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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Essay Film

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Personal Documentary
1940s Watershed Years
Chris Marker
Alain Resnais
Jean-Luc Godard
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Essay Film by Yelizaveta Moss LAST REVIEWED: 24 March 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 24 March 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0216

The term “essay film” has become increasingly used in film criticism to describe a self-reflective and self-referential documentary cinema that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Scholars unanimously agree that the first published use of the term was by Richter in 1940. Also uncontested is that Andre Bazin, in 1958, was the first to analyze a film, which was Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1958), according to the essay form. The French New Wave created a popularization of short essay films, and German New Cinema saw a resurgence in essay films due to a broad interest in examining German history. But beyond these origins of the term, scholars deviate on what exactly constitutes an essay film and how to categorize essay films. Generally, scholars fall into two camps: those who find a literary genealogy to the essay film and those who find a documentary genealogy to the essay film. The most commonly cited essay filmmakers are French and German: Marker, Resnais, Godard, and Farocki. These filmmakers are singled out for their breadth of essay film projects, as opposed to filmmakers who have made an essay film but who specialize in other genres. Though essay films have been and are being produced outside of the West, scholarship specifically addressing essay films focuses largely on France and Germany, although Solanas and Getino’s theory of “Third Cinema” and approval of certain French essay films has produced some essay film scholarship on Latin America. But the gap in scholarship on global essay film remains, with hope of being bridged by some forthcoming work. Since the term “essay film” is used so sparingly for specific films and filmmakers, the scholarship on essay film tends to take the form of single articles or chapters in either film theory or documentary anthologies and journals. Some recent scholarship has pointed out the evolutionary quality of essay films, emphasizing their ability to change form and style as a response to conventional filmmaking practices. The most recent scholarship and conference papers on essay film have shifted from an emphasis on literary essay to an emphasis on technology, arguing that essay film has the potential in the 21st century to present technology as self-conscious and self-reflexive of its role in art.

Both anthologies dedicated entirely to essay film have been published in order to fill gaps in essay film scholarship. Biemann 2003 brings the discussion of essay film into the digital age by explicitly resisting traditional German and French film and literary theory. Papazian and Eades 2016 also resists European theory by explicitly showcasing work on postcolonial and transnational essay film.

Biemann, Ursula, ed. Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age . New York: Springer, 2003.

This anthology positions Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) as the originator of the post-structuralist essay film. In opposition to German and French film and literary theory, Biemann discusses video essays with respect to non-linear and non-logical movement of thought and a range of new media in Internet, digital imaging, and art installation. In its resistance to the French/German theory influence on essay film, this anthology makes a concerted effort to include other theoretical influences, such as transnationalism, postcolonialism, and globalization.

Papazian, Elizabeth, and Caroline Eades, eds. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia . London: Wallflower, 2016.

This forthcoming anthology bridges several gaps in 21st-century essay film scholarship: non-Western cinemas, popular cinema, and digital media.

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The essay film

In recent years the essay film has attained widespread recognition as a particular category of film practice, with its own history and canonical figures and texts. In tandem with a major season throughout August at London’s BFI Southbank, Sight & Sound explores the characteristics that have come to define this most elastic of forms and looks in detail at a dozen influential milestone essay films.

Andrew Tracy , Katy McGahan , Olaf Möller , Sergio Wolf , Nina Power Updated: 7 May 2019

from our August 2013 issue

Le camera stylo? Dziga Vertov&#8217;s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

Le camera stylo? Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

I recently had a heated argument with a cinephile filmmaking friend about Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983). Having recently completed her first feature, and with such matters on her mind, my friend contended that the film’s power lay in its combinations of image and sound, irrespective of Marker’s inimitable voiceover narration. “Do you think that people who can’t understand English or French will get nothing out of the film?” she said; to which I – hot under the collar – replied that they might very well get something, but that something would not be the complete work.

The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August.

To take this film-lovers’ tiff to a more elevated plane, what it suggests is that the essentialist conception of cinema is still present in cinephilic and critical culture, as are the difficulties of containing within it works that disrupt its very fabric. Ever since Vachel Lindsay published The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915 the quest to secure the autonomy of film as both medium and art – that ever-elusive ‘pure cinema’ – has been a preoccupation of film scholars, critics, cinephiles and filmmakers alike. My friend’s implicit derogation of the irreducible literary element of Sans soleil and her neo- Godard ian invocation of ‘image and sound’ touch on that strain of this phenomenon which finds, in the technical-functional combination of those two elements, an alchemical, if not transubstantiational, result.

Mechanically created, cinema defies mechanism: it is poetic, transportive and, if not irrational, then a-rational. This mystically-minded view has a long and illustrious tradition in film history, stretching from the sense-deranging surrealists – who famously found accidental poetry in the juxtapositions created by randomly walking into and out of films; to the surrealist-influenced, scientifically trained and ontologically minded André Bazin , whose realist veneration of the long take centred on the very preternaturalness of nature as revealed by the unblinking gaze of the camera; to the trash-bin idolatry of the American underground, weaving new cinematic mythologies from Hollywood detritus; and to auteurism itself, which (in its more simplistic iterations) sees the essence of the filmmaker inscribed even upon the most compromised of works.

It isn’t going too far to claim that this tradition has constituted the foundation of cinephilic culture and helped to shape the cinematic canon itself. If Marker has now been welcomed into that canon and – thanks to the far greater availability of his work – into the mainstream of (primarily DVD-educated) cinephilia, it is rarely acknowledged how much of that work cheerfully undercuts many of the long-held assumptions and pieties upon which it is built.

In his review of Letter from Siberia (1957), Bazin placed Marker at right angles to cinema proper, describing the film’s “primary material” as intelligence – specifically a “verbal intelligence” – rather than image. He dubbed Marker’s method a “horizontal” montage, “as opposed to traditional montage that plays with the sense of duration through the relationship of shot to shot”.

Here, claimed Bazin, “a given image doesn’t refer to the one that preceded it or the one that will follow, but rather it refers laterally, in some way, to what is said.” Thus the very thing which makes Letter “extraordinary”, in Bazin’s estimation, is also what makes it not-cinema. Looking for a term to describe it, Bazin hit upon a prophetic turn of phrase, writing that Marker’s film is, “to borrow Jean Vigo’s formulation of À propos de Nice (‘a documentary point of view’), an essay documented by film. The important word is ‘essay’, understood in the same sense that it has in literature – an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well.”

Marker’s canonisation has proceeded apace with that of the form of which he has become the exemplar. Whether used as critical/curatorial shorthand in reviews and programme notes, employed as a model by filmmakers or examined in theoretical depth in major retrospectives (this summer’s BFI Southbank programme, for instance, follows upon Andréa Picard’s two-part series ‘The Way of the Termite’ at TIFF Cinémathèque in 2009-2010, which drew inspiration from Jean-Pierre Gorin ’s groundbreaking programme of the same title at Vienna Filmmuseum in 2007), the ‘essay film’ has attained in recent years widespread recognition as a particular, if perennially porous, mode of film practice. An appealingly simple formulation, the term has proved both taxonomically useful and remarkably elastic, allowing one to define a field of previously unassimilable objects while ranging far and wide throughout film history to claim other previously identified objects for this invented tradition.

Las Hurdes (1933)

It is crucial to note that the ‘essay film’ is not only a post-facto appellation for a kind of film practice that had not bothered to mark itself with a moniker, but also an invention and an intervention. While it has acquired its own set of canonical ‘texts’ that include the collected works of Marker, much of Godard – from the missive (the 52-minute Letter to Jane , 1972) to the massive ( Histoire(s) de cinéma , 1988-98) – Welles’s F for Fake (1973) and Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), it has also poached on the territory of other, ‘sovereign’ forms, expanding its purview in accordance with the whims of its missionaries.

From documentary especially, Vigo’s aforementioned À propos de Nice, Ivens’s Rain (1929), Buñuel’s sardonic Las Hurdes (1933), Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961); from the avant garde, Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), Straub/Huillet’s Trop tôt, trop tard (1982); from agitprop, Getino and Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), Portabella’s Informe general… (1976); and even from ‘pure’ fiction, for example Gorin’s provocative selection of Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909).

Just as within itself the essay film presents, in the words of Gorin, “the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected),” so, without, its scope expands exponentially through the industrious activity of its adherents, blithely cutting across definitional borders and – as per the Manny Farber ian concept which gave Gorin’s ‘Termite’ series its name – creating meaning precisely by eating away at its own boundaries. In the scope of its application and its association more with an (amorphous) sensibility as opposed to fixed rules, the essay film bears similarities to the most famous of all fabricated genres: film noir, which has been located both in its natural habitat of the crime thriller as well as in such disparate climates as melodramas, westerns and science fiction.

The essay film, however, has proved even more peripatetic: where noir was formulated from the films of a determinate historical period (no matter that the temporal goalposts are continually shifted), the essay film is resolutely unfixed in time; it has its choice of forebears. And while noir, despite its occasional shadings over into semi-documentary during the 1940s, remains bound to fictional narratives, the essay film moves blithely between the realms of fiction and non-fiction, complicating the terms of both.

“Here is a form that seems to accommodate the two sides of that divide at the same time, that can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate,” writes Gorin. When Orson Welles , in the closing moments of his masterful meditation on authenticity and illusion F for Fake, chortles, “I did promise that for one hour, I’d tell you only the truth. For the past 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off,” he is expressing both the conjuror’s pleasure in a trick well played and the artist’s delight in a self-defined mode that is cheerfully impure in both form and, perhaps, intention.

Nevertheless, as the essay film merrily traipses through celluloid history it intersects with ‘pure cinema’ at many turns and its form as such owes much to one particularly prominent variety thereof.

The montage tradition

If the mystical strain described above represents the Dionysian side of pure cinema, Soviet montage was its Apollonian opposite: randomness, revelation and sensuous response countered by construction, forceful argumentation and didactic instruction.

No less than the mystics, however, the montagists were after essences. Eisenstein , Dziga Vertov and Pudovkin , along with their transnational associates and acolytes, sought to crystallise abstract concepts in the direct and purposeful juxtaposition of forceful, hard-edged images – the general made powerfully, viscerally immediate in the particular. Here, says Eisenstein, in the umbrella-wielding harpies who set upon the revolutionaries in October (1928), is bourgeois Reaction made manifest; here, in the serried ranks of soldiers proceeding as one down the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin (1925), is Oppression undisguised; here, in the condemned Potemkin sailor who wins over his imminent executioners with a cry of “Brothers!” – a moment powerfully invoked by Marker at the beginning of his magnum opus A Grin Without a Cat (1977) – is Solidarity emergent and, from it, the seeds of Revolution.

The relentlessly unidirectional focus of classical Soviet montage puts it methodologically and temperamentally at odds with the ruminative, digressive and playful qualities we associate with the essay film. So, too, the former’s fierce ideological certainty and cadre spirit contrast with that free play of the mind, the Montaigne -inspired meanderings of individual intelligence, that so characterise our image of the latter.

Beyond Marker’s personal interest in and inheritance from the Soviet masters, classical montage laid the foundations of the essay film most pertinently in its foregrounding of the presence, within the fabric of the film, of a directing intelligence. Conducting their experiments in film not through ‘pure’ abstraction but through narrative, the montagists made manifest at least two operative levels within the film: the narrative itself and the arrangement of that narrative by which the deeper structures that move it are made legible. Against the seamless, immersive illusionism of commercial cinema, montage was a key for decrypting those social forces, both overt and hidden, that govern human society.

And as such it was method rather than material that was the pathway to truth. Fidelity to the authentic – whether the accurate representation of historical events or the documentary flavouring of Eisensteinian typage – was important only insomuch as it provided the filmmaker with another tool to reach a considerably higher plane of reality.

Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931)

Midway on their Marxian mission to change the world rather than interpret it, the montagists actively made the world even as they revealed it. In doing so they powerfully expressed the dialectic between control and chaos that would come to be not only one of the chief motors of the essay film but the crux of modernity itself.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), now claimed as the most venerable and venerated ancestor of the essay film (and this despite its prototypically purist claim to realise a ‘universal’ cinematic language “based on its complete separation from the language of literature and the theatre”) is the archetypal model of this high-modernist agon. While it is the turning of the movie projector itself and the penetrating gaze of Vertov’s kino-eye that sets the whirling dynamo of the city into motion, the recorder creating that which it records, that motion is also outside its control.

At the dawn of the cinematic century, the American writer Henry Adams saw in the dynamo both the expression of human mastery over nature and a conduit to mysterious, elemental powers beyond our comprehension. So, too, the modernist ambition expressed in literature, painting, architecture and cinema to capture a subject from all angles – to exhaust its wealth of surfaces, meanings, implications, resonances – collides with awe (or fear) before a plenitude that can never be encompassed.

Remove the high-modernist sense of mission and we can see this same dynamic as animating the essay film – recall that last, parenthetical term in Gorin’s formulation of the essay film, “multiply[ing] the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected)”. The nimble movements and multi-angled perspectives of the essay film are founded on this negotiation between active choice and passive possession; on the recognition that even the keenest insight pales in the face of an ultimate unknowability.

The other key inheritance the essay film received from the classical montage tradition, perhaps inevitably, was a progressive spirit, however variously defined. While Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) amply and chillingly demonstrated that montage, like any instrumental apparatus, has no inherent ideological nature, hers were more the exceptions that proved the rule. (Though why, apart from ideological repulsiveness, should Riefenstahl’s plentifully fabricated ‘documentaries’ not be considered as essay films in their own right?)

The overwhelming fact remains that the great majority of those who drew upon the Soviet montagists for explicitly ideological ends (as opposed to Hollywood’s opportunistic swipings) resided on the left of the spectrum – and, in the montagists’ most notable successor in the period immediately following, retained their alignment with and inextricability from the state.

Progressive vs radical

The Grierson ian documentary movement in Britain neutered the political and aesthetic radicalism of its more dynamic model in favour of paternalistic progressivism founded on conformity, class complacency and snobbery towards its own medium. But if it offered a far paler antecedent to the essay film than the Soviet montage tradition, it nevertheless represents an important stage in the evolution of the essay-film form, for reasons not unrelated to some of those rather staid qualities.

The Soviet montagists had created a vision of modernity racing into the future at pace with the social and spiritual liberation of its proletarian pilot-passenger, an aggressively public ideology of group solidarity. The Grierson school, by contrast, offered a domesticated image of an efficient, rational and productive modern industrial society based on interconnected but separate public and private spheres, as per the ideological values of middle-class liberal individualism.

The Soviet montagists had looked to forge a universal, ‘pure’ cinematic language, at least before the oppressive dictates of Stalinist socialist realism shackled them. The Grierson school, evincing a middle-class disdain for the popular and ‘low’ arts, sought instead to purify the sullied medium of cinema by importing extra-cinematic prestige: most notably Night Mail (1936), with its Auden -penned, Britten -scored ode to the magic of the mail, or Humphrey Jennings’s salute to wartime solidarity A Diary for Timothy (1945), with its mildly sententious E.M. Forster narration.

Night Mail (1936)

What this domesticated dynamism and retrograde pursuit of high-cultural bona fides achieved, however, was to mingle a newfound cinematic language (montage) with a traditionally literary one (narration); and, despite the salutes to state-oriented communality, to re-introduce the individual, idiosyncratic voice as the vehicle of meaning – as the mediating intelligence that connects the viewer to the images viewed.

In Night Mail especially there is, in the whimsy of the Auden text and the film’s synchronisation of private time and public history, an intimation of the essay film’s musing, reflective voice as the chugging rhythm of the narration timed to the speeding wheels of the train gives way to a nocturnal vision of solitary dreamers bedevilled by spectral monsters, awakening in expectation of the postman’s knock with a “quickening of the heart/for who can bear to be forgot?”

It’s a curiously disquieting conclusion: this unsettling, anxious vision of disappearance that takes on an even darker shade with the looming spectre of war – one that rhymes, five decades on, with the wistful search of Marker’s narrator in Sans soleil, seeking those fleeting images which “quicken the heart” in a world where wars both past and present have been forgotten, subsumed in a modern society built upon the systematic banishment of memory.

It is, of course, with the seminal post-war collaborations between Marker and Alain Resnais that the essay film proper emerges. In contrast to the striving culture-snobbery of the Griersonian documentary, the Resnais-Marker collaborations (and the Resnais solo documentary shorts that preceded them) inaugurate a blithe, seemingly effortless dialogue between cinema and the other arts in both their subjects (painting, sculpture) and their assorted creative personnel (writers Paul Éluard , Jean Cayrol , Raymond Queneau , composers Darius Milhaud and Hanns Eisler ). This also marks the point where the revolutionary line of the Soviets and the soft, statist liberalism of the British documentarians give way to a more free-floating but staunchly oppositional leftism, one derived as much from a spirit of humanistic inquiry as from ideological affiliation.

Related to this was the form’s problems with official patronage. Originally conceived as commissions by various French government or government-affiliated bodies, the Resnais-Marker films famously ran into trouble from French censors: Les statues meurent aussi (1953) for its condemnation of French colonialism, Night and Fog for its shots of Vichy policemen guarding deportation camps; the former film would have its second half lopped off before being cleared for screening, the latter its offending shots removed.

