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Theory?
May 2011
Start with this question, which I think is one of the most fascinating we
can ask: What enables us to understand films?
All films? Well, set aside some hard cases, like Brakhage abstractions
and transmissions of the Crab Nebula from the Hubble telescope
(above). Lets start with a prototype: a film whose moving images
present more or less recognizable persons, places, and things caught up
in what we intuitively call stories. In other words, an ordinary movie
shown in theatres and on video.
Catching a code
in C lassical C ine m a
Anatom y of the Action Picture
He aring Voice s
Pre face , C roatian e dition, On
the History of Film Style
Slavoj ie k : Say Anything
Film and the Historical R e turn
Studying C ine m a
Further, NiFF argued that the conventions that guide our inferential
extrapolation dont simply float free in space. There were recurring
clusters of favored choices for presenting causality, time, and space.
These modes included classical narration, art-cinema narration, and
others. The historical layout still seems valid to me, and they seem to
have proven useful to other researchers.
Theoretically, however, NiFF ran into problems in the role it assigned to
inference. At the time of writing NiFF, I was aware of the writings of J.
J. Gibson and his insistence that perception evolved in environments
very different from the impoverished information that New Look
theorists assumed triggered perception. In the three-dimensional world
in which creatures like us live, the stimuli are not typically partial or
degraded; they are in fact quite rich, even redundant. Moving through
space, we register an optic flow that specifies the layout of surfaces quite
precisely. 7
NiFF finessed this problem by saying that even if Gibsons account of
ordinary perception were right, films dont present the informational
array afforded by the real world. Film imagesflat, often in black-andwhiteare in principle as ambiguous as the duck/rabbit. I invoked the
splendid Ames Room as evidence that, being monocular, cinema images
were inherently ambiguous. 8
respond to certain formal features of lines-onpaper in the same way as one has learned to
respond to the same features when displayed by
the edges of surfaces.
The complete absence of instruction in the
present casepoints to some irreducible
minimum of native ability for pictorial
recognition. If it is true also that there are
cultures in which this ability is absent, such
deficiency will require special explanation; we
cannot assert that it is simply a matter of having
not yet learned the language of pictures. 19
Hochberg and Brooks used only still pictures, although their son did
once glimpse a horse on TV. (He cried, Dog!) What about moving
images?
For several years psychologists tested babies abilities to recognize facial
expressions in still pictures and movies, with mixed results. 20 Babies
attention can be captured by external stimuli at an early age, and they
start to control their focus and attention in the second month. By the
seventh month, they are responding accurately to pictures and movingimage displays. Yet its possible that recognition starts much earlier. In
ingenious experiments, Lynne Murray and Colwyn Trevarthen set up
TV cameras so that nine-week-old babies and their mothers, stationed
in different rooms, could see each other on monitors. The experimenters
wanted to record the interactions between them, as well as to vary the
timing of responses through pauses and replays. 21
Murray and Trevarthens conclusions about the babies ability to
synchronize their responses with the mothers expressions has touched
off considerable debate and further experimentation. 22 Thats not
what matters for us as students of cinema. Whats relevant for us is that
the babies evidently did, in both real time and in tape delay, recognize
the moving images of their mothers.
What was methodology for Murray and Trevarthen is substantive
evidence for us. Very young babies could grasp the video image, at least
to some extent, as a representation of the most familiar person in their
lives. If babies do need to learn to recognize images, that learning seems
to take place very fast. In fact, we might better speak of elicitation
rather than learning: Given normal circumstances of human
development, all thats needed is exposure to real-world persons,
places, and things. Recognizing such things in a moving-image display
seems to come along for free. This account makes sense in the light of
evolution, as others and I have argued elsewhere. 23
Folk psychology: Success stories
Still, there are important ways in which folk psychology leads us astray.
Film exploits those too.
Folk psychology: The downside
Daisy Kenyon.
In Everything Is Obvious* (*Once You Know the Answer), Duncan J.
Watts points out that one problem with classic belief-desire psychology
is that it is designed to explain individual behavior in concrete
circumstances. It doesnt scale up well to explain large-scale trends. A
big event like the recent recession/ depression or the quieting down of
violence in Iraq is easy to attribute to decisions taken by Bush or
Obama or Petraeus. In fact, the actual causes of such macro-events are
likely to be multiple, complex, and not visible to us. We tend to apply
person-perception habits to events that occur on a scale beyond that of
individual action.
Watts book is a contribution to Wrongology, the study of our
tendencies to overestimate our abilities, make simple logical errors, and
act inconsistently. The research area has its roots in the studies of
heuristics and biases conducted by Daniel Kahneman and Amos
Tversky. 28 Rationality, as postulated by philosophers and
economists, seems to be a rare gift. To take a now-classic example:
Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very
bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student,
she was deeply concerned with issues of
discrimination and social justice, and also
participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Now, which is more likely?
George Stroud in The Big Clock is trying to avoid the guards? Id reply
that once we move beyond the moment to look at strategies of
patterning at different scales, we find things arent so obvious; that was
the primary task of NiFF. But I grant that our point of departure will
seem very commonsensical. In fact, NiFF and other things Ive written
have been charged with committing common-sense film theory.
In one way thats true. The humanities have in general suffered from
straining for the most far-fetched accounts of how art, literature, and
music work. In the literary humanities in particular, ingenious
interpretationsoften relying on free-association, wordplay, and talking
points lifted from favored penseursget more notice than plausible
explanations do. In various places Ive argued for naturalistic and
empirical explanations as the best option we have in answering middlerange questions, and even bigger ones like How do we comprehend
movies? Sometimes our answers will not be counterintuitive. To say
that looking at images recruits our skills of looking at the world will not
surprise many people; but it is likely to be true. Whats likely to be
counterintuitive are the discoveries of mechanisms that undergird
perception. Would common sense predict that an objects form, color,
movement, and spatial location are analyzed along distinct pathways in
the visual system? Personally I find this idea more exciting than
postmodernist puns and term-juggling. 35
More important, we can embrace common sense at a meta-level.
Recognizing that it is in play in narrative comprehension makes it
something we need to analyze. We can understand filmic understanding
better if we recognize whats intuitively obvious, and then go on to ask
what in the film, and in our psychological and social make-up, makes
something obvious. And those factors may not be obvious in themselves.
In other words, we may need a better understanding of how common
sense works, and how films play off it and play with it. That
understanding may in turn oblige us to accept empirical experiment,
evolutionary thinking, and neurological researchall of which most
literary humanists find worrisome.
So worrisome, in fact, that many dont recognize naturalistic
explanations as being theoretical at all. For them, the only theories that
exist are Big Theories, and so efforts like the one I just mentioned are
condemned as expressing a disdain for or suspicion of theorizing tout
court. But that objection, feeble to start with, was blocked back in 1996
by the opening sentences Nol Carroll and I wrote in our Post-Theory:
Reconstructing Film Studies:
Our title risks misleading you. Is this book about
the end of film theory? No. Its about the end of
Theory, and what can and should come after. 36
That introduction and many of the pieces included in the volume float
arguments for theorizing as an activity that asks researchable questions
and comes up with more or less plausible answerssome