Cognitive Theory in Film Studies: Three Recent Books

Plantinga, Carl R.

College Literature, 33.1, Winter 2006, pp. 215-224 (Review)

Published by West Chester University

DOI: 10.1353/lit.2006.0011

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 Cognitive Theory in Film Studies:
Three Recent Books

Carl Plantinga

Carroll, Noël. 2003. Engaging the Moving Carl Plantinga is professor of

Image. New Haven:Yale University Press.
$45.00 hc. 448 pp.
Smith, Greg M. 2003. Film Structure and the
Emotion System. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. $65.00 hc. 230 pp.
Persson, Per. 2003. Understanding Cinema: A
Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
$75.00 hc. 296 pp.
Film Studies at Calvin College.
He is author of Rhetoric and
Representation in Nonfiction
Film (1997) and co-editor, with
Greg M. Smith, of Passionate
Views: Film, Cognition, and
Emotion (1999).

I
n 1988, Noël Carroll, then a professor of
philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison, dropped a “bombshell” on the
discipline of film studies. Carroll had earlier
earned a PhD. in film studies from New York
University, but found the disciplinary conver-
sation unsatisfying, and soon returned to
216 College Literature 33.1 [Winter 2006]

graduate school, this time in philosophical aesthetics. Some years and anoth-
er PhD. later, the bombshell came with the publication of Mystifying Movies:
Fads and Fallacies in Film Studies, a book which critiqued and ultimately dis-
missed the then-reigning paradigm of film theory, a meld of Lacanian psy-
choanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and Barthesian semiotics. After systemat-
ically dismantling the tenets of this Theory, Carroll’s conclusion was uncom-
promising. The Theory, he writes, has “impeded research and reduced film
analysis to the repetition of fashionable slogans and unexamined assump-
tions” (234). It should be wholly discarded, he argues, and film theorists need
to begin anew.
Together with his colleague, professor of film studies David Bordwell,
Carroll continued his assault on the received Theory with a collection of
essays entitled Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, an anthology of essays
with a frontispiece featuring a publicity still from Laurel and Hardy’s film, A
Chump at Oxford. In the photograph Laurel and Hardy stand visibly confused
before a blackboard covered with three-letter words and faulty arithmetic.
The cover suggested to some Bordwell and Carroll’s estimation of contem-
porary film theory, but one could also interpret the two comedians as stand-
ins for Bordwell and Carroll as they attempt to make sense of arcane aca-
demic systems. In either interpretation, however, the book is clearly designed
to mark a decisive intervention in the field.
It could be argued that “psycho-semiotic” film theory had already run
its course, but Carroll’s and others’ critiques hastened the demise of such film
theory, or at least its demotion from Official Theory to one theory among
many. Film studies today enjoys a more healthy pluralism. Although bad
feelings from the theory wars still linger in the discipline, the field is no
longer monolithic in its methodological assumptions. Psycho-semiotics
has lost its grip.
Carroll and Bordwell are not opposed to theorizing, but do reject broad-
based Theory which poses as an account of everything and is accepted as
doctrine rather than subjected to critical scrutiny. Carroll and Bordwell pro-
pose a cognitive approach to film theory as an alternative but emphasize that
it is an approach rather than a theory, and one that is able to contain many
disparate positions. Cognitive film theory has since become a significant
methodology in film studies, one that can no longer be ignored in any com-
prehensive account of film theory.
The cognitive approach is not a unified methodology, and even Carroll’s
characterization of cognitive film theory is open to question. As Carroll
writes in Engaging the Moving Image, cognitive film theory derives its name
“from the tendency to look for alternative answers to many of the questions
addressed by or raised by psychoanalytic film theories . . . in terms of cogni-
 Carl Plantinga 217

tive and rational processes rather than unconscious or irrational ones” (384).
Yet many cognitive theorists would balk at the claim that the theory confines
itself to conscious processes, since much of human mental processing occurs
unconsciously. Cognitive approaches tend to be interdisciplinary, some favor-
ing the philosophical method, some an empirical psychological approach,
and some a meld of the two. Carroll approaches the questions asked by cog-
nitive theory from the standpoint of analytic philosophy, while others, such
as the young scholars Greg M. Smith and Per Persson, find cognitive psy-
chology to be more useful. Moreover, cognitive film theory can be quite
eclectic, drawing not merely on cognitive science narrowly construed, but on
philosophy, J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, evolutionary psychology, neu-
roscience, and even pre-psychoanalytic semiotics.