Night and Fog (1955)

Appropriately, it is at this moment that the emphasis of the essay film begins to shift away from tactile presence – the whirl of the city, the rhythm of the rain, the workings of industry – to felt absence. The montagists had marvelled at the workings of human creations which raced ahead irrespective of human efforts; here, the systems created by humanity to master the world write, in their very functioning, an epitaph for those things extinguished in the act of mastering them. The African masks preserved in the Musée de l’Homme in Les statues meurent aussi speak of a bloody legacy of vanquished and conquered civilisations; the labyrinthine archival complex of the Bibliothèque Nationale in the sardonically titled Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) sparks a disquisition on all that is forgotten in the act of cataloguing knowledge; the miracle of modern plastics saluted in the witty, industrially commissioned Le Chant du styrène (1958) regresses backwards to its homely beginnings; in Night and Fog an unprecedentedly enormous effort of human organisation marshals itself to actively produce a dreadful, previously unimaginable nullity.

To overstate the case, loss is the primary motor of the modern essay film: loss of belief in the image’s ability to faithfully reflect reality; loss of faith in the cinema’s ability to capture life as it is lived; loss of illusions about cinema’s ‘purity’, its autonomy from the other arts or, for that matter, the world.

“You never know what you may be filming,” notes one of Marker’s narrating surrogates in A Grin Without a Cat, as footage of the Chilean equestrian team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics offers a glimpse of a future member of the Pinochet junta. The image and sound captured at the time of filming offer one facet of reality; it is only with this lateral move outside that reality that the future reality it conceals can speak.

What will distinguish the essay film, as Bazin noted, is not only its ability to make the image but also its ability to interrogate it, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty and see it as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen. No less than were the montagists, the film-essayists seek the motive forces of modern society not by crystallising eternal verities in powerful images but by investigating that ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic relationship between our regime of images and the realities it both reveals and occludes.

— Andrew Tracy

1. À propos de Nice

Jean Vigo, 1930

Few documentaries have achieved the cult status of the 22-minute A propos de Nice, co-directed by Jean Vigo and cameraman Boris Kaufman at the beginning of their careers. The film retains a spontaneous, apparently haphazard, quality yet its careful montage combines a strong realist drive, lyrical dashes – helped by Marc Perrone’s accordion music – and a clear political agenda.

In today’s era, in which the Côte d’Azur has become a byword for hedonistic consumption, it’s refreshing to see a film that systematically undermines its glossy surface. Using images sometimes ‘stolen’ with hidden cameras, A propos de Nice moves between the city’s main sites of pleasure: the Casino, the Promenade des Anglais, the Hotel Negresco and the carnival. Occasionally the filmmakers remind us of the sea, the birds, the wind in the trees but mostly they contrast people: the rich play tennis, the poor boules; the rich have tea, the poor gamble in the (then) squalid streets of the Old Town.

As often, women bear the brunt of any critique of bourgeois consumption: a rich old woman’s head is compared to an ostrich, others grin as they gaze up at phallic factory chimneys; young women dance frenetically, their crotch to the camera. In the film’s most famous image, an elegant woman is ‘stripped’ by the camera to reveal her naked body – not quite matched by a man’s shoes vanishing to display his naked feet to the shoe-shine.

An essay film avant la lettre , A propos de Nice ends on Soviet-style workers’ faces and burning furnaces. The message is clear, even if it has not been heeded by history.

— Ginette Vincendeau

2. A Diary for Timothy

Humphrey Jennings, 1945

A Diary for Timothy takes the form of a journal addressed to the eponymous Timothy James Jenkins, born on 3 September 1944, exactly five years after Britain’s entry into World War II. The narrator, Michael Redgrave , a benevolent offscreen presence, informs young Timothy about the momentous events since his birth and later advises that, even when the war is over, there will be “everyday danger”.

The subjectivity and speculative approach maintained throughout are more akin to the essay tradition than traditional propaganda in their rejection of mere glib conveyance of information or thunderous hectoring. Instead Jennings invites us quietly to observe the nuances of everyday life as Britain enters the final chapter of the war. Against the momentous political backdrop, otherwise routine, everyday activities are ascribed new profundity as the Welsh miner Geronwy, Alan the farmer, Bill the railway engineer and Peter the convalescent fighter pilot go about their daily business.

Within the confines of the Ministry of Information’s remit – to lift the spirits of a battle-weary nation – and the loose narrative framework of Timothy’s first six months, Jennings finds ample expression for the kind of formal experiment that sets his work apart from that of other contemporary documentarians. He worked across film, painting, photography, theatrical design, journalism and poetry; in Diary his protean spirit finds expression in a manner that transgresses the conventional parameters of wartime propaganda, stretching into film poem, philosophical reflection, social document, surrealistic ethnographic observation and impressionistic symphony. Managing to keep to the right side of sentimentality, it still makes for potent viewing.

— Catherine McGahan

3. Toute la mémoire du monde

Alain Resnais, 1956

In the opening credits of Toute la mémoire du monde, alongside the director’s name and that of producer Pierre Braunberger , one reads the mysterious designation “Groupe des XXX”. This Group of Thirty was an assembly of filmmakers who mobilised in the early 1950s to defend the “style, quality and ambitious subject matter” of short films in post-war France; the signatories of its 1953 ‘Declaration’ included Resnais , Chris Marker and Agnès Varda. The success of the campaign contributed to a golden age of short filmmaking that would last a decade and form the crucible of the French essay film.

A 22-minute poetic documentary about the old French Bibliothèque Nationale, Toute la mémoire du monde is a key work in this strand of filmmaking and one which can also be seen as part of a loose ‘trilogy of memory’ in Resnais’s early documentaries. Les statues meurent aussi (co-directed with Chris Marker) explored cultural memory as embodied in African art and the depredations of colonialism; Night and Fog was a seminal reckoning with the historical memory of the Nazi death camps. While less politically controversial than these earlier works, Toute la mémoire du monde’s depiction of the Bibliothèque Nationale is still oddly suggestive of a prison, with its uniformed guards and endless corridors. In W.G. Sebald ’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, directly after a passage dedicated to Resnais’s film, the protagonist describes his uncertainty over whether, when using the library, he “was on the Islands of the Blest, or, on the contrary, in a penal colony”.

Resnais explores the workings of the library through the effective device of following a book from arrival and cataloguing to its delivery to a reader (the book itself being something of an in-joke: a mocked-up travel guide to Mars in the Petite Planète series Marker was then editing for Editions du Seuil). With Resnais’s probing, mobile camerawork and a commentary by French writer Remo Forlani, Toute la mémoire du monde transforms the library into a mysterious labyrinth, something between an edifice and an organism: part brain and part tomb.

— Chris Darke

4. The House is Black

(Khaneh siah ast) Forough Farrokhzad, 1963

Before the House of Makhmalbaf there was The House is Black. Called “the greatest of all Iranian films” by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who helped translate the subtitles from Farsi into English, this 20-minute black-and-white essay film by feminist poet Farrokhzad was shot in a leper colony near Tabriz in northern Iran and has been heralded as the touchstone of the Iranian New Wave.

The buildings of the Baba Baghi colony are brick and peeling whitewash but a student asked to write a sentence using the word ‘house’ offers Khaneh siah ast : the house is black. His hand, seen in close-up, is one of many in the film; rather than objects of medical curiosity, these hands – some fingerless, many distorted by the disease – are agents, always in movement, doing, making, exercising, praying. In putting white words on the blackboard, the student makes part of the film; in the next shots, the film’s credits appear, similarly handwritten on the same blackboard.

As they negotiate the camera’s gaze and provide the soundtrack by singing, stamping and wheeling a barrow, the lepers are co-authors of the film. Farrokhzad echoes their prayers, heard and seen on screen, with her voiceover, which collages religious texts, beginning with the passage from Psalm 55 famously set to music by Mendelssohn (“O for the wings of a dove”).

In the conjunctions between Farrokhzad’s poetic narration and diegetic sound, including tanbur-playing, an intense assonance arises. Its beat is provided by uniquely lyrical associative editing that would influence Abbas Kiarostami , who quotes Farrokhzad’s poem ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ in his eponymous film . Repeated shots of familiar bodily movement, made musical, move the film insistently into the viewer’s body: it is infectious. Posing a question of aesthetics, The House Is Black uses the contagious gaze of cinema to dissolve the screen between Us and Them.

— Sophie Mayer

5. Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still

Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972

With its invocation of Brecht (“Uncle Bertolt”), rejection of visual pleasure (for 52 minutes we’re mostly looking at a single black-and-white still) and discussion of the role of intellectuals in “the revolution”, Letter to Jane is so much of its time as to appear untranslatable to the present except as a curio from a distant era of radical cinema. Between 1969 and 1971, Godard and Gorin made films collectively as part of the Dziga Vertov Group before they returned, in 1972, to the mainstream with Tout va bien , a big-budget film about the aftermath of May 1968 featuring leftist stars Yves Montand and Jane Fonda . It was to the latter that Godard and Gorin directed their Letter after seeing a news photograph of her on a solidarity visit to North Vietnam in August 1972.

Intended to accompany the US release of Tout va bien, Letter to Jane is ‘a letter’ only in as much as it is fairly conversational in tone, with Godard and Gorin delivering their voiceovers in English. It’s stylistically more akin to the ‘blackboard films’ of the time, with their combination of pedagogical instruction and stern auto-critique.

It’s also an inspired semiological reading of a media image and a reckoning with the contradictions of celebrity activism. Godard and Gorin examine the image’s framing and camera angle and ask why Fonda is the ‘star’ of the photograph while the Vietnamese themselves remain faceless or out of focus? And what of her expression of compassionate concern? This “expression of an expression” they trace back, via an elaboration of the Kuleshov effect , through other famous faces – Henry Fonda , John Wayne , Lillian Gish and Falconetti – concluding that it allows for “no reverse shot” and serves only to bolster Western “good conscience”.

Letter to Jane is ultimately concerned with the same question that troubled philosophers such as Levinas and Derrida : what’s at stake ethically when one claims to speak “in place of the other”? Any contemporary critique of celebrity activism – from Bono and Geldof to Angelina Jolie – should start here, with a pair of gauchiste trolls muttering darkly beneath a press shot of ‘Hanoi Jane’.

6. F for Fake

Orson Welles, 1973

Those who insist it was all downhill for Orson Welles after Citizen Kane would do well to take a close look at this film made more than three decades later, in its own idiosyncratic way a masterpiece just as innovative as his better-known feature debut.

Perhaps the film’s comparative and undeserved critical neglect is due to its predominantly playful tone, or perhaps it’s because it is a low-budget, hard-to-categorise, deeply personal work that mixes original material with plenty of footage filmed by others – most extensively taken from a documentary by François Reichenbach about Clifford Irving and his bogus biography of his friend Elmyr de Hory , an art forger who claimed to have painted pictures attributed to famous names and hung in the world’s most prestigious galleries.

If the film had simply offered an account of the hoaxes perpetrated by that disreputable duo, it would have been entertaining enough but, by means of some extremely inventive, innovative and inspired editing, Welles broadens his study of fakery to take in his own history as a ‘charlatan’ – not merely his lifelong penchant for magician’s tricks but also the 1938 radio broadcast of his news-report adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds – as well as observations on Howard Hughes , Pablo Picasso and the anonymous builders of Chartres cathedral. So it is that Welles contrives to conjure up, behind a colourful cloak of consistently entertaining mischief, a rueful meditation on truth and falsehood, art and authorship – a subject presumably dear to his heart following Pauline Kael ’s then recent attempts to persuade the world that Herman J. Mankiewicz had been the real creative force behind Kane.

As a riposte to that thesis (albeit never framed as such), F for Fake is subtle, robust, supremely erudite and never once bitter; the darkest moment – as Welles contemplates the serene magnificence of Chartres – is at once an uncharacteristic but touchingly heartfelt display of humility and a poignant memento mori. And it is in this delicate balancing of the autobiographical with the universal, as well as in the dazzling deployment of cinematic form to illustrate and mirror content, that the film works its once unique, now highly influential magic.

— Geoff Andrew

7. How to Live in the German Federal Republic

(Leben – BRD) Harun Farocki, 1990

Harun Farocki ’s portrait of West Germany in 32 simulations from training sessions has no commentary, just the actions themselves in all their surreal beauty, one after the other. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland is shown as a nation of people who can deal with everything because they have been prepared – taught how to react properly in every possible situation.

We know how birth works; how to behave in kindergarten; how to chat up girls, boys or whatever we fancy (for we’re liberal-minded, if only in principle); how to look for a job and maybe live without finding one; how to wiggle our arses in the hottest way possible when we pole-dance, or manage a hostage crisis without things getting (too) bloody. Whatever job we do, we know it by heart; we also know how to manage whatever kind of psychological breakdown we experience; and we are also prepared for the end, and even have an idea about how our burial will go. This is the nation: one of fearful people in dire need of control over their one chance of getting it right.

Viewed from the present, How to Live in the German Federal Republic is revealed as the archetype of many a Farocki film in the decades to follow, for example Die Umschulung (1994), Der Auftritt (1996) or Nicht ohne Risiko (2004), all of which document as dispassionately as possible different – not necessarily simulated – scenarios of social interactions related to labour and capital. For all their enlightening beauty, none of these ever came close to How to Live in the German Federal Republic which, depending on one’s mood, can play like an absurd comedy or the most gut-wrenching drama. Yet one disquieting thing is certain: How to Live in the German Federal Republic didn’t age – our lives still look the same.

— Olaf Möller

8. One Man’s War

(La Guerre d’un seul homme) Edgardo Cozarinsky , 1982

One Man’s War proves that an auteur film can be made without writing a line, recording a sound or shooting a single frame. It’s easy to point to the ‘extraordinary’ character of the film, given its combination of materials that were not made to cohabit; there couldn’t be a less plausible dialogue than the one Cozarinsky establishes between the newsreels shot during the Nazi occupation of Paris and the Parisian diaries of novelist and Nazi officer Ernst Jünger . There’s some truth to Pascal Bonitzer’s assertion in Cahiers du cinéma in 1982 that the principle of the documentary was inverted here, since it is the images that provide a commentary for the voice.

But that observation still doesn’t pin down the uniqueness of a work that forces history through a series of registers, styles and dimensions, wiping out the distance between reality and subjectivity, propaganda and literature, cinema and journalism, daily life and dream, and establishing the idea not so much of communicating vessels as of contaminating vessels.

To enquire about the essayistic dimension of One Man’s War is to submit it to a test of purity against which the film itself is rebelling. This is no ars combinatoria but systems of collision and harmony; organic in their temporal development and experimental in their procedural eagerness. It’s like a machine created to die instantly; neither Cozarinsky nor anyone else could repeat the trick, as is the case with all great avant-garde works.

By blurring the genre of his literary essays, his fictional films, his archival documentaries, his literary fictions, Cozarinsky showed he knew how to reinvent the erasure of borders. One Man’s War is not a film about the Occupation but a meditation on the different forms in which that Occupation can be represented.

—Sergio Wolf. Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido

9. Sans soleil

Chris Marker, 1982

There are many moments to quicken the heart in Sans soleil but one in particular demonstrates the method at work in Marker’s peerless film. An unseen female narrator reads from letters sent to her by a globetrotting cameraman named Sandor Krasna (Marker’s nom de voyage), one of which muses on the 11th-century Japanese writer Sei Shōnagon .

As we hear of Shōnagon’s “list of elegant things, distressing things, even of things not worth doing”, we watch images of a missile being launched and a hovering bomber. What’s the connection? There is none. Nothing here fixes word and image in illustrative lockstep; it’s in the space between them that Sans soleil makes room for the spectator to drift, dream and think – to inimitable effect.

Sans soleil was Marker’s return to a personal mode of filmmaking after more than a decade in militant cinema. His reprise of the epistolary form looks back to earlier films such as Letter from Siberia (1958) but the ‘voice’ here is both intimate and removed. The narrator’s reading of Krasna’s letters flips the first person to the third, using ‘he’ instead of ‘I’. Distance and proximity in the words mirror, multiply and magnify both the distances travelled and the time spanned in the images, especially those of the 1960s and its lost dreams of revolutionary social change.

While it’s handy to define Sans soleil as an ‘essay film’, there’s something about the dry term that doesn’t do justice to the experience of watching it. After Marker’s death last year, when writing programme notes on the film, I came up with a line that captures something of what it’s like to watch Sans soleil: “a mesmerising, lucid and lovely river of film, which, like the river of the ancients, is never the same when one steps into it a second time”.

10. Handsworth Songs

Black Audio Film Collective, 1986

Made at the time of civil unrest in Birmingham, this key example of the essay film at its most complex remains relevant both formally and thematically. Handsworth Songs is no straightforward attempt to provide answers as to why the riots happened; instead, using archive film spliced with made and found footage of the events and the media and popular reaction to them, it creates a poetic sense of context.

The film is an example of counter-media in that it slows down the demand for either immediate explanation or blanket condemnation. Its stillness allows the history of immigration and the subsequent hostility of the media and the police to the black and Asian population to be told in careful detail.

One repeated scene shows a young black man running through a group of white policemen who surround him on all sides. He manages to break free several times before being wrestled to the ground; if only for one brief, utopian moment, an entirely different history of race in the UK is opened up.

The waves of post-war immigration are charted in the stories told both by a dominant (and frequently repressive) televisual narrative and, importantly, by migrants themselves. Interviews mingle with voiceover, music accompanies the machines that the Windrush generation work at. But there are no definitive answers here, only, as the Black Audio Film Collective memorably suggests, “the ghosts of songs”.

