Projections

Referring to the widespread disappointment over the ending of the Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin recently cried: “I don't understand how people can come to hate so much something that they once loved.” My aim here is to offer an account that explains this shift in viewers’ emotions, which I refer to as affective trajectory. On my proposal, viewers are attached to a certain work for a considerable amount of time when they care for it and feel rewarded by such caring. When this sense of reward is absent from their experience, they start to feel disappointed. To account for such an absence, and such a shift, I first analyze some of the ways in which a show inspires and rewards a sense of care in the viewers, and I then move on to examine how this sense is betrayed. Underlying my analysis are insights from cognitive approaches to aesthetics, philosophy of taste and emotions, and television studies.

The study reported herein investigated the possible affective and cognitive impact of presenting viewers with video footage processed for a prototype multi-primary (4P) display vs a traditional 3P, RGB display. Specifically, differences in feelings of awe were assessed via a within-and- between-subjects experimental design. Participants viewed NASA footage of Earth from the International Space Station on 3P and 4P displays. Feelings of awe were assessed after each video presentation. Results indicated that the 4P footage inspired greater feelings of awe than the standard 3P footage, indicating that wide-gamut video on multi-primary displays may be more affectively powerful than traditional RGB video.

Arousal, editing style, and eye movements have been implicated in time perception when watching videos. However, little multimodal research has explored how manipulating both the auditory and visual properties of videos affects temporal processing. This study investigated how editing density and music-induced arousal affect viewers’ time perception. Thirty-nine participants watched six videos varying in editing density and music while their eye movements were recorded. They estimated the videos’ duration and reported their subjective experience of time passage and emotional involvement. Fast-paced editing was associated with the feeling of time passing faster, a relationship mediated by fixation durations. High-arousal background music was also associated with the feeling of time passing faster. The consequences of this study in terms of a possible auditory driving effect are explored.

This article provides an embodied cognitive account of sound in film. Treating sound and image as equal partners, we first develop a spatial model for film sound that is based on the inferential logic of the container image schema; an embodied schema which has been argued to play a pivotal role in human reasoning. Next, we use this model to distinguish between three kinds of dynamic sound patterns of containment in film: (1) sound vectors that cross the on-screen/off-screen border within diegetic space, (2) sound vectors that shift from one diegetic time and/or space into another, and (3) sound vectors that cross the diegetic/non-diegetic border. The theoretical entailments of these patterns for film sound analysis will be illustrated through various case examples of narrative cinema.

James Cutting. Movies on Our Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 400 pp., $45.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9780197567777.

Patrick Colm Hogan. Style in Narrative: Aspects of an Affective-Cognitive Stylistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021, 320 pp., $110 (hardback), ISBN: 9780197539576.

Steven Willemsen and Miklós Kiss, eds. Puzzling Stories: The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Film, Television and Literature. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022, $145.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9781800735910.

Sarah Tremlett. The Poetics of Poetry Film. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2021, 412 pp., $53.00 (paperback), ISBN: 9781789382686