II
Carroll’s Engaging the Moving Image collects eighteen essays on film, orig-
inally published in various books and journals between 1996 and 2001. In
many ways a successor to his Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge
University Press, 1996), Engaging the Moving Image is wide-ranging and eclec-
tic, and includes both theoretical and interpretive essays. Cognitive film the-
ory tends to be interested primarily in the film spectator, or to put it in other
words, in the relationship between text, context, and viewer psychology. In
this book, however, Carroll is far more wide-ranging, theorizing about medi-
um specificity, the nature of documentary, film and emotion, film evaluation,
and naturalistic accounts of mainstream film form. He also provides critical
analyses of Sergei Eisenstein’s Old and New, Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of the
Performers, and the “professional western.”
Carroll has long been arguing against “medium foundationalism,” and he
extends his argument here in several essays. Early critics of film did not
believe that film was a unique and important medium, but was merely
mechanical reproduction of material that was parasitic on the traditional art
forms. For example, some called film “canned theater.” The classical film the-
orists responded by attempting to demonstrate that film is a unique art form
with its own rules.These rules were elaborated as positive and negative laws
that emerged from the nature of the medium itself, and that could be used
to explain why some films fail and others succeed.
In “Forget the Medium,” Carroll argues that not all art forms have a dis-
tinct medium; in fact, film has more than one medium, since those artifacts
we call films are made on film stock, analogue video, and now in digital form.
Carroll prefers to use the term “moving image media” over “film” since,
strictly speaking, our primary interest is in a particular use of several distinct
media, that use being the creation of moving images. Moreover, even if it
218 College Literature 33.1 [Winter 2006]

were true that film embodied a unique medium, claims for filmic excel-
lence should not be rooted in the supposed nature of the medium.That is,
the critic cannot say in advance what will or will not be successful based
on the purported nature of the medium itself.This is all the more true for
the fact that media-makers will actually alter the medium in the course of
experimentation.
Carroll also continues long-standing discussions of the documentary
film. In “Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism,” he defends notions
of documentary objectivity and truth against postmodernist and poststruc-
turalist attacks, systematically demonstrating flaws in the arguments of film
theorists and defending the documentary against those who are skeptical of
its very claims to assert or embody truths.Then, in “Fiction, Nonfiction, and
the Film of Presumptive Assertion,” Carroll develops a definition of the doc-
umentary rooted in speech act theory, in which he calls the documentary a
“film of presumptive assertion,” in which (to put it simply) the filmmaker
intends the film to be taken as an assertion of its propositional content, and
the audience presumes the film to be one which makes such propositional
assertions.Thus, the definition of the documentary is rooted in the idea that
a documentary is a conventional artifact which is designed, then identified
or “indexed” as one which performs certain communicative functions, lead-
ing to audience presumptions about such functions.
Readers who desire a statement of Carroll’s overarching approach to film
theory should turn to “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,”
originally published in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies as a polemical
challenge to dominant film theory. Here Carroll distinguishes his position
from those of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theorists and provides a
compelling argument for what he calls the “piecemeal” approach to theoriz-
ing about film. Dominant theory, Carroll claims, had been prone to several
methodological impediments, among them a tendency to conflate film inter-
pretation with film theory, in which theorists mistakenly assume that film
interpretation can do the work of theory building.As Carroll points out, the-
ory requires “evolving categories and hypothesizing the existence of general
patterns; but finding that those categories and hypotheses are instantiated in
a particular case is not a matter of theory” (363). As Carroll concludes, it is
like “the difference between discovering the existence of a viral syndrome
and finding that Henry has it” (363).
Carroll suggests that productive film theory should be fallibilist, gov-
erned by the constraints of rationalist discourse and dialectical in consider-
ing alternative explanations of the phenomena at hand. Moreover, Carroll
advocates a “piecemeal” approach to film theorizing. A significant impedi-
ment to productive theory, he writes, has been “monolithic” conceptions of
 Carl Plantinga 219

the scope of film theory, in which theory was thought to be a “comprehen-

sive instrument that was supposed to answer virtually every legitimate ques-
tion you might have about film” (359). Instead, piecemeal theory would
break down some of the presiding questions of Theory into more manage-
able bits.Then, as we gradually develop answers to small-scale questions,“we
may be in a position to think about whether these answers can be unified in
a more comprehensive theoretical framework” (381).