— Nina Power

11. Los Angeles Plays Itself

Thom Andersen, 2003

One of the attractions that drew early film pioneers out west, besides the sunlight and the industrial freedom, was the versatility of the southern Californian landscape: with sea, snowy mountains, desert, fruit groves, Spanish missions, an urban downtown and suburban boulevards all within a 100-mile radius, the Los Angeles basin quickly and famously became a kind of giant open-air film studio, available and pliant.

Of course, some people actually live there too. “Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticise,” growls native Angeleno Andersen in his forensic three-hour prosecution of moving images of the movie city, whose mounting litany of complaints – couched in Encke King’s gravelly, near-parodically irritated voiceover, and sometimes organised, as Stuart Klawans wrote in The Nation, “in the manner of a saloon orator” – belies a sly humour leavening a radically serious intent.

Inspired in part by Mark Rappaport’s factual essay appropriations of screen fictions (Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, 1993; From the Journals of Jean Seberg , 1995), as well as Godard’s Histoire(s) de cinéma, this “city symphony in reverse” asserts public rights to our screen discourse through its magpie method as well as its argument. (Today you could rebrand it ‘Occupy Hollywood’.) Tinseltown malfeasance is evidenced across some 200 different film clips, from offences against geography and slurs against architecture to the overt historical mythologies of Chinatown (1974), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and L.A. Confidential (1997), in which the city’s class and cultural fault-lines are repainted “in crocodile tears” as doleful tragedies of conspiracy, promoting hopelessness in the face of injustice.

Andersen’s film by contrast spurs us to independent activism, starting with the reclamation of our gaze: “What if we watch with our voluntary attention, instead of letting the movies direct us?” he asks, peering beyond the foregrounding of character and story. And what if more movies were better and more useful, helping us see our world for what it is? Los Angeles Plays Itself grows most moving – and useful – extolling the Los Angeles neorealism Andersen has in mind: stories of “so many men unneeded, unwanted”, as he says over a scene from Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), “in a world in which there is so much to be done”.

— Nick Bradshaw

12. La Morte Rouge

Víctor Erice, 2006

The famously unprolific Spanish director Víctor Erice may remain best known for his full-length fiction feature The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), but his other films are no less rewarding. Having made a brilliant foray into the fertile territory located somewhere between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ with The Quince Tree Sun (1992), in this half-hour film made for the ‘Correspondences’ exhibition exploring resemblances in the oeuvres of Erice and Kiarostami , the relationship between reality and artifice becomes his very subject.

A ‘small’ work, it comprises stills, archive footage, clips from an old Sherlock Holmes movie, a few brief new scenes – mostly without actors – and music by Mompou and (for once, superbly used) Arvo Pärt . If its tone – it’s introduced as a “soliloquy” – and scale are modest, its thematic range and philosophical sophistication are considerable.

The title is the name of the Québécois village that is the setting for The Scarlet Claw (1944), a wartime Holmes mystery starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce which was the first movie Erice ever saw, taken by his sister to the Kursaal cinema in San Sebastian.

For the five-year-old, the experience was a revelation: unable to distinguish the ‘reality’ of the newsreel from that of the nightmare world of Roy William Neill’s film, he not only learned that death and murder existed but noted that the adults in the audience, presumably privy to some secret knowledge denied him, were unaffected by the corpses on screen. Had this something to do with war? Why was La Morte Rouge not on any map? And what did it signify that postman Potts was not, in fact, Potts but the killer – and an actor (whatever that was) to boot?

From such personal reminiscences – evoked with wondrous intimacy in the immaculate Castillian of the writer-director’s own wry narration – Erice fashions a lyrical meditation on themes that have underpinned his work from Beehive to Broken Windows (2012): time and change, memory and identity, innocence and experience, war and death. And because he understands, intellectually and emotionally, that the time-based medium he himself works in can reveal unforgettably vivid realities that belong wholly to the realm of the imaginary, La Morte Rouge is a great film not only about the power of cinema but about life itself.

Sight & Sound: the August 2013 issue

In this issue: Frances Ha’s Greta Gerwig – the most exciting actress in America? Plus Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives, Wadjda, The Wall,...

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The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Film Analysis

What this handout is about.

This handout introduces film analysis and and offers strategies and resources for approaching film analysis assignments.

Writing the film analysis essay

Writing a film analysis requires you to consider the composition of the film—the individual parts and choices made that come together to create the finished piece. Film analysis goes beyond the analysis of the film as literature to include camera angles, lighting, set design, sound elements, costume choices, editing, etc. in making an argument. The first step to analyzing the film is to watch it with a plan.

Watching the film

First it’s important to watch the film carefully with a critical eye. Consider why you’ve been assigned to watch a film and write an analysis. How does this activity fit into the course? Why have you been assigned this particular film? What are you looking for in connection to the course content? Let’s practice with this clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Here are some tips on how to watch the clip critically, just as you would an entire film:

Give the clip your undivided attention at least once. Pay close attention to details and make observations that might start leading to bigger questions.
Watch the clip a second time. For this viewing, you will want to focus specifically on those elements of film analysis that your class has focused on, so review your course notes. For example, from whose perspective is this clip shot? What choices help convey that perspective? What is the overall tone, theme, or effect of this clip?
Take notes while you watch for the second time. Notes will help you keep track of what you noticed and when, if you include timestamps in your notes. Timestamps are vital for citing scenes from a film!

For more information on watching a film, check out the Learning Center’s handout on watching film analytically . For more resources on researching film, including glossaries of film terms, see UNC Library’s research guide on film & cinema .

Brainstorming ideas

Once you’ve watched the film twice, it’s time to brainstorm some ideas based on your notes. Brainstorming is a major step that helps develop and explore ideas. As you brainstorm, you may want to cluster your ideas around central topics or themes that emerge as you review your notes. Did you ask several questions about color? Were you curious about repeated images? Perhaps these are directions you can pursue.

If you’re writing an argumentative essay, you can use the connections that you develop while brainstorming to draft a thesis statement . Consider the assignment and prompt when formulating a thesis, as well as what kind of evidence you will present to support your claims. Your evidence could be dialogue, sound edits, cinematography decisions, etc. Much of how you make these decisions will depend on the type of film analysis you are conducting, an important decision covered in the next section.

After brainstorming, you can draft an outline of your film analysis using the same strategies that you would for other writing assignments. Here are a few more tips to keep in mind as you prepare for this stage of the assignment:

Make sure you understand the prompt and what you are being asked to do. Remember that this is ultimately an assignment, so your thesis should answer what the prompt asks. Check with your professor if you are unsure.
In most cases, the director’s name is used to talk about the film as a whole, for instance, “Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo .” However, some writers may want to include the names of other persons who helped to create the film, including the actors, the cinematographer, and the sound editor, among others.
When describing a sequence in a film, use the literary present. An example could be, “In Vertigo , Hitchcock employs techniques of observation to dramatize the act of detection.”
Finding a screenplay/script of the movie may be helpful and save you time when compiling citations. But keep in mind that there may be differences between the screenplay and the actual product (and these differences might be a topic of discussion!).
Go beyond describing basic film elements by articulating the significance of these elements in support of your particular position. For example, you may have an interpretation of the striking color green in Vertigo , but you would only mention this if it was relevant to your argument. For more help on using evidence effectively, see the section on “using evidence” in our evidence handout .

Also be sure to avoid confusing the terms shot, scene, and sequence. Remember, a shot ends every time the camera cuts; a scene can be composed of several related shots; and a sequence is a set of related scenes.

Different types of film analysis

As you consider your notes, outline, and general thesis about a film, the majority of your assignment will depend on what type of film analysis you are conducting. This section explores some of the different types of film analyses you may have been assigned to write.

Semiotic analysis

Semiotic analysis is the interpretation of signs and symbols, typically involving metaphors and analogies to both inanimate objects and characters within a film. Because symbols have several meanings, writers often need to determine what a particular symbol means in the film and in a broader cultural or historical context.

For instance, a writer could explore the symbolism of the flowers in Vertigo by connecting the images of them falling apart to the vulnerability of the heroine.

Here are a few other questions to consider for this type of analysis:

What objects or images are repeated throughout the film?
How does the director associate a character with small signs, such as certain colors, clothing, food, or language use?
How does a symbol or object relate to other symbols and objects, that is, what is the relationship between the film’s signs?

Many films are rich with symbolism, and it can be easy to get lost in the details. Remember to bring a semiotic analysis back around to answering the question “So what?” in your thesis.

Narrative analysis

Narrative analysis is an examination of the story elements, including narrative structure, character, and plot. This type of analysis considers the entirety of the film and the story it seeks to tell.

For example, you could take the same object from the previous example—the flowers—which meant one thing in a semiotic analysis, and ask instead about their narrative role. That is, you might analyze how Hitchcock introduces the flowers at the beginning of the film in order to return to them later to draw out the completion of the heroine’s character arc.

To create this type of analysis, you could consider questions like:

How does the film correspond to the Three-Act Structure: Act One: Setup; Act Two: Confrontation; and Act Three: Resolution?
What is the plot of the film? How does this plot differ from the narrative, that is, how the story is told? For example, are events presented out of order and to what effect?
Does the plot revolve around one character? Does the plot revolve around multiple characters? How do these characters develop across the film?

When writing a narrative analysis, take care not to spend too time on summarizing at the expense of your argument. See our handout on summarizing for more tips on making summary serve analysis.

Cultural/historical analysis

One of the most common types of analysis is the examination of a film’s relationship to its broader cultural, historical, or theoretical contexts. Whether films intentionally comment on their context or not, they are always a product of the culture or period in which they were created. By placing the film in a particular context, this type of analysis asks how the film models, challenges, or subverts different types of relations, whether historical, social, or even theoretical.

For example, the clip from Vertigo depicts a man observing a woman without her knowing it. You could examine how this aspect of the film addresses a midcentury social concern about observation, such as the sexual policing of women, or a political one, such as Cold War-era McCarthyism.

A few of the many questions you could ask in this vein include:

How does the film comment on, reinforce, or even critique social and political issues at the time it was released, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality?
How might a biographical understanding of the film’s creators and their historical moment affect the way you view the film?
How might a specific film theory, such as Queer Theory, Structuralist Theory, or Marxist Film Theory, provide a language or set of terms for articulating the attributes of the film?

Take advantage of class resources to explore possible approaches to cultural/historical film analyses, and find out whether you will be expected to do additional research into the film’s context.

Mise-en-scène analysis

A mise-en-scène analysis attends to how the filmmakers have arranged compositional elements in a film and specifically within a scene or even a single shot. This type of analysis organizes the individual elements of a scene to explore how they come together to produce meaning. You may focus on anything that adds meaning to the formal effect produced by a given scene, including: blocking, lighting, design, color, costume, as well as how these attributes work in conjunction with decisions related to sound, cinematography, and editing. For example, in the clip from Vertigo , a mise-en-scène analysis might ask how numerous elements, from lighting to camera angles, work together to present the viewer with the perspective of Jimmy Stewart’s character.

To conduct this type of analysis, you could ask:

What effects are created in a scene, and what is their purpose?
How does this scene represent the theme of the movie?
How does a scene work to express a broader point to the film’s plot?

This detailed approach to analyzing the formal elements of film can help you come up with concrete evidence for more general film analysis assignments.

Reviewing your draft

Once you have a draft, it’s helpful to get feedback on what you’ve written to see if your analysis holds together and you’ve conveyed your point. You may not necessarily need to find someone who has seen the film! Ask a writing coach, roommate, or family member to read over your draft and share key takeaways from what you have written so far.

Works consulted

We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.

Aumont, Jacques, and Michel Marie. 1988. L’analyse Des Films . Paris: Nathan.

Media & Design Center. n.d. “Film and Cinema Research.” UNC University Libraries. Last updated February 10, 2021. https://guides.lib.unc.edu/filmresearch .

Oxford Royale Academy. n.d. “7 Ways to Watch Film.” Oxford Royale Academy. Accessed April 2021. https://www.oxford-royale.com/articles/7-ways-watch-films-critically/ .

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Pixar's 'Soul’ Offers a Thesis on the Meaning of Life, and It’s a Pretty Good One

Dir. pete docter––4.5 stars.

Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) and 22 (Tina Fey) surrounded by Counselors — Picasso-esque beings that shepherd new souls through The Great Before.

There are technically no rules against an animated film winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. In the 93-year history of the Oscars, however, only three have ever received a nomination (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Up,” and “Toy Story 3”), and none have ever won. When “Wall-E” wasn’t nominated in 2008, critics began to raise questions about whether the existence of the separate “Best Animated Feature” category was inherently harmful — an implicitly degrading statement that animated films must be judged by different standards than live-action ones.

This, in some ways, is besides the point; to delve into a discussion of the Academy’s inner machinations would probably make this review about 20 times longer. But the “Best Animated Feature” category is, in many ways, symptomatic of the way many Americans view animation: as a genre, rather than as a medium. The way we associate animation with fart jokes and cheesy endings makes it difficult to think broader, to produce something mature and thoughtful like “Spirited Away” or “Your Name” — leaving us to define animated movies as “just for kids”

Pixar’s “Soul,” however, blows this definition out of the water.

The film follows Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a middle-school band teacher who’s always dreamed of being a professional jazz pianist. On the day he finally gets his big break — literally moments after being offered the chance to play with one of the jazz greats — he falls into an open manhole and, well, dies.

What follows is a bit less realistic. Instead of proceeding to The Great Beyond like all the other souls, Joe (now an ethereal, glowing, light teal-colored soul) flees to The Great Before — the fantastical celestial plane where new souls get their personalities before proceeding to Earth. There, he meets 22 (Tina Fey), a petulant, jaded new soul who’s not all that jazzed about going to Earth, and together, they devise a plan to return Joe to his earthly body in time for his big gig.

Much like in “Inside Out” (another brainchild of director and Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter), the far-fetched premise of “Soul” is balanced by how grounded it is in the human condition. It’s okay, for instance, that Joe’s soul inhabits a therapy cat named Mr. Mittens for a good chunk of the second act, because this ultimately allows 22 to recognize the true meaning of life on Earth. And the slapstick is kept to a minimum — replaced with humor that is either very clever or uncannily mature (“Can’t crush a soul here,” 22 says as a building collapses onto a group of new souls in The Great Before. “That’s what life on Earth is for”).

The astral landscapes of The Great Before are just as lush, beautiful, and imaginative as Riley’s mind in “Inside Out.” Purple “trees” are scattered on hills of turquoise “grass” in this land of blue-green pastels and incoherent, fuzzy forms — making for a world that is dream-like in the most literal sense of the word. Particularly striking are the Counselors: the kind, gentle giants that guide new souls through The Great Before. The way they are animated to look both two-dimensional and three-dimensional (sort of like a Picasso portrait brought to life) is visually stunning: a refreshing take on CG animation from the studio that pioneered the craft.

The other half of the film is set in New York, a city that Pixar managed to make just as visually interesting as a literal astral plane. Docter achieves a frenetic, energized depiction of the city that never sleeps and the diverse people it comprises, and everything about the film — from the cinematography to the crowds animation — imbibes Joe’s New York with gritty authenticity. The contrast in scoring, too — between composer Jon Batiste’s jazzy, piano-heavy New York and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ (the duo behind “Mank” and “The Social Network”) ethereal, airy underscore to The Great Before — does more than its fair share of narrative and emotional heavy lifting.

And as beautiful as the animation and music are, the real soul (pun intended) of the film lies in its writing. It does, for the most part, follow the typical Pixar story beats, but the way it builds to its final point is masterful: scattering seemingly insignificant plot points throughout the second act, shepherding an ostensibly well-adjusted protagonist through a series of adventures, and having him discover the flaw in his thinking just as the audience does — a puzzle that the viewer assembles right alongside Joe.

The final act is a masterclass in storytelling: in particular, a four-minute sequence near the end manages to — wordlessly, sublimely, poignantly — capture the beauty of the human condition. It is an ending that feels earned, one that will not only leave the viewer (as most good films do) reflecting on their own life, but also (as not many animated films do) wondering if their child can fully grasp its meaning.

“Soul” offers a thesis on the meaning of human life — a difficult question to answer in a 200-page philosophy dissertation, much less a 104-minute animated film. And it does so with all the beauty, detail, and imagination that audiences have come to expect from Pixar. It is a good animated film (indeed, probably an Oscar-worthy one), but more importantly, it is a good film, period. And it is films like “Soul” that prove that animation isn’t just as good as live-action, but — quite often — better.

Pixar's "Soul" is available to stream on Disney+ beginning on Dec. 25.

—Staff writer Kalos K. Chu can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him on Twitter @kaloschu .

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Film Analysis

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All art forms convey meaning, and film is no different. Whereas paintings convey meaning through shape and colour, and works of literature convey meaning through language, films convey meaning through various audiovisual elements, such as mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound, among others. The purpose of a film analysis paper is to explore how these formal features contribute to a film’s meaning.

Remember that a film’s formal features are the result of creative decisions made by the filmmaker. So, when analyzing a particular formal aspect of a film, ask yourself: Why has the filmmaker constructed the film in this way? What effect might they be trying to elicit in the viewer? In Film Art: An Introduction , Bordwell, Thompson, and Smith provide examples of some questions that illustrate how films convey meaning through form:

Does the use of music or noise alter our attitude toward a character? Does the composition of the shot tend to make us concentrate on a particular detail (4.153, the shot of Anne’s face in Day of Wrath )? Does the use of camera movement hold off story information to create suspense, as in the opening of Touch of Evil (pp. 213–215)? Does the use of discontinuous editing cue us to create thematic comparisons, as in the sequence we analyzed in October (pp. 259–262)? Bordwell, Thompson, & Smith, 2017, p. 309.

