance for all narrative media today.

James E. Cutting (S. L. Sage Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Cornell) has made an outsize contribution to the Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image. Since he first attended the society's yearly conference in 2010 to give the keynote address, titled “Attention, Intensity, and the Evolution of Hollywood Film,” Cutting has presented at every SCSMI conference, often in collaboration with his students, and he was elected a Fellow of SCSMI in 2013. Some of his numerous articles on film have been published in Projections, and his work has become highly influential on our membership. In its integration of film aesthetics and psychology, Cutting's work exemplifies the “consilience” that the founders of SCSMI hoped would occur in bringing together humanistic film scholars and psychologists.

Movies on Our Minds (Cutting, 2021) provides structural analyses of popular, English-language cinema and maps them onto biological and psychological bases. It progresses from the details of optics and screen projection; through transitions and shots; on to scenes, montages, and syntagmas; and finally to larger narrative units and the flow of patterns of elements across whole movies. It focuses on changes in all of those patterns across a century, ascribing them to evolution. That evolution, akin to Darwinian evolution, is hallmarked by patterns of reproduction with inheritance, variation, and selection of traits over time. Two forces appear to have guided this evolution: the matching of elements of film form to predilections of the biology of our visual systems, and their matching to predilections of our cognition, particularly as it has been shaped by visual culture.

Since cinema communicates meanings through images and sounds, it has long been assumed that it possesses a language—a coded system of units and rules. Cinematic practice is infinitely varied, and it has proven difficult for film theory to pinpoint a language of cinema beyond the assertion that classical continuity codes cinematic illusion. The computational approach presented in James Cutting's Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement offers a promising new path toward defining a true language of cinema. It shows that mainstream narrative film uses a reliable set of measurable, evolving formal patterns to match the neuropsychological capacities of the average viewer. This article argues that the cinematic “code” Cutting identifies can be elaborated by specifying the minimal narrative unit.

Cutting (2021) argues that the narrational complexity of fiction film can be quantified similarly to computational measures of text complexity. Narrational complexity refers to the structure that arises from how a story is told. This article expands upon Cutting's proposal by taking inspiration from contemporary approaches for measuring text complexity. These approaches reject the notion that complexity can be measured via a limited set of indices as Cutting proposed for narrational complexity. Similarly, we argue that narrational complexity for fiction films should be multi-dimension and include indices that are associated with events, characters, and the rules that govern the fictional world. We discuss the viability of using computational approaches to analyze video and natural language processing to develop approaches to measuring narrational complexity.

IQ tests have charted massive gains over the last century, known as the Flynn Effect. Over the same period, the time society spends with screens has massively increased and intensified, for example, shorter and closer shots, increasing narrative complexity. In Movies on our Minds (2021), James Cutting suggests a potential bidirectional link between the two effects: generational increase in visual processing abilities led to movie makers increasing the demands their movies place on viewer cognition, which in turn has trained societal visual processing capacity. In this commentary we review the evidence for such a positive association. The evidence indicates that increasing screen time may be associated with faster visual processing but also a potentially decreased ability to process this information (i.e., reduced executive functions). Further, effects may be dependent on the type of screen experience (e.g., developmental appropriateness of content and delivery platform such as TikTok) and other environmental considerations (e.g., socioeconomic status, parenting), suggesting that the factors influencing our evolving media/mind niche may be more complex than originally proposed.

Cutting's quantitative approach to analyzing films enables him to discover many fascinating and important design features of mainstream movies as well as how they have changed over cinema's history. Cutting also proposes plausible psychological explanations for some of these features and changes. However, Cutting places his empirical findings and his psychological explanations of them within a broader account of what he calls the evolution of cinematic engagement. For Cutting, movies have “evolved” to better “fit” our psychological capacities and have therefore become more “absorbing.” While some aspects of this account are plausible, others are less so. In this article, I therefore focus critically on Cutting's use of the concepts of “evolution,” “psychological fit,” and “engagement.”

What a pleasure it is to have colleagues read Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement, to understand it, and to offer some praise and a panoply of diverse and penetrating criticisms. The perspectives and qualms raised in the four commentaries in the special section of this issue are well-worth considering in detail. My first reply concerns relations between cinematic narration and narrative, the second explores constraints on cinematic complexity and its assessment, the third addresses possible consequences of changing movie structure and our increased cognitive processing speed, and the fourth ramifies concepts I use to account for the historical changes in popular cinema.

Adriana Gordejuela. Flashbacks in Film: A Cognitive and Multimodal Analysis. New York: Routledge, 2021, 190 pp, $128.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9780367721336.

Francesco Sticchi. Melancholy Emotion in Contemporary Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2019, 206 pp, $39.20 (softcover), ISBN: 9780367663421.

Peter Turner. Found Footage Horror Films: A Cognitive Approach. New York: Routledge, 2019, 204 pp, $39.16 (softcover), ISBN: 9780367661847.

Katherine Thomson-Jones. Image in the Making: Digital Innovation and the Visual Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 152 pp, $74.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780197567616.

His eyes were invariably full of curiosity and kindness. This is an odd way to start a tribute, perhaps, but as those of us who knew and loved Henry Bacon can attest, it was true of him and a gift to us. This observation does no disservice to his sizable contributions to the academy, as all his good work for film studies flowed from magnanimity, friendship, and wonder. For Henry, the study of cinema—or anthropology, or opera, or religion, or philosophy, or the many different customs of varied cultures throughout the world, to name a few of his interests—expressed and enacted genuine love for the world before him.