‘How movies move us just the right way’ - Exploring the role of camera movement and montage in human film perception - First steps on a joint venture of 4EA approaches to cognition and empirical Neuroscience

Abstract

Film is an omnipresent medium in today’s world, playing a crucial role in a massive amusement industry, in advertisement as well as in information distribution, education, sciences and the arts. What and how we perceive the world when we perceive it via film thus seems an important question to answer. Still, the principles of film perception are barely understood. This thesis presents some of the newest steps in an interdisciplinary approach to exploring human creation and perception of film. Specifically, it reports about two high density EEG studies investigating the role of camera movement and montage in live-action edited moving images while being informed by modern theoretical approaches to cognition as will be outlined in the following. Live-action edited moving images comprise any kind of film or video, consisting of shots recorded by means of a camera filming live events (in contrast to animations), with these shots being then edited together to form a perceptually continuous stream of images. This thesis argues that contemporary concepts of how the mind works, known as 4EA (embedded, embodied, enactive, extended and affective) approaches to cognition, can be used to develop a notion of the human perception of life-action edited movies which can crucially illuminate the principles of movie making and movie experience. Especially, as this thesis will outline, they can help to gain an understanding of the role of camera movement and montage in procuring deep involvement of the spectators in the film’s fictional world. This thesis will show how such theoretical conceptualisations can be used to derive precise hypotheses testable in an experimental setup of cognitive neuroscience, enabling us to enhance our knowledge about how movies can move us the way they do.