Here are some other tips to consider when you are conducting film analysis:

Aim to persuade

Just like most university essays, a film analysis paper is a form of persuasive writing, and as such, it advances an argument that is backed up by evidence. Usually, your paper will need to have a thesis statement, located in the introduction, that summarizes your main argument, and body paragraphs that present and analyze evidence supporting your thesis. Your evidence must include specific examples drawn from the film(s) you are studying. For some assignments, you may also be permitted or even required to draw on outside sources (such as film criticism or historical/biographical information) to contextualize your analysis.

Avoid film review

The goal of a film analysis paper is not to state whether you liked or disliked the film, or to encourage people to see it or not. The goal is to analyze the film. Analysis means breaking something down into its constituent parts and showing how these parts function and relate to one another to make up a unified whole. Film analysis reveals something about how the film works that you may not have noticed the first time you watched it. Therefore, rather than merely claiming that a particular shot is beautiful, ask yourself: Why do I find this shot beautiful? What cinematic techniques does the filmmaker employ to create this effect?

Avoid excessive plot summary

Summary states what happened; analysis explains how or why it happened. In a film analysis paper, you can usually assume that the reader is familiar with the film you are writing about and therefore knows “what happened” in it. The reader is much more interested to know how the film was constructed and to what effect. Summarize only those aspects of the film’s plot that the reader needs to understand your analysis.

Consider the narrative

Don’t take the film’s plot—or any of its narrative aspects—for granted. They all result from creative decisions made by the filmmaker and therefore require critical analysis. Ask yourself: How is the sequence of events in the film ordered? Is it linear or not? From whose point of view is the film’s story told? Is the narration restricted or unrestricted, subjective or objective? To what effect? If the film lacks a conventional narrative altogether, does it employ another sort of organizing principle or pattern? Keep in mind that your analysis should pay attention to both the narrative and stylistic aspects of the film. If your argument could equally apply to a novel on which the film is based, you are not analyzing the film as a film .

Consider the film’s theme(s)

One of the ways films produce meaning is by engaging with themes. Themes are what you might say a film is “about.” They are broad, universal topics, such as romantic relationships, mortality, and good versus evil, which have served as the subject matter of art time and time again. However, different filmmakers deal with these themes in very different ways. Therefore, rather than merely claiming that a film is about romantic relationships, ask yourself: What is the filmmaker saying about romantic relationships? And importantly, how is this claim or message reinforced through the film’s form and style?

Consider the film’s genre, place in film history, and filmmaker

To fully appreciate the significance of a film, you may need some understanding of its genre, place in film history, or filmmaker. Ask yourself: Does the film belong to a genre category, such as action, horror, sci-fi, or comedy? Does the film conform to the typical norms and conventions of the genre, or does it deviate from them? To what effect? Is the film part of a specific tradition or movement in film history, such as the French New Wave of the early ’60s or the New Hollywood era of the ’70s? What characteristics do films of this kind have in common? Is the film the work of a recognized auteur? If so, what is distinctive or unmistakable about this person’s filmmaking style?

Consider the film’s ideological stance

Some films are made to advance a particular social or political message. However, upon close analysis, films may also be shown to express ideological beliefs or assumptions that the filmmaker did not directly intend. When analyzing a film, you should be on the lookout for both types of meaning. Ask yourself: What values does the film advocate (both explicitly and implicitly)? To what degree do these values reflect the time and place in which the film was made? How does the film represent racial, gender, and class relations? Does the film exhibit any unacknowledged biases or prejudices?

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Laura Rascaroli (bio)

The label "essay film" is encountered with ever-increasing frequency in both film reviews and scholarly writings on the cinema, owing to the recent proliferation of unorthodox, personal, reflexive "new" documentaries. In an article dedicated to the phenomenon that he defines as the "recent onslaught of essay films," Paul Arthur proposes: "Galvanized by the intersection of personal, subjective and social history, the essay has emerged as the leading non-fiction form for both intellectual and artistic innovation." 1 Although widely used, the category is under-theorized, even more so than other forms of non-fiction. In spite of the necessary brevity of this contribution, by tracing the birth of the essay in both film theory and film history, and by examining and evaluating existing definitions, a theory of the essay film can be shaped, some order in its intricate field made, and some light shed on this erratic but fascinating and ever more relevant cinematic form.

Most of the existing scholarly contributions acknowledge that the definition of essay film is problematic, and suggest it is a hybrid form that crosses boundaries and rests somewhere in between fiction and nonfiction cinema. According to Giannetti, for instance, "an essay is neither fiction nor fact, but a personal investigation involving both the passion and intellect of the author." 2 Arthur's framing of such in-betweenness is particularly instructive: "one way to think about the essay film is as a meeting ground for documentary, avant-garde, and art film impulses." 3 Nora Alter insists that the essay film is " not a genre, as it strives to be beyond formal, conceptual, and social constraint. Like 'heresy' in the Adornean literary essay, the essay film disrespects traditional boundaries, is transgressive both structurally and conceptually, it is self-reflective and self-reflexive." 4 [End Page 24]

Transgression is a characteristic that the essay film shares with the literary essay, which is also often described as a protean form. The two foremost theorists of the essay are, as is well known, Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukács; both describe it as indeterminate, open, and, ultimately, indefinable. According to Adorno, "the essay's innermost formal law is heresy" 5 ; for Lukács, the essay must manufacture the conditions of its own existence: "the essay has to create from within itself all the preconditions for the effectiveness and solidity of its vision." 6 Other theorists and essayists make similar claims: for Jean Starobinski, the essay "does not obey any rules" 7 ; for Aldous Huxley, it "is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything" 8 ; for Snyder, it is a "nongenre." 9 As these examples indicate, many existing definitions of both literary and filmic essays are simultaneously vague and sweeping. Indeed, elusiveness and inclusiveness seem to become the only characterizing features of the essayistic; as Renov observes: "the essay form, notable for its tendency towards complication (digression, fragmentation, repetition, and dispersion) rather than composition, has, in its four-hundred-years history, continued to resist the efforts of literary taxonomists, confounding the laws of genre and classification, challenging the very notion of text and textual economy." 10

As José Moure argued, the fact that we resort to a literary term such as "essay" points to the difficulty that we experience when attempting to categorize certain, unclassifiable films. 11 This observation flags the risk that we accept the current state of under-theorization of the form, and use the term indiscriminately, in order to classify films that escape other labeling, as the following remark appears to endorse: "The essayistic quality becomes the only possibility to designate the cinema that resists against commercial productions." 12 The temptation of assigning the label of essay film to all that is non-commercial or experimental or unclassifiable must, however, be resisted, or else the term will cease being epistemologically useful, and we will end up equating very diverse films, as sometimes happens in the critical literature—for instance, works such as Sans Soleil/Sunless (Chris Marker, FR, 1983) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, US, 2004), which have very little in common aside the extensive voice-over and the fact that they both...

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Essays on the Essay Film

About the author.

In addition to his long career in film archiving and curating, Jan-Christopher Horak has taught at universities around the world. His recent book, Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design (2014) was published by University Press of Kentucky.

"Archival Spaces" Blog - Ithaca College

Sans soleil (1983)

For decades, I’ve been interested in the essay film, ever since I fell in love with Jean-Luc Godard’s work from the 1960s, like Pierrot le fou (1965), Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967), but especially since the 1990s, when I wrote about Godard’s colleague Chris Marker, whose Sans soleil (1983) is a masterpiece of the genre. Recently, I discussed Saul Bass’ Why Man Creates (1968) as an essay film. But is it a genre? Straddling documentary and fiction, the subjectivity of the author and the objectivity of the filmed image, vacillating between image and sound, visuality and the word, essay films in many ways defy definition. Jean-Pierre Gorin, himself a film essayist, writes in Essays on the Essay Film (ed. Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan, Columbia University Press, 2017): “They come in all sizes, shapes, and hues – and they will continue to do so... How can one even attempt to draw its floor plan, sketch its history and catalog the idiosyncratic products that appear in its inventory?” (p. 270).

Such semantic nebulousness already held true for the literary essay, as this anthology documents. Max Bense notes that essays always imply a level of experimentation, because they are exploring various forms of subjectivity. Similarly, the essays in this volume experiment with possible definitions of film essays. Essays on the Essay Film is accordingly divided into four sections: 1. Theoretical essays on the essay as a literary form by Georg Lukács, Robert Musil, Max Bense, Theodor W. Adorno and Aldous Huxley. 2. Previously published essays on the essay film by Hans Richter, Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin. 3. Analytical essays by Phillip Lopate, Paul Arthur, Michael Renov, Timothy Corrigan and Raymond Bellour. 4. Essays by filmmakers of the form, including Gorin, Hito Steyerl, Ross McElwee, Laura Mulvey and Isaac Julien.

Pierrot le fou (1965)

The editors make a wise decision to include writings on the literary essay, since many of its characteristics can be applied to essay films. Georg Lukács, for example, supposes that the essay is not an act of creating the new, but rather only of reconfiguring previously known information. Max Bense defines essays as a form of experimental writing that eschews absolute statements in the interest of exploring parameters and possibilities. Theodor Adorno takes Bense a step further by connecting the essay to anti-Platonic values, such as the ephemeral, the transitory, and the fragmentary. Given the ambiguity of the image, the push and pull between the filmmaker’s subjectivity and the objectivity of the image, are not such values integral to the cinema experience?

The earliest theoretical statements about the essay film come from experimental filmmaker and artist Hans Richter, who in his 1939 tract, Struggle for the Film: Towards a Socially Responsible Cinema , foresees a new form of documentary that has the ability to visualize thought. Alexander Astruc, an early member of the French New Wave , theorized the future of cinema in neither documentary nor fiction films, but rather in filmmakers who use the camera as a pen— le camera au stylo— for the expression of authorial subjectivity. Phillip Lopate, on the other hand, defines five characteristics for the essay film: 1. It has to communicate through language, whether spoken or written. 2. It must be the work of a single author. 3. It must set itself the task of solving a specific problem or problems. 4. It must be a wholly personal point of view. 5. It must be eloquent and interesting. Like Lopate, the late film critic and essayist Paul Arthur focuses on the film auteur, insisting that the essay film must give evidence a critical, self-reflexive author who is able to communicate through word and image.

Timothy Corrigan contributes a historical analysis of the essay film, from Dziga Vertov to Agnès Varda, agreeing with Lukács’ thesis that the essay film indeed creates no new forms, but remixes and recontextualizes ideas that are already in circulation. The final part of his essay focuses on a close reading of Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000).

Again and again the authors of the volume emphasize the essay film’s openness of form and always-tentative contours that defy any absolute definitions. Thus, the authors of Essays , as well as the even more subjective contributions of the filmmakers, discuss definitions and characteristics of a genre that isn’t one, unable or unwilling to draw definite conclusions. They are consciously circling around an indefinable object. The pleasure here is not to be found in the end goal, but rather in the intellectual journey. Nevertheless, it would have been nice if there had at least been agreement about when the essay film first appeared in film history, whether with Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Georges Franju’s Le sang des bêtes (1949) or Chris Marker’s Lettre de Sibérie (1958). A filmography of the essay film would have helped readers visualize the parameters of what films are considered essay films, a common ground for further discussion. Personally, I would have also liked to have read more about the aesthetics of the essay film, its visual and emotional appeal, not just intellectual pull. In retrospect, I remember the tactile sensuality of images in many of the films discussed, scenes that evoke emotion. I also question whether the essay or essay film is mainly a remix, and not in some way an independent creation of aesthetic value. Despite these slight reservations, this volume is eminently readable and a contribution to understanding a form of cinema that continues to morph and grow.

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Defining the Cinematic Essay: The Essay Film by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades, and Essays on the Essay Film by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan

When it came time for the students to create their own documentaries, one of my policies was for them to “throw objectivity out the window”. To quote John Grierson, documentaries are the “creative treatment of actuality.” Capturing the truth, whatever it may be, is quite nearly impossible if not utterly futile. Often, filmmakers deliberately manipulate their footage in order to achieve educational, informative and persuasive objectives. To illustrate, I screened Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North and always marveled at the students’ reactions when, after the screening, I informed them that the film’s depiction of traditional Inuit life was entirely a reenactment. While many students were shocked and disappointed when they learned this, others accepted Flaherty’s defence of the film as true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inuit’s vanishing way of life. Another example that I screened was a clip from controversial filmmaker Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) which demonstrated how Moore shrewdly used editing to villainise then-NRA president Charlton Heston. Though a majority of the class agreed with Moore’s anti-gun violence agenda, many were infuriated about being “lied to” and “misled” by the editing tactics. Naturally these examples also raise questions about the role of ethics in documentary filmmaking, but even films that are not deliberately manipulative are still “the product of individuals, [and] will always display bias and be in some manner didactic.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 193.)

To further my point on the elusive nature of objectivity, I screened Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard ( Night and Fog , 1956), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008.) Yet at this point I began to wonder if I was still teaching documentary or if I had ventured into some other territory. I was aware that Koyaanisqatsi had also been classified as an experimental film by notable scholars such as David Bordwell. On the other hand, Nuit et brouillard is labeled a documentary film but poses more questions than answers, since it is “unable to adequately document the reality it seeks.” (Alter/Corrigan p. 210.) Resnais’s short film interweaves black and white archival footage with colour film of Auschwitz and other camps. The colour sequences were shot in 1955, when the camps had already been deserted for ten years. Nuit et brouillard scrutinises the brutality of the Holocaust while contemplating the social, political and ethical responsibilities of the Nazis. Yet it also questions the more abstract role of knowledge and memory, both individual and communal, within the context of such horrific circumstances. The students did not challenge Night and Fog’s classification as a documentary, but they wondered if Waltz with Bashir and especially Sans Soleil had entirely different objectives since they seemed to do more than present factual information. The students also noted that these films seemed to merge with other genres, and wondered if there was a different classification for them aside from poetic, observational, participatory, et al. Although it is animated, Waltz with Bashir is classified as a documentary since it is based on Folman’s own experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War. Also, as Roger Ebert notes, animation is “the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities, past and present.” 2 However, it is not solely a document of Folman’s experiences or of the war itself. It is also a subjective meditation on the nature of human perception. As Folman attempts to reconstruct past events through the memories of his fellow soldiers, Waltz with Bashir investigates the very nature of truth itself. These films definitely challenged the idea of documentary as a strict genre, but the students noticed that they each had interesting similarities. Aside from educating, informing and persuading, they also used non-fiction sounds and images to visualise abstract concepts and ideas.

Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983)

Sans Soleil has been described as “a meditation on place […] where spatial availability confuses the sense of time and memory.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 117.) Some of my students felt that Marker’s film, which is composed of images from Japan and elsewhere, was more like a “filmed travelogue”. Others described it as a “film journal” since Marker used images and narration to describe certain experiences, thoughts and memories. Yet my students’ understanding of Sans Soleil was problematised when they discovered that the narration was delivered by “a fictional, nameless woman […] reading aloud from, or else paraphrasing, letters sent to her by a fictional, globe-trotting cameraman.” 3 Upon learning this, several students wondered if Sans Soleil was actually a narrative and not a documentary at all. I briefly explained that, since it was also an attempt to visualise abstract concepts, Sans Soleil was known as an essay film. Yet this only complicated things further! The students wondered if other films we saw in the class were essayistic as well. Was Koyaanisqatsi an essay on humanity’s impact on the world? Was Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006) an essay on the place of religion in society and politics? Where was the line between documentary and the essay film? Between essay and narrative? Or was the essay just another type of documentary? Rather than immerse myself in the difficulties of describing the essay film, I quickly changed the topic to the students’ own projects, and encouraged them to shape their documentaries through related processes of investigation and exploration.

If I had been able to read “Essays on the Essay Film” by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades before teaching this class, I still may not have been able to provide definitive answers to my students’ questions. But this is not to say that either of these books are vague and inconclusive! Each one is an insightful collection of articles that explores the complexities of the essay film. In her essay “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments” featured in Alter and Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” Laura Rascaroli wisely notes that “we must resist the temptation to overtheorise the form or, even worse, to crystallise it into a genre…” since the essay film is a “matrix of all generic possibilities.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) Fabienne Costa goes so far as saying that “The ‘cinematographic essay’ is neither a category of films nor a genre. It is more a type of image, which achieves essay quality.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) It is true that filmmakers, critics, and scholars (myself included) have attempted to understand the essay film better by grouping it with genres that bear many similarities, such as documentary and experimental cinema. Yet despite these similarities, the authors suggest that the essay film needs to be differentiated from both documentary and avant-garde practices of filmmaking. Both “Essays on the Essay Film” and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” illustrate that this mutable form should not be understood as a specific genre, but rather recognised for its profoundly reflective and reflexive capabilities. The essay film can even defy established formulas. As stated by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin in his essay “Proposal for a Tussle” the essay film “can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 270.)

Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” consists of writings by distinguished scholars such as Andre Bazin, Theodore Adorno, Hans Richter and Laura Mulvey, but also includes more recent work by Thomas Elsaesser, Laura Rascaroli and others. Although each carefully selected text spans different time periods and cultural backgrounds, Alter and Corrigan weave together a comprehensive, yet pliable description of the cinematic essay.