III
Cognitive film theorists have been primarily concerned with under-
standing the relationship between films and spectators and have produced a
good deal of work exploring the means by which film narration cues spec-
tator activity and response. Carroll has been at the forefront of the study of
film and emotion, having most thoroughly explored the nature of “art hor-
ror” in The Philosophy of Horror (1990), but also writing (in Engaging the
Moving Image) about film suspense, humor, melodrama, and the elicitation of
emotion in film generally.
Greg M. Smith, in Film Structure and the Emotion System, develops a the-
ory of emotion-elicitation in film that contrasts starkly with that of Carroll.
Smith writes that films are “invitations to feel” and calls his approach the
“mood-cue approach.” Smith’s theory differs from other broadly cognitive
theories of emotion in film in fundamental ways. Most importantly, Smith
argues that the “primary emotive effect of film is to create mood” (42).
Where emotions are intense, brief, and intermittent, moods have longer
duration and are elicited consistently throughout most films. Emotions also
depend on moods as “orienting states” that prepare the viewer for specific
emotional responses.
Most theorists of filmic emotions see narrative and character engage-
ment as central to the spectator’s emotional response to a film. That is, the
spectator’s concern for a character within an evolving narrative situation is
typically seen as the backbone of spectator emotion. Thus, emotional
response is typically rooted in the spectator’s appraisal of the evolving situa-
tion of the character, in conjunction with what the character wishes or
desires. In an essay in Engaging the Moving Image,“Film, Emotion, and Genre,”
Carroll argues that narrative films are “criterially pre-focused,” and that such
focusing, together with spectator “pro-attitudes” toward favored characters, is
primarily responsible for the elicitation of spectator emotion.
Smith rejects this, claiming that a strength of the mood-cue approach in
its focus on the cues offered by film style rather than primarily by narrative
and character. Stylistic elements cue emotions by way of associations rather
than the appraisals associated with narrative and character, and it is affective
220 College Literature 33.1 [Winter 2006]

experience via association and other less prototypical means that most inter-
ests Smith. Thus Smith pays far more attention to stylistic cues designed to
elicit emotion than Carroll tends to do.
One useful element of Smith’s book is its clear summaries of previous
cognitive theories of emotion-elicitation in film. It is here that Smith sets out
his differences with Carroll’s theory of the filmic elicitation of emotion. To
put it simply, Smith argues that Carroll, in relying on the logician’s thought
experiments rather than on the empirical data of experimental psychology,
is well able to articulate prototypical emotions, but is unable to deal with the
“nonprototypical” emotions. In fact, Smith implies, the messiness of human
emotion leaves philosophical methodologies at a loss, and Smith prefers the
empirical findings of psychology to the thought experiments of philosophy.
Smith does not mention the philosophical studies of emotion that refuse
to define an emotion in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, as
Carroll does. Here one thinks of the work of Ronald de Sousa and Robert
C. Roberts, for example, who do not define emotions, but consider emotions
as complex phenomena that escape traditional definitions. Smith’s suggestions
about the weaknesses of philosophy in understanding emotion would be
stronger were he more familiar with the philosophical literature.
It seems right that some affects do not have the clear objects that “cog-
nitive fundamentalism” would posit, but have a rather diffuse causality. Some
emotions may be caused by associations, as Smith claims. To be fair, Carroll
is careful to distinguish between “emotions” and “affects,” the former defined
as all of those affective experiences that have a clear cognitive genesis in
appraisal, and the latter consisting of all the rest: moods, reflex actions,“kines-
thetic turbulence,” sexual arousal, pleasures, and desires. Thus, one might
quibble with Carroll’s parsing of the terms, but it isn’t right to claim that
Carroll ignores all but prototypical emotions. (Elsewhere, for example,
Carroll writes about moods and also about how film music contributes to
the elicitation of emotion).
Smith is far less interested in making distinctions and drawing bound-
aries between types of emotional phenomena, but as a consequence his cat-
egories are sometimes confusing. If Carroll makes his definitions too stipula-
tive, Smith’s use of terminology is sometimes muddled and unclear, even in
the case of his theory’s central concepts.This is best seen in Smith’s descrip-
tion of a mood: an “orienting emotional state” that serves an adaptive func-
tion by orienting us toward particular stimuli, creating expectations and
priming us to experience certain kinds of emotions. Moods, then, are not
emotions themselves but “orienting emotion states” and “tendencies toward
expressing emotion.” A mood is “a predisposition that makes it more likely
that we will experience emotion” (39).The filmmaker elicits a mood, then,
 Carl Plantinga 221

