The Reality of Illusion: Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory - Softcover

Anderson, Joseph D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809321963 ISBN 13: 9780809321964

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Pr, 1998

Synopsis

The Reality of Illusion deals with the problems - psychology and spectatorship - that are central to the field of cinema studies. The author joins a small group of theorists who are sounding a call to increase the emphasis on experimental method as the primary tool for research on film viewing. He regards cognitive theory, which treats the mind as an information processor and a computer as an inspiration, as the research paradigm of choice for film theorists. The film viewer is ""a standard biological audio/visual processor"". Thus, Anderson has organized this book according to areas of film theory that can be studied from a cognitive perspective - human perception, perception of images and sounds in the film medium, problems of continuity and narrativity, and character recognition and attribution.

About this title

About the Author

Joseph D. Anderson heads the Institute for Cognitive Studies in Film and Video at the University of Kansas

From the Back Cover

Anderson's primary argument is that motion picture viewers mentally process the projected images and sounds of a movie according to the same perceptual rules used in response to visual and aural stimuli in the world outside the theater. To process everyday events in the world, the human mind is equipped with capacities developed through millions of years of evolution. In this context, Anderson builds a metatheory influenced by the writings of J. J. and Eleanor Gibson and employs it to explore motion picture comprehension as a subset of general human comprehension and perception, focusing his ecological approach to film on the analysis of cinema's true substance: illusion. Anderson investigates how viewers, with their mental capacities designed for survival, respond to particular aspects of filmic structure - continuity, diegesis, character development, and narrative - and examines the ways in which rules of visual and aural processing are recognized and exploited by filmmakers. He uses Orson Welles's Citizen Kane to disassemble and redefine the contemporary concept of character identification; he addresses continuity in a shot-by-shot analysis of images from Casablanca; and he uses a wide range of research studies, such as Harry F. Harlow's work with infant rhesus monkeys, to describe how motion pictures become a substitute or surrogate reality for an audience. By examining the human capacity for play and the inherent potential for illusion, Anderson considers the reasons viewers find movies so enthralling, so emotionally powerful, and so remarkably real.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809321963
• ISBN 13: 9780809321964
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216