“Essays on the Essay Film” begins by including articles that investigate the form and function of the written essay. This first chapter, appropriately titled “Foundations” provides a solid groundwork for many of the concepts discussed in the following chapters. Although the written essay is obviously different from the work created by filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha, Alter and Corrigan note that these texts “have been influential to both critics and practitioners of the contemporary film essay.” (p. 7) The articles in this chapter range from Georg Lukacs’s 1910 “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” to “Preface to the Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley” which was published in 1960. Over a span of fifty years, the authors illustrate how the very concept of the essay was affected by changing practices of art, history, philosophy, culture, economics, politics, as well as through modernist and postmodernist lenses. However, these articles are still surprisingly relevant for contemporary scholars and practitioners. For example, in an excerpt from The Man Without Qualities , Robert Musil writes that, “A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?” (p. 45.) Naturally, this reminded me of my class’s discussion on Sans Soleil and Waltz with Bashir. It concisely encapsulates the difficulties that arise when the essay film crosses boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. However, in his 1948 essay “On the Essay and its Prose”, Max Bense believes that the essay lies within the realm of experimentation, since “there is a strange border area that develops between poetry and prose, between the aesthetic stage of creation and the ethical stage of persuasion.” (p. 52.) Bense also notes that the word “essay” itself means “to attempt” or to “experiment” and believes that the essay firmly belongs in the realm of experimental and avant-garde. This is appropriate enough, given that writers, and more recently filmmakers and video artists have pushed the boundaries of their mediums in order to explore their deepest thoughts and emotions.

Alter and Corrigan follow this chapter with “The Essay Film Through History” which details the evolution of the essay film. Writing in 1940, Hans Richter considers the essay film a new type of documentary and praises its abilities to break beyond the purportedly objective goals of documentaries in an attempt to “visualize thoughts on screen.” (p. 91) Eighteen years later, Andre Bazin celebrates Chris Marker’s thought-provoking voice-over narration as well as his method of “not restricting himself to using documentary images filmed on the spot, but [using] any and all filmic material that might help his case.” (p. 104) Bazin even compares Marker’s style to the work of animator Norman McLaren, supporting the idea of the essay film’s use of unfettered creativity. By the time the reader gets to the third chapter, “Contemporary Positions”, he or she is well aware of the capricious and malleable nature of the essay film. As Corrigan remarks:

As it develops in and out of those documentary and avant-garde traditions, the history of the essay film underlines a central critical point: that the essayistic should not necessarily be seen simply as an alternative to either of these practices (or to narrative cinema); rather it rhymes with and retimes them as counterpoints within and to them. Situated between the categories of realism and formal experimentation and geared to the possibilities of “public expression,” the essay film suggests an appropriation of certain avant-garde and documentary practices in a way different from the early historical practices of both, just as it tends to invert and restructure the relations between the essayistic and narrative to subsume narrative within that public expression. The essayistic play between fact and fiction, between the documentary and the experimental, or between non-narrative and narrative becomes a place where the essay film inhabits other forms and practices. (p. 198)

Alter and Corrigan’s volume implies that the essay can inhabit many forms, styles or genres. More importantly is the idea that it should be recognised for its intentions and capabilities. Whatever form it takes, the essay is an attempt to seek, explore, understand, visualise and question, without necessarily providing clearly defined answers. The essay film also places considerable value on the intellect and opinion of the viewer, since it is an invitation to reflect on the thoughts, experiences, emotions and perceptions that are being conveyed. “Essays on the Essay Film” sensibly concludes with the chapter entitled “Filmmakers on the Essayistic”. Notable filmmakers, such as Lynn Sachs and Ross McElwee provide valuable insight into their own practices. The featured filmmakers, documentarians and video artists in this chapter do not focus specifically on what form their work takes, but what they are trying to achieve. For instance, in her article “On Writing the Film Essay,” Lynn Sachs proclaims that “My job is not to educate but rather to spark a curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out.” (p. 287.) Admittedly, Sachs’s statement contradicts the idea that documentary films seek to educate, inform and persuade, which I taught in my own classes. Yet Sachs’s insights, as well as those of the many other filmmakers in “Essays on the Essay Film” demonstrate how the camera is as versatile as the pen when communicating thoughts, emotions and ideas.

Tree of Life (Malick, 2011)

Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades have also compiled several surprising, challenging and thoroughly captivating articles that exemplify the many forms that the essay film can take. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia includes articles by several prominent scholars that explore the essay film’s place throughout history as well as within various cultural settings. Like Alter and Corrigan, they also present a convincing argument that the essay film is distinct from both documentary, avant-garde and narrative filmmaking, since it is “characterized by a loose, fragmentary, playful, even ironic approach […] and raises new questions about the construction of the subject, the relationship of the subject to the world and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema.” (Papazian/Eades, p. 1) Papazian and Eades explore how essayistic tendencies can manifest in narrative, documentary, avant-garde, and even video art through careful analyses of specific films and videos. The book opens with Timothy Corrigan’s “Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative” which explores how the essayistic can inhabit narrative film, specifically through Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross , both released in 2011. Corrigan observes that The Tree of Life “continually seems to resist its own narrative logic” (p. 18) by presenting a highly fragmented and non-linear plot. Instead of placing it into the hybrid realm of experimental-narrative, however, Corrigan argues that:

Rather than locate a linear connection between past, present and future, the narrative flashbacks in The Tree of Life become a search for genesis – or more accurately many geneses – which might be better described as disruptive recollections that never adequately collect and circulate, as fractured and drifting images and moments producing not evolutionary lines, but the spreading reflective branches of essayism. (p. 19-20.)

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia continues with essays by other acclaimed, yet indefinable filmmakers such as Jean Luc-Godard and Claire Denis. Essays by Rick Warner and Martine Beugnet explore how these filmmakers defy closure and continuity, even while appearing to work within established forms and genres. Ann Eaken Moss explores the essayistic approach that Chantal Akerman imbues within her experimental “home movies.” News from Home (1977) is a meditation on Akerman’s own sense of dislocation from her home in Belgium while she adapts to life in New York City. In “Inside/Outside: Nicolasito Guillen Landrian’s Subversive Strategy in Coffea Arabiga” Ernesto Livon-Grosman investigates Landrian’s means of furtively including his own political agenda within a government-sanctioned documentary. What was meant to be a propagandistic documentary about the benefits of Cuban coffee plantations becomes an essayistic critique on the power structure of Fidel Castro’s government. (Livon-Grosman.) Papazian and Eades conclude their volume with an afterward by Laura Rascaroli, affirming that “it is with the potentiality of all essay films to question and challenge their own form”. (p. 300) The essay film may be distinct from narrative, documentary and the avant-garde, but it itself has no discernable style or formula. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia clearly illustrates how the essay film, although bordering on established genres “must create the conditions of its own form.” (pp. 301-302.) Every filmmaker’s unique thoughts, experiences, meditations, questions and perceptions cannot neatly fit into a strict set of generic guidelines. However, this does not make the essay film more difficult to understand, but further implies that it is a unique practice rather than a specific form.

News from Home (Akerman, 1977)

Even with the insight provided by these two volumes, I do not regret introducing the essay film to my documentary students, despite their questions and confusion. As illustrated throughout Essays on the Essay Film and The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia it has typically been an esoteric and transgressive form, and perhaps including it with better known genres such as documentary and experimental films could be an effective way of introducing it to beginning filmmakers and scholars. Then again, perhaps it should be taught as a form separate from documentary, narrative and the avant-garde. I do wish that I was able to speak more about it at length during that particular instance, since the essay film deserves a considerable amount of thought and attention. Whether or not there is a correct pedagogical approach to teaching the essay film, both of these volumes are tremendously illuminating, but also open the door to further discussion about this compelling form of cinema.

Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary , 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). ↩
Roger Ebert, “Waltz with Bashir”, rogerebert.com , January 21, 2009, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/waltz-with-bashir-2009 ↩
Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil”, The Criterion Collection , June 25, 2017, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/484-personal-effects-the-guarded-intimacy-of-sans-soleil ↩

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48 Film Analysis

Film analysis, what this handout is about.

This handout provides a brief definition of film analysis compared to literary analysis, provides an introduction to common types of film analysis, and offers strategies and resources for approaching assignments.

What is film analysis, and how does it differ from literary analysis?

Film analysis is the process in which film is analyzed in terms of semiotics, narrative structure, cultural context, and mise-en-scene, among other approaches. If these terms are new to you, don’t worry—they’ll be explained in the next section.

Analyzing film, like analyzing literature (fiction texts, etc.) , is a form of rhetorical analysis—critically analyzing and evaluating discourse, including words, phrases, and images. Having a clear argument and supporting evidence is every bit as critical to film analysis as to other forms of academic writing.

Unlike literature, film incorporates audiovisual elements and therefore introduces a new dimension to analysis. Ultimately, however, analysis of film is not too different. Think of all the things that make up a scene in a film: the actors, the lighting, the angles, the colors. All of these things may be absent in literature, but they are deliberate choices on the part of the director, producer, or screenwriter—as are the words chosen by the author of a work of literature. Furthermore, literature and film incorporate similar elements. They both have plots, characters, dialogue, settings, symbolism, and, just as the elements of literature can be analyzed for their intent and effect, these elements can be analyzed the same way in film.

Different types of film analysis

Listed here are common approaches to film analysis, but this is by no means an exhaustive list, and you may have discussed other approaches in class. As with any other assignment, make sure you understand your professor’s expectations. This guide is best used to understand prompts or, in the case of more open-ended assignments, consider the different ways to analyze film.

Keep in mind that any of the elements of film can be analyzed, oftentimes in tandem. A single film analysis essay may simultaneously include all of the following approaches and more. As Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie propose in Analysis of Film, there is no correct, universal way to write film analysis.

Semiotic analysis

Semiotic analysis is the analysis of meaning behind signs and symbols, typically involving metaphors, analogies, and symbolism.

This doesn’t necessarily need to be something dramatic; think about how you extrapolate information from the smallest signs in your day to day life. For instance, what characteristics can tell you about someone’s personality? Something as simple as someone’s appearance can reveal information about them. Mismatched shoes and bedhead might be a sign of carelessness (or something crazy happened that morning!), while an immaculate dress shirt and tie would suggest that the person is prim and proper. Continuing in that vein:

What might you be able to infer about characters from small hints?
How are these hints (signs) used to construct characters? How do they relate to the relative role of those characters, or the relationships between multiple characters?

Symbols denote concepts (liberty, peace, etc.) and feelings (hate, love, etc.) that they often have nothing to do with. They are used liberally in both literature and film, and finding them uses a similar process. Ask yourself:

In Frozen Elsa’s gloves appear in multiple scenes.
Her gloves are first given to her by her father to restrain her magic. She continues to wear them throughout the coronation scene, before finally, in the Let It Go sequence, she throws them away.

Again, the method of semiotic analysis in film is similar to that of literature. Think about the deeper meaning behind objects or actions.

Elsa’s gloves represent fear of her magic and, by extension, herself. Though she attempts to contain her magic by hiding her hands within gloves and denying part of her identity, she eventually abandons the gloves in a quest for self-acceptance.

Narrative structure analysis

Narrative structure analysis is the analysis of the story elements, including plot structure, character motivations, and theme. Like the dramatic structure of literature (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), film has what is known as the Three-Act Structure: “Act One: Setup, Act Two: Confrontation, and Act Three: Resolution.” Narrative structure analysis breaks the story of the film into these three elements and might consider questions like:

How does the story follow or deviate from typical structures?
What is the effect of following or deviating from this structure?
What is the theme of the film, and how is that theme constructed?

Consider again the example of Frozen. You can use symbolism and narrative structure in conjunction by placing the symbolic objects/events in the context of the narrative structure. For instance, the first appearance of the gloves is in Act One, while their abandoning takes place in Act Two; thus, the story progresses in such a way that demonstrates Elsa’s personal growth. By the time of Act Three, the Resolution, her aversion to touch (a product of fearing her own magic) is gone, reflecting a theme of self-acceptance.

Contextual analysis

Contextual analysis is analysis of the film as part of a broader context. Think about the culture, time, and place of the film’s creation. What might the film say about the culture that created it? What were/are the social and political concerns of the time period? Or, like researching the author of a novel, you might consider the director, producer, and other people vital to the making of the film. What is the place of this film in the director’s career? Does it align with his usual style of directing, or does it move in a new direction? Other examples of contextual approaches might be analyzing the film in terms of a civil rights or feminist movement.

For example, Frozen is often linked to the LGBTQ social movement. You might agree or disagree with this interpretation, and, using evidence from the film, support your argument.

Some other questions to consider:

How does the meaning of the film change when seen outside of its culture?
What characteristics distinguishes the film as being of its particular culture?

Mise-en-scene analysis

Mise-en-scene analysis is analysis of the arrangement of compositional elements in film—essentially, the analysis of audiovisual elements that most distinctly separate film analysis from literary analysis. Remember that the important part of a mise-en-scene analysis is not just identifying the elements of a scene, but explaining the significance behind them.

What effects are created in a scene, and what is their purpose?
How does the film attempt to achieve its goal by the way it looks, and does it succeed?

Audiovisual elements that can be analyzed include (but are not limited to): props and costumes, setting, lighting, camera angles, frames, special effects, choreography, music, color values, depth, placement of characters, etc. Mise-en-scene is typically the most foreign part of writing film analysis because the other components discussed are common to literary analysis, while mise-en-scene deals with elements unique to film. Using specific film terminology bolsters credibility, but you should also consider your audience. If your essay is meant to be accessible to non-specialist readers, explain what terms mean. The Resources section of this handout has links to sites that describe mise-en-scene elements in detail.

Rewatching the film and creating screen captures (still images) of certain scenes can help with detailed analysis of colors, positioning of actors, placement of objects, etc. Listening to the soundtrack can also be helpful, especially when placed in the context of particular scenes.

Some example questions:

How is the lighting used to construct mood? Does the mood shift at any point during the film, and how is that shift in mood created?
What does the setting say about certain characters? How are props used to reveal aspects of their personality?
What songs were used, and why were they chosen? Are there any messages in the lyrics that pertain to the theme?

Writing the film analysis essay

Writing film analysis is similar to writing literary analysis or any argumentative essay in other disciplines: Consider the assignment and prompts, formulate a thesis (see the Brainstorming Handout and Thesis Statement Handout for help crafting a nuanced argument), compile evidence to prove your thesis, and lay out your argument in the essay. Your evidence may be different from what you are used to. Whereas in the English essay you use textual evidence and quotes, in a film analysis essay, you might also include audiovisual elements to bolster your argument.

When describing a sequence in a film, use the present tense, like you would write in the literary present when describing events of a novel, i.e. not “Elsa took off her gloves,” but “Elsa takes off her gloves.” When quoting dialogue from a film, if between multiple characters, use block quotes: Start the quotation on a new line, with the entire quote indented one inch from the left margin. However, conventions are flexible, so ask your professor if you are unsure. It may also help to follow the formatting of the script, if you can find it. For example:

ELSA: But she won’t remember I have powers? KING: It’s for the best.

You do not need to use quotation marks for blocked-off dialogue, but for shorter quotations in the main text, quotation marks should be double quotes (“…”).

Here are some tips for approaching film analysis:

Make sure you understand the prompt and what you are being asked to do. Focus your argument by choosing a specific issue to assess.
Review your materials. Rewatch the film for nuances that you may have missed in the first viewing. With your thesis in mind, take notes as you watch. Finding a screenplay of the movie may be helpful, but keep in mind that there may be differences between the screenplay and the actual product (and these differences might be a topic of discussion!).
Develop a thesis and an outline, organizing your evidence so that it supports your argument. Remember that this is ultimately an assignment—make sure that your thesis answers what the prompt asks, and check with your professor if you are unsure.
Move beyond only describing the audiovisual elements of the film by considering the significance of your evidence. Demonstrate understanding of not just what film elements are, but why and to what effect they are being used. For more help on using your evidence effectively, see ‘Using Evidence In An Argument’ in the Evidence Handout .

New York Film Academy Glossary Movie Outline Glossary Movie Script Database Citation Practices: Film and Television

Works Consulted

We consulted these works while writing the original version of this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find the latest publications on this topic. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial .

Aumont, Jacques, and Michel Marie. L’analyse Des Films. Paris: Nathan, 1988. Print. Pruter, Robin Franson. “Writing About Film.” Writing About Film. DePaul University, 08 Mar. 2004. Web. 01 May 2016.

Film Analysis Copyright © 2020 by Liza Long; Amy Minervini; and Joel Gladd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Surviving Your Animation Thesis: A Post-Mortem of My Own Short Film

David Oneacre

Something I realized shortly after completing my thesis is that I never found any resources, guides, or other students’ experience when creating their thesis films.

Spending your senior year crafting a short film is a universal experience shared by animation students worldwide — yet when I started work on my film in May 2018, I had no idea what I was in for, or what to expect. A year of your life working on one project that lasts only a few minutes…where do you start, what should you watch out for, how do you organize everything?

For that reason, I wanted to offer my own experience, advice, mistakes, and everything in-between so that other students feel less afraid to tackle their films this coming September and beyond. If you have not already watched my film, I recommend doing so before reading this article.

Maplewood is a 3DCG film created solely by me as a student at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Although a lot of these thoughts and strategies will apply to any animator, some of the technical talk will only really apply to 3DCG films. And you may also be part of a team for your film, where some parts of the film you don’t have to worry about.

That said, I believe most of this article will be useful to any animator, as just hearing someone else’s experience can shed some light on creating a thesis as a whole. But all parts are labelled, and there are plenty of notes for 2D and stop motion animators out there.

Also, most films usually go through three stages: Pre-Production, Production, and Post-Production.