to better enable the elicitation of brief “bursts of emotion.” And an emotion

episode consists of a mood (emotional orientation) and “external circum-
stances” (39) or narrative situations.
Smith’s great insight is the importance of such orienting states in the
elicitation of emotion in film. On this score his book is immensely useful and
is sure to generate a good deal of productive scholarship in response.Yet to
call such orienting states “moods” is problematic. Smith writes of “cheerful”
(38),“suspenseful” (45),“comic” (50), and “fearful” (51) moods. He describes
the mood elicited at the beginning of Stella Dallas as “embarrassment for
Stella” and “anticipation of impending class-based catastrophe” (89).Yet sus-
pense, fear, humor, embarrassment, and anticipation are most often thought
of as emotions rather than moods.And in the case of Stella Dallas, the embar-
rassment and anticipation are clearly the result of the spectator’s appraisal of
character and narrative situation, rather than the result of stylistic cues or
associations ostensibly favored by Smith.
Thus, Smith convincingly demonstrates that many films create a strong
orienting state that is relatively long-lasting and that the affective appeal of
films extends beyond prototypical emotions. More work needs to be done,
however, to fully understand the nature of such orienting states in film view-
ing. Smith’s book is suggestive and marks a step forward in our thinking
about film-elicited emotion. One isn’t confident, however, that Smith’s
account of “mood” is either accurate or sufficient in this regard. Perhaps such
orienting states are complex, consisting of emotions, emotional residue or
“spillover,” moods, and a range of other sorts of affect.

IV
Persson, like Smith, is a young scholar intent on understanding cinema
psychology from a broadly cognitive perspective. His Understanding Cinema:
A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery is perhaps most useful in establishing
a fertile methodology for the study of the psychology of film spectatorship.
The title suggests a complete psychological theory of the cinema, but
Persson’s aims are actually more modest.The book investigates three specific
psychological issues: (1) how spectators make inferences about point-of-view
editing, (2) how viewers make inferences about fictional characters, and (3)
how viewers respond to variable framing. In Persson’s scheme, the word “dis-
position” plays a lead role. Dispositions are “the totality of expectations,
assumptions, hypotheses, theories, rules, codes, and prejudices that individu-
als project onto the world.” “Through these capacities,” Persson writes,
“humans are disposed to understand the world in a certain preconfigured way,
already prepared for some regularities of the world” (13). Dispositions have
their roots in more or less universal human characteristics and in cultural
222 College Literature 33.1 [Winter 2006]