Pre-Production: Developing ideas, setting limits, designing/creating/rigging characters, and storyboarding. (Summer and first semester senior year, so May to December 2018.)
Production: Animating. Creating final art and backgrounds after designing them in pre-production. Sound effects and music. (Second semester senior year, so January to April 2019.)
Post-Production: Editing, compositing, effects, color correction, checking for mistakes, releasing your film and marketing it/submitting to film festivals. (I edited my film throughout the production stage.)

I’ve also split this article up into those stages, but I should note that I spent far more time in pre-production than I did in production and post-production, which is normal for stop motion and 3D animators. 2D animators should spend much more time in production , with maybe only one or two months in pre-production.

With that, I hope you enjoy.

Pre-Production

May to December 2018

Background (and Burnout Advice)

In May 2018, I completed my first 2D animated short film, Baby no Diaper .

I didn’t really enjoy making it even if I’m proud of how it turned out. Storyboarding and animating the rough stage of the film was fun, but I really hated clean-up, coloring, lineart, and so on, which also took the longest.

This was my first thought I had about my thesis: “There’s no way I’m spending a whole year doing this.”

So, I didn’t. Obviously, that doesn’t mean your thesis shouldn’t be 2D. What I mean is, if there are stages in your film you don’t enjoy much, you should consider designing your film to avoid them or mitigate them as much as possible. (This avoids burnout!)

In the same vein, design your film so that it emphasizes parts of the process you enjoy. My teacher and mentor, Tammy Dudman, described a thesis film as akin to a “business card” for employers, in that it represents everything you’re good at. If you really love backgrounds and environments, maybe that could be the focus on your film. Your love for those parts will show! And it gives your film an obvious, immediate purpose for existing aside from being created to graduate.

If you’re in your senior year, you should already be intimately familiar with that parts of the animation process you’re not a fan of, and the parts you’d probably spend your entire career doing.

If you’re not familiar with what part of the animation process you enjoy, consider spending part of your film’s development figuring out what you enjoy and trying things out . Maybe you could complete a short clip or spend some time on new processes you haven’t yet tried. This is exactly what I spent my last summer doing.

For me, I wanted to explore the idea of creating a 3D short film, but I had almost no experience in rigging. (The process of getting a 3D model ready for animation.) It’s a very hidden part of 3D film development, but extremely important and unskippable — no animation happens until your characters are rigged.

I figured I would spend the summer learning some advanced rigging and seeing how it goes — if I didn’t like it, then I’ll design my film so it’s less important.

I loved it!

Maplewood ended up cementing my love for 3D, and in particular rigging. There’s something about the problem solving and technical mumbo jumbo that scratches my brain in ways 2D animation never did. I ended up rigging for several months straight without any burnout, and actually ended up somewhat disappointed when it came time to animate.

However, if you’re doing work for your thesis over the summer, you should work on something that doesn’t require critique . I was primarily learning how to rig over the summer, and this was a time-consuming, technical part of the process best done early.

But storyboarding, animatics or character designs you should not finalize in the summer. It’s okay to start developing these ideas early, but you shouldn’t be too attached to anything you create that hasn’t been properly shown to others and critiqued.

Although I started modelling and rigging my characters early, the characters I was using had come from an earlier assignment I did in 2017, and had been critiqued by other students and teachers.

At the time, I figured that using characters that were already developed and critiqued would give a good jumping off point for rigging and development. It’s a super simple design too, which suggested a simple story: a lumberjack bear living alone in the woods.

“Keep your idea simple” is some of the most important advice I can give to anyone starting their thesis soon. You don’t have to keep it as sickeningly simple as funny cartoon animals, but I recommend resisting the temptation of telling the story you’ve been dying to tell.

I did have another idea before I settled on Maplewood ’s characters: a more abstract, dream-like film that follows a single character named Luna floating through landscapes that represent her fears and anxiety.

She’s from a bigger story that I do want to tell someday, but even then, I set limits for my thesis and used nothing from that story but her design.

There will come a time for finally showing the world your favorite characters and your expansive world building, but the majority of your thesis isn’t spent on that. It’s spent on the technical parts, the process of making it. Therefore, your film should be based on that first, with the actual idea and story second.

As you develop your idea, I seriously recommend browsing student short films, as it sets realistic goals and can give you a sense of what’s possible in a thesis film. My primary inspiration came from the short film Allisk8r by Anna Prado , one of my favorite short films, regardless of it being a student’s thesis.

I didn’t think it was realistic to create a thesis film that mixes 2D and 3D beforehand, as I thought it was primarily the work of smart technical tricks. But after Allisk8r, I realized a lot of what makes a 3D film look 2D is a matter of art and design rather than technical specifics, and it instantly felt possible to take my own 2D animation background and apply it to a 3D film.

It’s also short, sweet and simple : two dinosaurs in a feud. It’s entirely driven by its expressions and characters, and tells its story with no dialogue. No lip-syncing needed, no exposition. Your idea doesn’t have to be as simple, but it definitely gives you a lot more time to focus on whats important.

You shouldn’t be afraid to message the creators of short student films you love either — I messaged the creator of Allisk8r about a technical aspect of the film, and they responded with the same excitement over 2D/3D mixes in CG films. If the short film was created in the past few years, chances are the student is happy to talk about their own work. And in an odd twist, eventually Ringling students starting their own 3D thesis also messaged me, and I happily shared my own process. Just be respectful and patient.

Once you have an idea, keep developing it. Don’t ever settle on the “eh” — don’t ever settle on the “good enough.” Keep revising and developing the idea until you’re jumping out of your bed in the morning ready to work on it. If you’re not enjoying what you’re working on, you won’t do yourself, or your film, any favors. Ask questions, take critiques, keep developing until you’re excited.

This is also a good time to start visualizing how you want the final film to look. Don’t stress over finalizing the look just yet — much of that will come later. At this point, you just want a basic idea of how it might look in the end. Even if you’re worried about technical challenges or don’t have a clue how to achieve a certain “look”, ignore that for now and draw it.

If you’re not much of an artist, as some 3D filmmakers are, that’s okay: gather inspiration together that conveys the visuals you want for your film on a site like Pinterest, Tumblr, etc.. Get it in one place and put it together. You can more easily narrow down how you want your film to look when you’re looking at one big swathe of inspiration. I did a small Pinterest early in the film’s development over the summer.

If you plan on doing any compositing or effects as well, now would be a good time to give those a try. For example, if you wanted your film to have a vintage VHS look, you’ll want to try out some ways of how to get that effect. You want to be familiar with what that process is like so you can be prepared for any hangups caused by effects and editing.

Having the characters and some visuals in mind, I started developing my story in September, and began work on the animatic.

Developing The Story

To me, a lot of idea and story development is looking at the idea you already have, taking it apart, and putting it back together. What do you find appealing about the idea? Why is it that way?

My initial idea for the story was incredibly simple: Maple keeps appearing out of nowhere and won’t leave the bear alone. She’d appear when the bear opens the cupboard, when he has his back turned, and so on. Some of this appears in the final film during the first minute.

But eventually this didn’t feel like enough — I wanted to tell a deeper story than that, with a clear three act structure. I took apart the elements of the story I already had and tried to find reason and logic to them, and started asking myself questions about the story…

Why does a bear live in a cabin in the woods?

The answer to this lead me to the film’s second act: all the animals in this forest have a home and a daily routine. Dead simple, it’s funny animals — but it immediately lead to the idea of a tiny grandma squirrel with her home inside a tree, and a fish living in the river with half his house submerged.

This also created a new role for Maple — she’s now the weird outsider in this world, and the focus of the story shifted to finding out who she is and why she’s here. From here, I started storyboarding, and found another important lesson: Your story is not perfect. It doesn’t matter how good at storyboarding you are, how long you’ve been writing the story, nothing matters until it’s critiqued.

Critique is your best friend at this stage. Many of the specifics came as I storyboarded and presented my work for critique from other students. You should always, always listen to critiques, and polish your story to the point that nobody is asking any questions.

Your story should completely and utterly speak for itself. If you find students are confused or concerned about specifics in your storyboards, by God, listen to them. You don’t have to follow their suggestion, just try and figure out why they are asking that specific question. Don’t ignore them, especially early on.

One of my biggest breakthroughs in the story actually came from Ru Kuwahata, co-director of Negative Space , who was a guest at our school reviewing student thesis films. Originally, the relationship between Maple and her father was more complex, with Maple running away from a hunting trip with her dad. The Hunter was not introduced at all until 3 minutes in, and the posters had Maple on it instead.

But this created confusion with some students, and I instantly knew something had to be done when Ru was confused about the story and pointed out a critical flaw. She had a few suggestions on how to fix it, but she was clear about why she was confused rather than emphasizing her own suggestion. (And putting the hunter on the posters instead of Maple was all her.)

There was also an earlier version of the story where the hunter was attacked in the end by the animals that Maple and the bear had met along the way. Another student and friend, Jack Seber-Merolla (watch his film!) made a suggestion that completely rocked my core: there should be some kind of “understanding” between the father and Maple. Again, it’s not the how, but the why that is important.

Storyboarding Tips

While your thesis storyboard is mostly created for your own use, you’ll be showing it to fellow students and teachers, and possibly even employers as part of your portfolio. Your critique will waste valuable time if you’re spending it explaining the storyboards. Here are some quick tips everyone working on their storyboards should know:

Animatics aren’t comics

Comic panels are moments frozen in time, while animatics move forward in time normally. Any movement or action is done entirely differently in each medium. Think in terms of actual time instead of moments in time.

Avoid certain visual language that makes more sense in comics too, like text or exclamation points. Remember that the final product is animation, and you should be showing your animation in a simpler form.

2. Camera is king

Here’s the order I usually follow when drawing a storyboard:

Composition
Everything Else

Cameras can key the audience into character motivations and scene emotions, by location, angle and composition. Consider the camera like it was its own character. Also, as a bonus, audiences feel really rewarded when they know what’s happening before its explained, which is usually caused by the camera giving them their own perspective into how to feel.

3. Keep the audience’s eye in mind

Your audience’s eyes move around instead of taking in the entire image at once. Keep in mind what the audience should be focusing on in a shot, then focus your composition towards that with lines, movement and details all focusing in on what’s important. If something happens that distracts the eye from the focus, it might pull your audience away from something important!

4. Draw fast but take breaks

Draw fast. Draw faster!

You can convey a lot of emotion, energy, and atmosphere in simple, fast drawings. And you should never get attached to your storyboards either, as they can and should be thrown out the next day in critique.

But take breaks. If you can’t get a drawing out the way you want, get away from the screen for a bit and come back later. Any time I was having trouble with a storyboard, it came out way faster right after a break than if I tried to force it out from a dozen failed drawings.

Maplewood’s Animatic

Above is the full animatic for Maplewood, dated November 2018, with some early music by my composer Jason Fujita, and placeholder free music by Kevin Macleod. There are a lot of differences to the final film, but most of the changes were made in the production stage where I didn’t feel the need to change the storyboards.

One thing to note about my animatic is that at this point I knew my film was a mix of 2D and 3D, and therefore I limited my camera to mostly side views. In your animatics, I recommend you use the camera more to your advantage.

Bringing the Characters to Life

In 3D animation and stop motion, a “puppet” of each character needs to be made before any animation happens. The puppet should have everything you (or your animator) need to fully convey the personality of the character — how they move, talk, walk, and so on. In hand-drawn 2D animation, you don’t need any puppet, but you should still consider everything here while animating your character.

So before going any further, we should stop and take a moment to analyze exactly what our character needs and how to achieve it. Look past the design for a moment and think about how that character would actually move. You could ask yourself a million questions, but all of them lead back into one simple question: how do I convey their personality?

Maple is young, curious, and hyperactive. The main aspects of her design are her long coat, long hair, loopy noodle arms and legs, and large eyes, with her hat brim acting as her eyebrows.

When creating the puppet for Maple, these were the most important aspects to keep in mind, and the puppet should keep these features as faithful to the drawings and concepts as possible. Everything else is secondary.

Any “tests” or “studies” that can narrow down specific aspects of your characters are good tests. How they lift a heavy object, how they look angry, sad, etc., how they walk and run. The more you do, the better. One famous test that comes to mind is all the characters in Big Hero 6 sitting down, seen below. This is well after the puppets are completed, but there are a lot of specifics in how they enter the room, take the chair, and finally sit down, that show off their individual personalities:

Your character was also not made in the vacuum of space — it’s inspired by other characters you enjoy in media. Take a second to analyze the inspirations that make your character and the kinds of personalities they have. Maple in particular was especially inspired by Goo from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends , and somewhat by Dee Dee from Dexter’s Lab. Both have that hyperactive personality (although a bit extreme), but also the way they move is similar to how I wanted Maple to move.

Even the hunter’s character design was directly inspired by a minor character that appears in just one chapter of the webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court . I really enjoyed how his beard drapes over his shoulders, and it was something several people commented on as a memorable feature in the hunter’s design.

From here, determine how you make those characters a reality and start planning. Much of Maplewood’s development was learning some of the advanced rigging necessary for what Maple and the bear’s puppets needed. I don’t feel the need to get into the technical details, but this video below briefly goes over many of the specifics:

By the end of December, I had two rigs mostly completed with all the features I felt I needed. They still needed color and textures, but I could animate and move them around. Moving into the Production stage , I began strategizing the best way to organize files, manage my time, set expectations and ultimately how to complete the film over the next few months.

January to April 2018

File Organization and Pipeline

Maplewood had a ton of files to keep track of, from models, to textures, character rigs, backgrounds, scenes, renders, and so on. Keeping everything organized was the only reason I was able to finish my film on time. This goes beyond just keeping files in specific folders. You really don’t want to be in the final weeks and not able to find a specific file.

What you need is a “pipeline,” that is, a process for starting and finishing every scene until the film is complete. This will totally depend on the kind of film you’re making, and may not even matter to stop motion animators, but just try and think about how you will create each scene from start to finish. Here’s my own development pipeline:

After completing the animatic, I added a timecode at the bottom and red scene codes in the bottom right.

The timecode is exactly as it looks like, and is mostly for syncing the sound and music with my composer, but having a timecode onscreen also helps you sync your own animation to your animatic. The number to the far right of the timecode is the frame count of that second, so the above screenshot is the 23rd frame of the 46th second in my film. Since animatics are mostly still images, this lets you keep track of which specific frame your timing is on.

The number to the right is a scene code , and was entirely for file management purposes. “A” means “Act,” and the number following is which act the film is in. “S” means “Scene” or “Shot” and the number following that is which shot the film is on. So the above screen shot could be called “Act 1, Shot 5.”

The most important use of these scene codes was I would name my files after them. It was extremely easy to keep track of which scenes were what files, both in my head and on paper, and when you eventually edit and put your film together, your files are named in order.

There’s a balance in how long each scene file lasts , though. I usually had a new scene code for a major camera shift, like a new angle that would require a new background. But this ended up being a bad idea for some scenes, especially if you need continuity between two shots. For example, the campfire scene (3:32–4:07) had five unique scene codes. But there was a lot of continuity between each shot, with the campfire being a central focus of the shot, and both characters sitting down with their marshmallow on a stick. I ended up having one file with the characters sitting around the campfire, and saved five unique scene codes from that.

Production started by creating these scene code files for every scene in the film, starting with a “base scene” that had everything I needed for each file. In particular, this “base scene” contained:

Three windows or “views” that contained 1.) my animatic, 2.) a locked camera used as the final “look” of the shot, and 3.) a free roaming view to manipulate my rig’s controls from any angle.
Both of my main character rigs, referenced in
A directional light, the main type of light used in the entire film.

From there, I would save the file and name it the same as the scene code of the shot I’m working on, and then start working. In 3D animation, each file started in the layout stage, where the animation looks absolutely goofy:

This stage is just about getting the timing of each action, the basic poses, and some background placeholders. Within Maya, I would sync my animatic to the current scene code, and then copy the timing and poses from the animatic into 3D. After a month of work I eventually had the entire film in this state.

If you are doing a 3D or stop motion film, don’t jump straight to animation. Get your film in this stage first — in stop motion, I recommend remaking your animatic with your puppets, even if you’re using the wire armature or stand-ins. You need to test the limits of your puppets in the 3D space compared to your 2D drawings. There are lots of surprises you’d never realize.

As an example, I had a scene where the bear lifts his axe to chop wood, only to find it disappeared off-screen as he lowers his arms. But I soon found that my puppet couldn’t reach his arms that high…how do I tell this joke in the 3D world? Instead, I had the axe disappear behind his head as he raises it — problem solved.

With a file for every shot in the film, I could then put together the whole film in this stage, and I don’t have to worry about syncing or timing any shots when I start animating. Below you can watch the first three minutes of the film in this layout stage, created in February to March 2019. Some of the timing is off, but the basic layouts were there and eventually synced in the final film.

Upon completing a scene, I would render it as a sequence of PNG images and put it in a folder named after the scene code, then render the PNG sequence again as a video file. It’s important to have a full quality, uncompressed render of every frame after completing it, rather then holding onto compressed video files. Finally, I would replace the layout scene with the completed scene in my video editor.

In addition to this pipeline, I kept a folder for each major component of my film, with sub folders for each smaller part. The Models folder, for example, had a folder for the bear, Maple, and the hunter, with all of their rigs, models, and textures inside each. I had a folder specifically for the animal characters in Act 2 called “2DCharacters”, as they required some special care to create.

Since the render that came out of Maya was the final look of the film, there was no extra step in this pipeline. But I recommend you experiment with additional effects, editing, and compositing. For example, a friend of mine, Jhonatan Lechar, has a really cool style for his upcoming film, where he renders the character separately on a 2D drawn background, and puts them together afterwards. (Give him a follow!)

One last file management tip: if you are working on a Windows computer, I highly recommend the program “Everything” , which lets you quickly search for any file on your computer much faster than Windows’ default search. I use it probably more than any other program on my computer, even File Explorer.

Speaking of everything…

Backup Everything

A wise man once said “There are two types of hard drives. Dead hard drives, and dying hard drives.” That wise man was my department’s studio manager, Adam Savje, who has probably seen many fallen hard drives in his time in the department. Working at my college’s tech center as well, you wouldn’t believe the amount of students I’ve seen that kept everything on one crappy external hard drive that would break if you coughed on it.

Back everything up.

I really can’t emphasize this enough. You need to back up all your data. If you’ve done any work on your thesis already, you should back it up right now. And you should back it up in multiple ways, not just automatically. Here are all the backups I did:

Maya’s automatic backups: Every ten minutes Maya would save what I’m working on as a new iterative backup. I can’t count the amount of work that was saved by loading a backup from just a few minutes ago.
Google Drive backup: Specific folders on my computer are automatically backed up to my Google Drive account, my thesis folder being one of them. This also includes Maya’s automatic backups.
Physical backup: I have an internal, desktop hard drive in an external enclosure , used only for taking backups. These require a power source, but last much longer than external hard drives. I backed all my work up to this every month. An external solid state drive is also not a bad idea, as the lack of moving parts prevents damage.

Again, BACK EVERYTHING UP. PLEASE.

Sound and Music

Sound is by far the most important component of your film, even more than animation. Bad sound is distracting, or worse, annoying — good sound lets your audience enjoy your animation and hard work without worrying about anything else. Do your sound early! Don’t leave it until the end!

Whether you have music or not is up to you, but it certainly helps. For Maplewood’s music and sound, I teamed up with the great Jason Fujita, who worked with me on my previous short film, Baby no Diaper. He did an amazing job and my film wouldn’t be the same without it.

If you are collaborating with someone else for your music and sound, set deadlines for both yourself and your composer. Give them expectations. Tell them you expect to have a cut of the film by the weekend, and deliver that. Ask if they can deliver some rough sound by next week. Jason was fantastic at delivering on deadlines, despite working on several other great films at the same time. (Like Steve Ly’s Cock Fight and Erica Machida’s Musubi .) He later redid my sound design for the final release of the film in May too.

Time Management

This is easily the biggest worry for most students starting their thesis soon. How do you manage your time? What limits do you set? What do you sacrifice to complete the film?

While I’m incredibly proud of how my film turned out in the end, it falls short in some areas, particularly animation. I spent a little too much time rigging and experimenting, and decided to sacrifice some of my animation to polish the visuals. Actually animating the film only took a month!

I made this decision after evaluating the strengths of what I had already made , and building upon that. People responded really well to how the main characters looked, and I decided to focus my time on visual development over the animation.

But I could have managed my time a bit better and set more deadlines for myself. I probably spent less time on animation and more time experimenting on features for Maple’s rig that never saw the light of day, which is a shame.

Something I did that helped manage expectations and time is a big “laundry list.” (This strategy is thanks to the awesome Steve Subotnick , my teacher for Baby no Diaper .) I wrote down every single little thing needed for every shot in the film — every thing I needed to model, draw, etc. for every shot in the film. Be sure to include sound effects as well if you are doing your own sound.

This forces you to evaluate everything needed, almost like a shopping list, and mitigates any surprises that might happen. I tried to picture the scene playing out in my head and write down what the characters are holding or interacting with, and make any notes of anything I might need to add. For the scene with the business fish (A2S7, above), I specifically noted that the car door has to open, and the chassis should rock back and forth as the fish enters — not something I would have considered otherwise.

I did my task list within Google Docs, but other animators and fellow students I’ve seen create spreadsheets with percentages, bullet journals, sticky notes on a big board in front of them, all sorts of ways. Anything that gets you to sit down and evaluate your film inside and out.

Although I crossed stuff off my list as I went along, I eventually didn’t really need to as I got closer to the deadline. It’s just the act of writing it all down that gets it in your head — once that’s done, don’t worry too much about keeping track of it when you’re crunching.

You can take a look at the full document by clicking here.

Final Visual Development

I didn’t quite know how to create Maplewood ’s look until I started experimenting and trying different things. Being my first 3D short film, I was definitely concerned I would run into some technical problems with Maya, or that I would be limited on some of the visuals.

However, it ended up being much simpler than I expected it to be, and I didn’t really run into anything serious. Because my 3D skills are mostly self taught, I wasn’t really familiar with more advanced 3D rendering, so I mostly used my 2D art abilities as a place to start. It’s really the old saying of “write what you know,” except for art. Don’t be afraid to try things out.

I was also limiting myself to visuals that render in real-time — that is, the final look of the film is what I would see as I was animating it, rather than a simplified version that needs to be rendered once complete. This saved a lot of time as most 3D films take some time to render, and my college does not have a render farm like Ringling; if I had gone a more traditional 3D route, I would have to complete my film several weeks early just to render it.

The best visual style for your thesis is something you can do fast, but still looks unique. Try and experiment with your visuals and push it in directions you don’t expect, and don’t settle on your traditional methods. If you come up with something that looks great but takes a while, simplify it. Mess with it until you can do it fast.

Maplewood reuses a lot of art assets throughout the whole film, particularly trees. I drew 6 trees and made pretty much all the backgrounds with them. They were great filler, and I was able to twist them around to create unique compositions. I also reused these trees for Act 3, which is set at night, and adjusted the palette to be darker blue and purple. Palettes and limiting your colors is probably one of the most important ways to give your film an identity, so I recommend starting there if you’re trying to give your thesis a unique identity.

Crunch (The Final Weeks)

Imagine I’m sitting backwards on a wooden chair, like I’m talking to you about the birds and the bees.

Don’t crunch.

Okay, maybe crunch a little. Crunch within your means . If I’m deeply interested in a project, I tend to work 24/7 on it, so I don’t personally mind crunch.

And in the final weeks of your film you will probably end up crunching to get it done — if you feel you can take it, it’s fine. Listen to your mind and body and make the right call about what you can finish in time.

But don’t stay up all night. I only pulled one all nighter in Maplewood’s development, and that was to finish it the night of the deadline on April 30th.

No matter what you do, you’re not cool for staying up all night to finish something. It’s unproductive, unhealthy, and dumb. If you stayed up all night to finish something, your work was probably worse and completed slower than if you just worked on it with a good night’s rest.

Post-Production

May 2019 and Beyond

Editing and Quality Checks

There is not a whole lot to be said that hasn’t been said already. Be sure to keep your file specifications the same throughout — stick to 30fps or 24fps, 1080p, etc. Try to keep your film uncompressed until the final cut, and hold onto the uncompressed files.

I edited my film together using Adobe Premiere — however, I could have easily also put it together using the free Davinci Resolve , as there’s nothing in particular I did that can only be done in Premiere, and the interface is nearly the same.

Most of the film was edited as I went along, replacing the animatic with the layouts as they were completed, and replacing the layouts with the final renders when those were completed. You will probably end up doing this too if you are collaborating with other students, composers, or showing your work for critique.

As you edit it along and render your film out to show others, keep those files and mark them with the current date. It’s good to keep track of how much progress you’re making so you can evaluate when you’ll complete each stage of your film.

You should also watch your film, or finished clips, with friends and students. If anyone points out any mistakes, fix them. That means they’re obvious and distracting. But don’t sweat small mistakes that only appear for a couple frames, or if they’re outside of the focus of the shot. It may be time better spent polishing and improving your film in other areas.

By the way, this is the point where you’d do any visual effects you need for your film — I didn’t need any myself for Maplewood.

Promotion and Marketing

When your film is done, nothing will matter if nobody can see it. You should get the word out, set a release date, and promote it. Give your audience an expectation of when they can see it.

Most of Maplewood’s marketing and exposure actually came mid-development as I posted updates and short clips. People really like to see behind the scenes work — a number of things I posted from Maplewood attracted thousands of likes and retweets.

You should post what you’re comfortable with though — if you feel you don’t want to clue your audience in some of your methods, you don’t have to. In fact, making your audience wonder how you achieved a certain effect can be tantalizing.

Submitting to Film Festivals

You should always submit your work to any film festivals you can — you will probably hear this a lot as a student, and there’s not much to say that hasn’t already been said. Check out this excellent article on submitting your work , containing pretty much the exact same advice every teacher I’ve had has given me for the past three years.

I will say that I put my thesis film up online earlier than most students would , and some students feel that they should let their films run in film festivals before putting it up online. This is up to you. I’ve only had one festival deny my work because it was online already, but I felt I was already receiving the attention I wanted by putting it online early anyways.

I’ve submitted to about 30–35 festivals, all of which are still making their selections. I don’t expect to receive any responses by late July, August at the earliest.

From what I know, many Sheridan and CalArts students also put their thesis films online almost immediately after graduating. One of my teachers, Steve Subotnick, has also mentioned he puts his work online immediately, and has no trouble getting his work into festivals. The decision is yours.

The Post-Graduation Crisis

It’s summer. But I’m not returning to college in September.

Aside from the impending doom of “get a job,” these past couple months after finishing my film have definitely been some of the strangest. I’ve received far more attention that I ever have for my work, but I’m still figuring out how I can expand upon that. I loved making Maplewood , but it’s left me confused on exactly what I want to do as a career.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this post-graduation crisis, so let’s think about this together, stream of consciousness style. You got this far in the article, after all.

My main takeaway from Maplewood is that I loooove 3D. I went literal months straight just burning away the day working on my character rigs. If I can do that for the rest of my life and get paid for it? I’m set.

I started Maplewood with only a curiosity about 3D. I was pretty sure something would go horribly wrong and I’d learn not to bother with making a 3D thesis film. “Oh well, maybe I’ll try it after I graduate!” Now I want to do it for the rest of my life. Never be afraid to try new things.

I also started noticing lots of little things in 3D films. If you’ve ever done 3D animation, you should try watching Toy Story again. I probably watched clips of it a dozen times this past year. It’s a total mixed bag of animators who had no idea how to make 3D animation look good, and totally natural, brilliant animation. But once you start picking up on all the little things in films, you can start avoiding and improving on those in your own film.

Yet, because it’s my first 3D film, I’m left with Maplewood as practically the only major 3D work in my portfolio, aside from small projects. There’s a crushing feeling somewhere inside me that I should backtrack and do more 3D exercises, as though I was back in college doing assignments. But I also need to find work, and I don’t really have time to do those assignments.

I’ve felt at a crossroads for the past few months on three career paths I want to pursue: 3D Animation, Rigging or Art Direction . But there’s no clear winner.

If I pursue art direction, I feel like I can stand out and my work is unique. Maplewood received most of its attention from its art direction. But it’s not quite as “safe” or “employable” as the other career paths. However, in the middle of Maplewood’s development, I did receive an offer for visual development for an animated series based on a popular children’s toy. The deal fell through, (I was extremely close to signing an NDA and doing an art test when they decided to move on) but it shows there’s some “market value” in my art direction.

I really love rigging — as I mentioned earlier, I was almost disappointed to finish my rigs and move on to animation. But at the moment I’m really a beginner, and I still have a long ways to go. I have a few mutuals who are excellent at rigging and are in college specifically for technical direction. I also feel the need to learn more coding.

Finally, I love 3D animation and I started creating a 3D film specifically for the animation, only to love most of the other process. While I feel I could be a solid, natural animator and make a career in it, I don’t know how much I would stand out, and I need a lot more in my portfolio for it to work.

I’ve also noticed there’s serious competition in the 3D animation world from AnimSchool and Animator Mentor students, who have massive, high quality portfolios completely focused on animation. Spiderverse ’s animation team was an army of excellent online school grads who were mentored by animators who worked at Pixar, Dreamworks, etc..

Maybe I’m overthinking it! Maybe it’s cathartic to hear someone else going through this crisis, or maybe its scary. Maybe you can figure it out earlier than me and get a headstart from these thoughts. I just want to be transparent, open, and real with anyone about this part of the game. You’ll finish your film, graduate, and wonder what’s next.

But I’m sure I’ll figure it out soon and look back on this section thinking “Why did I write all of that?” Maybe I’ll come back and make an edit.

Closing Statements

While all of this is my own advice and thoughts that may not apply to everyone reading, I hope just hearing someone else’s thoughts after they’ve been put through the ringer makes it all just a little less scary.

If you have anything you would like to add, questions, corrections, concerns, please email me at [email protected].

I’d also like to thank any friends and fellow students who graduated alongside me. I’m nothing without those who critiqued my work and helped me along the way, and many of the advice and thoughts in this article only exist because of them. The same goes for my teachers, colleagues, and those I met and made friends with along the way.

Thanks for reading!

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Written by David Oneacre

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Published: 03 July 2018

A psychology of the film

Ed S. Tan 1 , 2

Palgrave Communications volume 4 , Article number: 82 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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Cultural and media studies

The cinema as a cultural institution has been studied by academic researchers in the arts and humanities. At present, cultural media studies are the home to the aesthetics and critical analysis of film, film history and other branches of film scholarship. Probably less known to most is that research psychologists working in social and life science labs have also contributed to the study of the medium. They have examined the particular experience that motion pictures provide to the film audience and the mechanisms that explain the perception and comprehension of film, and how movies move viewers and to what effects. This article reviews achievements in psychological research of the film since its earliest beginnings in the 1910s. A leading issue in the research has been whether understanding films is a bottom-up process, or a top-down one. A bottom-up explanation likens film-viewing to highly automated detection of stimulus features physically given in the supply of images; a top-down one to the construction of scenes from very incomplete information using mental schemata. Early film psychologists tried to pinpoint critical features of simple visual stimuli responsible for the perception of smooth movement. The riddle of apparent motion has not yet been solved up to now. Gestalt psychologists were the first to point at the role of mental structures in seeing smooth movement, using simple visual forms and displays. Bottom-up and top-down approaches to the comprehension of film fought for priority from the 60s onwards and became integrated at the end of the century. Gibson’s concept of direct perception led to the identification of low-level film-stylistic cues that are used in mainstream film production, and support film viewers in highly automated seamless perception of film scenes. Hochberg’s argument for the indispensability of mental schemata, too, accounted for the smooth cognitive construction of portrayed action and scenes. Since the 90s, cognitive analyses of narration in film by film scholars from the humanities have revolutionised accounts of the comprehension of movies. They informed computational content analyses that link low-level film features with meaningful units of film-story-telling. After a century of research, some perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that support our interaction with events in the real world have been uncovered. Today, the film experience at large has reappeared on the agenda. An integration of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms is sought in explaining the remarkable intensity of the film experience. Advances are now being made in grasping what it is like to enjoy movies, by describing the absorbing and moving qualities of the experience. As an example, a current account of film viewers' emotional experience is presented. Further advances in our understanding of the film experience and its underlying mechanisms can be expected if film psychologists team up with cognitive film studies, computer vision and the neurosciences. This collaboration is also expected to allow for research into mainstream and other genres as forms of art.

Art films foster theory of mind

Movie editing influences spectators’ time perception

Cortical network responses map onto data-driven features that capture visual semantics of movie fragments

An agenda for the psychology of the film.

At the time of the first kinetoscope and cinema exhibitions in 1894–1895, thanks to devices such as the Phenakistoscope, Zoetrope and Praxinoscope, moving images had been popular for decades. Just before that time, academic psychology turned to the identification of the mechanisms underlying the functioning of the mind. Perception psychologists began to study apparent movement of experimental visual stimuli under controlled conditions because they found moving stimuli interesting cases in human perception, or as part of the study of psychological aesthetics founded by Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt. The publication of The Photoplay: A Psychological Study marked the beginning of the psychology of the film. Hugo Münsterberg was trained by Wundt and recruited by William James to lead the experimental psychology lab at Harvard. Importantly, Münsterberg was also an avid cinemagoer as his analyses of theatrical films of his time may tell, and a professing cinephile at that. Münsterberg set two tasks for the study of the film: one was to describe the functioning of psychological mechanisms in the reception of film; the other to give an account of film as an artistic medium.

Münsterberg shared his contemporaries’ and even today’s spectators’ fascination for the wonder of moving images and their apparent reality. He described the film experience as a 'unique inner experience' that due to the simultaneous character of reality and pictorial representation “brings our mind into a peculiar complex state” (p. 24).

In the first part of The Photoplay , explores how film characteristically addresses the mechanisms of the basic psychological functions investigated by experimental psychology—namely perception, attention, memory and emotion. Footnote 1 In The Photoplay the imagination is the psychological faculty that theatrical movies ultimately play upon; attention, perception, memory and emotion are also directed by the film, but contribute to the film experience as building blocks for the imagination in the first place. One of the ways that films entertain the imagination is by mimicking the psychological functions. Film scenes may represent as-if perceptions, as-if thoughts, as-if streams of associations, and as-if emotions or more generally: display subjectivity. Footnote 2 Second, the film creates an imagined world that deviates from real world scenes as we perceive these in real life. Liberated from real life perceptual constraints involves the spectator’s self in 'shaping reality by the demands of our soul' (p. 41). Third, Münsterberg has a nuanced view of the automaticity of responses to film. On the one hand, it is the spectator’s choice—based on their interest—which ideas from memory and the imagination to fit to images presented on screen; they are felt as 'our subjective supplements' (p. 46). On the other, the film’s suggestions function to control associated ideas, '… not felt as our creation but as something to which we have to submit' (p. 46). And yet in Münsterberg’s view the film does not dictate psychological responses in any way. Footnote 3

Finally, The Photoplay provides abundant and compelling introspective reports of the film experience and so probes into the phenomenology of film, that is, what it is like to watch a movie. I think it is fair to say that for Münsterberg the film experience is the ultimate explanandum for a psychology of the film. In order to account for that phenomenology by mechanism of the mind proper descriptions of the film experience are needed, and introspective reports are an indispensable starting point for these.