specificity; for Persson, it is not necessary to choose between nature and nur-
ture. Both are at work.
The central themes of this book, then, are the ways in which visual com-
munication “relies on tacitly shared dispositions and the ways in which the
dispositions of the spectator-reader guide the decoding of the discourse”
(16). For Persson, textual cues “steer the production of meaning,” but such
meaning “requires a disposition-rich spectator who is actively searching for
coherence in a film.” Thus, meaning is not contained in the film, but
“emerges in the constant negotiation between discourse and the dispositions
of the spectator” (23).
The overall project of the book is to identify the dispositions made use
of in the spectator’s understanding of point-of-view editing, character psy-
chology, and variable framing, and then to “reconstruct the interaction
between text and disposition” (40). Persson is thus in a position to explain
why certain cinematic practices look the way they do. He hopes that such
psychological explanations will compliment historical studies.
For example, Persson introduces his account of POV editing by describ-
ing the nature, structure, and function of deictic gaze ability, that is, the ability
of persons to follow and gain information from other people’s gazes. Persson
provides a history of the development of POV editing, demonstrating that
the technique arose not merely to encourage the spectator’s spatial immer-
sion but also to elicit character allegiance, empathy, and identification, and
thus narrative immersion. The spectator’s understanding of POV editing is
fundamentally “an inferential activity in the cognitive unconscious of the
spectator” (66). After providing eight hypotheses on the psychology of POV,
Persson is able to gauge the probability that a spectator will identify a struc-
ture as a POV structure on the basis of the kinds of cues present. Such a
probability, he notes, must take into account not merely the textual cues pres-
ent but also their narrative, genre, and historical context.
Persson’s account of all spectator psychological processes is construc-
tivist, in that he seems to hold that spectators actually construct textual
processes, and that no processes in cinematic discourse take place in the text
per se, but only in relation to the “biological, psychological, and cultural dis-
positions brought to the film by the spectator” (97).This constructivism leads
him, like Smith, to favor psychological over philosophical explanations of
text-spectator relations. It also raises issues about the universality or cultural
specificity of various spectator dispositions. Here Persson nods toward the
middle ground, but finds himself more often than not agreeing with Carroll’s
naturalist explanations of mainstream film form. Carroll has claimed that
filmmakers have exploited POV because such structures fit human tenden-
cies to deictic gazing, and POV structures are thus susceptible to fast pick-
 Carl Plantinga 223

ups by untutored audiences. Persson is sympathetic to such naturalistic

claims, but holds a hand out to the cultural relativists. To explain why POV
editing is widespread, we must appeal not only to human psychology, but to
economic and historical factors, and in addition to concrete production cir-
cumstances. In the last analysis, however, POV cannot be described as an
arbitrary, accidental, or purely conventional technique because it matches the
“ability of the deictic gaze”(99). In addition to whatever contextual factors
come into play, POV works because it exploits universally human physical
and psychological capacities.

V
During the summer of 2004, the Center for the Cognitive Study of the
Moving Image held its fourth biennial meeting, a conference entitled
“Narration, Imagination, and Emotion in the Moving Image Media.” An
interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered from nine different countries to
present papers and share their research.The conference was a heartening tes-
timony to the strength and appeal of cognitive approaches to the arts and
media. With intelligent and provocative books such as those discussed here
appearing on a regular basis, the prognosis for cognitive approaches to the
moving image media is positive.The work of the past twenty years has laid a
firm foundation, but there is much left to do, and much is being done.
Currently, cognitive approaches in film studies have been seriously examin-
ing the elicitation of affect and emotion in film; Smith’s book is an example
of this. Another potentially valuable research focus will be the investigation
of points of contact between cognitive studies and cultural theory. This is
where Persson’s methodology, with its emphasis on human dispositions
which are universal and/or culturally specific, will be very useful.
Meanwhile, Carroll continues to produce work on a wide array of film-relat-
ed topics, often defining the terms of discourse for younger scholars. As is
apparent from Smith and Persson’s responses to Carroll, his work often serves
as a touchstone for other scholars, who build on, amend, and/or critique his
ideas in true dialectical fashion. May the conversation continue.

Work Cited
A Chump at Oxford. 1940. Released by Hal Roach Studios. Directed by Alfred J.
Goulding. Screenplay by Charley Rogers and Felix Adler.
Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll, eds. 1996. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Caroll, Noël. 1988. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory.
New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1990. The Philosphy of Horror. New York: Routledge.
de Sousa, Ronald. 1990. The Rationality of the Emotions. Cambridge: MIT Press.
224 College Literature 33.1 [Winter 2006]

Roberts, Robert C. 2003. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.
Stella Dallas (1937). Released by Samuel Goldwyn Company. Directed by King
Vidor. Screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman. Based on the novel
by Olive Higgins Prouty.