The other task Münsterberg set himself was to propose an account of the film as a form of art. Part two of The Photoplay proposes that the film experience includes an awareness of unreality of perceived scenes. This awareness is taken as fundamental for psychological aesthetics; all forms of art are perceived to go beyond the mere imitation of nature. Footnote 4 Münsterberg showed himself a formalist in that he theorised that aesthetic satisfaction depends not on recognition of similarity with the real world or practical needs, but on the sense of an 'inner agreement and harmony [of the film’s parts]' (p. 73). Footnote 5 But in order to qualify as art, according to Münsterberg film was not to deviate too much from realistic representation that distinguishes theatrical movies from non-mainstream forms.

Münsterberg’s agenda is in retrospect quite complete. The detailed investigation of psychological mechanisms and aesthetics of film is followed by a last chapter on the social functions of the photoplay. The thoughts forwarded in it are more global than those on perception and aesthetics. The immediate effect of theatrical films on their audience is enjoyment due to their freeing the imagination, and their easy accessibility to consciousness 'which no other art can furnish us' (p. 95). Enjoyment comes with additional gratifications such as a feeling of vitality, experiencing emotions, learning and above all aesthetic emotion.

In a final section behavioral effects of successful films are discussed. Here the film psychologist vents concerns on what we now refer to as undesirable attitude changes and social learning, especially in young audiences. The agenda of today's social science research on mass media effects (e.g. Dill, 2013 ) is not all that different from Münsterberg's in the last chapter of The Photoplay.

The two tasks that Münsterberg worked on set the agenda for the psychology of film in the century after The Photoplay . It is clearly recognisable in the psychology of the film as we know it today. Footnote 6 But the promising debut made in 1916 was not followed up until the nineteen seventies, or so it seems. James Gibson lamented in his last book on visual perception that whereas the technology of the cinema had reached peak levels of applied science, its psychology had so far not developed at all (1979, p. 292). The cognitive revolution in psychology of the 60s paved the way for its upsurge in the early 80s. But some qualifications need to be made on the seeming moratorium. First, Rudolf Arnheim developed since the 1920s a psychology of artistic film form. Second, although not visible as a coherent psychology of the film, laboratory research on issues in visual perception of the moving image—in particular studies of apparent movement—continued.

Gestalt psychology and film form

Rudolf Arnheim’s essays published first in 1932 added analytic force to Münsterberg’s conviction that film is not an imitation of life. Film and Reality ( 1957 ) highlights shortcomings of film in representing scenes as we know them from natural perception. Footnote 7 In the same essay, it is pointed out that comparing a filmic representation of a scene with its natural perception is what analytic philosophers would call an error of category. In The Making of Film ( 1957 ) Arnheim presented an inventory of formative means for artistic manipulations of visual scenes, including delimitation and point of view, distance to objects and mobility of framing. It is argued that chosen manipulations often go against the most realistic options. For example, ideal viewpoints and canonical distances are often dismissed in favour of more revealing options. Footnote 8 Arnheim’s aesthetics of film gravitates towards acknowledged artistic productions more than to the 'naturalistic narrative film' (e.g., 1957 , p. 116–117) the more moderate art form that Münsterberg tended to prefer.

Arnheim was informed by such founders of Gestalt psychology as Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka. This school held that natural perception results from the mind’s activity. It organises sensory inputs into patterns according to formal principles such as simplicity, regularity, order and symmetry. Arnheim developed into the leading Gestalt theorist of aesthetics of the 20th century. In his 1974 book he analysed a great number of pictorial, sculptural, architectural, musical and poetic works of art while only rarely referring to film. Footnote 9 The cornerstone aesthetic property of art works including film is expression, defined by Arnheim as 'modes of organic or inorganic behaviour displayed in the dynamic appearance of perceptual objects or events' ( 1974 , p. 445). Expression’s dynamic appearance is a structural creation of the mind imposing itself on sound, touch, muscular sensations and vision. Expressive qualities are in turn, the building blocks of symbolic meaning that art works including film add to the representation of objects and events as we know them in the outer world. Thus, Arnheim’s theory of expression and meaning in the arts seems to echo Münsterberg’s formalist position on the perception of 'inner harmony' as the determinant of film spectators’ aesthetic satisfaction.

Apparent motion

Münsterberg shared the amazement that moving images awakened in early film audiences. He considered the experience of movement a central issue for the psychology of the film. The experience of movement in response to a series of changing still pictures has been studied in psychology and physiology under the rubric of apparent motion . Footnote 10 In Münsterberg’s days, international psychology labs were probing the perception of movement in response to experimental stimuli that were perceived as moving images. Well-known examples include apparent motion induced by the subsequent views of single stationary lines in different positions that result in phi movement , the perception of one moving shape or line. Researchers in this area have continued to study the perception of movement in film as only one of many interesting visual stimuli, such as shapes painted on rotating disks, or dynamic computer-generated lights, shapes and objects of many kinds. Why and how we see motion has been as basic to the study of visual perception as questions of perception of colour, depth, and shape. Helmholtz proposed that what we need to explain is how retinal images that correspond one-to one, i.e., optically with a scene in the world are transformed into mental images, or percepts that we experience. In the case of apparent motion, we also need to understand how a succession of retinal images are perceived as one or more objects in motion Footnote 11 Apparent motion in film viewing needs to be smooth, Footnote 12 and depends on frame rates and masking effects. (The latter effects refer to dampening of the visual impact of one frame by a subsequently presented black frame).

Münsterberg’s conviction that the perception of movement needs a cognitive contribution from the viewer clashes with alternative explanations that rely on prewired visual mechanisms that automatically and immediately pick up the right stimulus features causing an immediate perception of motion, without the mind adding anything substantial. The inventors of nineteenth century moving image devices explained the illusion of movement by the slowness of the eye, possibly following P.M. Roget’s report on apparent motion to the Royal Society in 1824. In the early years of cinema, the persistence of vision account was meant to add precision to this explanation. It proposed that the retina, the optic nerve or the brain could not keep up with a rapid succession of projected frames, and that afterimages would bridge the intervals between subsequent frames. Anderson and Fisher ( 1978 ) and Anderson and Anderson ( 1993 ) have argued why the notion is false and misleading. It suggests that film viewers’ perceptual system sluggishly pile up retina images on top of one another. However, this would lead them to blur which obviously is not the case. The Andersons refer to the explanation as a myth because it is based on a mistaken conception of film viewing as a passive process. Even with the characteristically very small changes between subsequent frames characteristic of motion picture projection, the visual system performs an active integrative role in distinguishing what has changed from one image to another. This integrating mechanism in film viewing is exactly the same as in perceiving motion in real world scenes. Mechanistic explanations have since been founded on growing insights in the neuroscience of vision, such as single cell activity recordings in response to precisely localised stimulus features. Footnote 13 'Preprocessing' of visual input before it arrives in the cortex takes place in the retina and the lateral geniculate nucleus, which have specialised cells or trajectories for apprehending various aspects of motion. There are major interactions between perceptual modules. Footnote 14 Physiological and anatomical findings in the primate visual system, as well as clinical evidence, support the distinction of separate channels for the perception of movement on the one hand, and form, colour and depth on the other (Livingstone and Hubel, 1987 ). Research on how exactly the cortical integration systems for vision are organised has not yet come to a close. A variety of anatomical subsystems have been identified Footnote 15 , and there is room for task variables in the explanation of motion perception. Footnote 16 The operation of task variables in presumably automated processes (e.g., attentional set, induced by specific task instructions) complicates accounts of apparent motion and the perception of movement based on lowest processing levels.

Non-trivial and clear-cut contributions of the mind to smooth apparent motion have been proposed by Gestalt psychologists. Arnheim ( 1974 ) considered the perception of movement as subsidiary to that of change. The mind uses Gestalt principles such as good continuation and object consistency to perceive patterns in ongoing stimuli. Movement is the perception of developing sequences and events. Footnote 17 Gestalt psychologists have attempted to identify stimulus features that are perceived as a spatiotemporal pattern of 'good' motion, and they discovered various types of apparent motion have been distinguished as a function of stimulus features. In an overview volume, Kolers ( 1972 ) presented phi and beta motion as the major variants. Phi , the most famous, was first documented by Wertheimer in 1912 . An image of an object is presented twice in succession in different positions. Footnote 18 Pure or beta motion that is objectless motion, was the novel and amazing observation; the perception seemed to be a sum or integration by the mind beyond the stimulus parts, and asked for an explanation. It is also experienced when the objects in the subsequent presentations are different.

Wertheimer and those after him looked for mechanisms of the mind that could complement the features of the stimulus responsible for apparent motion in its various forms. Footnote 19 Other studies of apparent motion, too, indicated that simple models of stimulus features alone could not explain apparent motion. Footnote 20 One of the best examples of what the cognitive system adds to stimulus features is induced motion (Duncker, 1929 ). When we see a small target being displaced relative to a framework surrounding it, we invariably see the target moving irrespective of whether it is the target or the frame that is displaced. Ubiquitous film examples are shots of moving vehicles, with mobile or static framing.

In this summary and incomplete overview of the field, we could not make a strict distinction between mechanist and cognitive explanations for the perception of movement in film. The current state of research does not allow for it. Footnote 21 Kolers’s conclusions on the state of the field closing his 1972 volume on motion perception seem still valid. He inferred from then extant research that there must be separate mechanisms for extracting information from the visual stimulus and for selecting and supplementing the information into a visual experience of smooth object motion or motion brief. He concluded that 'The impletions of apparent motion make it clear that although the visual apparatus may select from an array [of] features to which it responds, the features themselves do not create the visual experience. Rather, that experience is generated from within, by means of supplementative mechanisms whose rules are accomodative and rationalizing rather than analytical' (p.198). But even if after Koler's analysis some perceptual (Cutting, 1986) or brain mechanisms (Zacks, 2015) have been identified today we still do not know enough about the self-supplied supplementations. Footnote 22

Perception and cognition of scenes

Mental representation and event comprehension.

Contributions of the mind can go considerably beyond apparent motion, i.e., the perception of smooth motion from one frame to another. The cognitive revolution in academic psychology that took off in the 1960s broadened the conceptualisation of contributions of the mind to the film experience beyond the narrower stimulus-response paradigms that had dominated psychological science until the 1960s. The cognitive revolution went beyond Gestalt notions of patterns applied by the mind on stimulus information. It introduced the concept of mental representation as a key to understanding the relation between sensory impressions from the environment on the one hand, and people’s responses to it. Moreover, these cognitive structures were seen functional in mental operations such as retrieval and accommodation of schemas from memory, inference and attribution. These were quite complex in comparison to perceptual and psychophysical responses. In the past 30 years, they have come to encompass event, action, person, cultural, narrative and formal-stylistic schemas. The cognitive turn in film psychology has stimulated a growing exchange with humanist film scholarship, resulting in advances in the elaboration of cognitive structural notions. Early applications of the cognitive perspective in the psychology of the film can be found in the 1940s and 50s in work by Albert Michotte ( 1946 ) and Heider and Simmel. Footnote 23

Against mental representation: direct perception of film events

The psychology of the film as a subdiscipline of academic psychology really took off in the late 1970s. Münsterberg’s broad agenda that had been scattered across isolated studies of mainly movement perception regained general acclaim. This was due first to the booming supply and consumption of moving images through media television and computer-generated imagery since the 60s. Second, the cognitive turn in experimental psychology renewed an interest in perception and cognition as it occurs in natural ecologies. This is the backdrop against which James Gibson ( 1979 ) noted the virtual absence of a psychology of the moving image, motivating his chapter on the film experience. The chapter was important in that it applied his highly influential ecological principles of perception of real world scenes to perception in the cinema. Gibson’s general theory of visual perception (e.g., Gibson, 1979 ) hinges on the notion that the visual system has evolved to extract relevant information from the world in a direct fashion. A scene presents itself to the observer as an ambient optical array that immediately and physically reflects the structure of the real world. Changes and transitions in the flow of the optical array are due to natural causes such as alternations of lighting intensity of the scene, e.g., due to clouds, or movement of objects in the scene or of the observer. These variations in the optical flow enable the automatic pick-up of invariants. Example invariants are the change in size of portions in the array, and the density of texture in that portion when the observer gets closer to, or farther away from the object. Footnote 24 The changes in these parameters are linked with depth-information in a way that is constant across different scenes, observer speeds, lighting conditions, etc. Invariants enable the direct perception of the real world in the service of adaptive action. Disturbances of the optic flow can automatically be perceived as events. The events are categorised on the basis of the nature of the disturbances, e.g., as terrestrial, animate, or chemical events. Furthermore, the direct tuning of the perceptual senses to the structures of the environment enable an immediate perception of affordances , for example the slope of a hill causes the direct perception of 'climbability'.

The experience of motion pictures according to Gibson involves a dynamic optical flow exactly like the one an observer would have when being present at the filmed scene. Footnote 25 Film represents the world to the senses that are calibrated to that world. The field of view of the camera becomes the optic array to the viewer (Gibson, 1979 , p. 298). Perception of objects, movement, events and affordances is direct and realist, based as it is on the same invariants and affordances that the scene in the real world would offer. Deviations from these as emphasised by cognitivist film psychologists from Münsterberg through Arnheim to Hochberg as we will shortly see, are largely taken as non-representative exceptions.

A major affordance offered by conventional movies is empathy with characters. Empathy presupposes that we understand what happens to characters. Scenes present their actions, reactions and feelings. However, most scenes are not continuous. How do we understand scenes presented in pieces, and what are the limits to our understanding? Gibson’s reply to the question of how continuity is perceived in scenes that is, smooth movement and unitary events across cuts would be that the perceptual system extracts the same invariants from the two shots on either side of the cut. The elegant explanation again rests upon a presumed correspondence between perception of real world scenes and film scenes.

Gibson inspired important theorising on the film experience, notably by Anderson and Cutting that we will turn to shortly. Here we emphasise that his direct perception account of the film experience stands in perpendicular opposition to the key innovation that the cognitive turn introduced in experimental psychology. Gibson denied the necessity of mental representations in the perception of objects and events, be it in real scenes or in film.

Cognitive schemas and the canonical set-up of the cinema

The role of mental representations, be they cognitive principles or schemas or other mental structures was argued over a lifetime of work in the psychology of film by Julian Hochberg. A perception psychologist with an interest in pictorial representations and their aesthetics, he devoted a large part of his work to identify what is given in film stimuli and how perception goes beyond that, in often ingenuous demonstrations and experiments. (The demonstrations are, in fact, introspective observations of film perception under exactly specified, reproducible stimulus conditions). A comprehensive overview can be found in Hochberg ( 1986 ). Footnote 26 His legacy should be referred to as the Hochberg and Brooks oeuvre, because his wife Virginia Brooks a psychologist and filmmaker, contributed such a great deal to it. Hochberg found that cognitive schemata are necessary in the perception of film for two reasons. The most profound one is that completely stimulus-driven (or 'bottom-up') accounts of the perception of movement, events, and scene continuity do not really explain the experience. For example, Hochberg and Brooks point out that neurophysiological motion detectors do not explain motion perception, that is, they 'amend but do not demolish' an account based on a mental representation of motion (Hochberg and Brooks, 1996b , p. 226). The same would go for any other direct perception account, including Gibson’s optics plus invariant extraction model. The more practical argument is that the direct perception account fails to pose limits to the scope of its application, leaving thresholds and ceiling conditions for the mechanisms out of consideration. The canonical set-up of cinematic devices for recording and displaying motion pictures has evolved to produce good impressions of depth, smooth and informative motion, emphasis on relevant objects and continuity of action, often violating the course of direct perception in comparable real world scenes. Figure 1 presents a demonstration of active disregard that viewers of mainstream movies typically display. (See also Cutting & Vishton ( 1995 ) on contextual use of depth-information).

Example of perceptual disregard in the cinema. Hochberg ( 2007 ) discusses the view of objects moving in front of a landscape. In normal film viewing flatness of studio-backgrounds and quasi-camera movement is disregarded. Traditional films can use a painted or projected landscape at the backdrop of the set, and panning camera movements instead of a really mobile camera to create a convincing impression in the viewer of following a moving object in the scene’s space. A cycling woman is followed in a pan shot moving from left to right; frames A and B constitute the beginning and the end of the panning shot. In normal perception in the real-world objects on the horizon seem to move in the direction of the moving subject, whereas nearby objects move in opposite direction. Panning involves a stationary viewpoint, causing the image to lack this 'motion parallax'. For example, the scarecrow in the middle ground of frame B should be further to the left from the ridge on the horizon than in frame A (DA < DB), but the distance between the objects has remained identical (DA = DB). However, the lack of parallax and resulting apparent flatness can be and is disregarded and viewers experience smooth self-motion parallel to the moving object. Disregard such a this is part and parcel of normal film viewing or the "ecology of the cinema".

The most immediate demonstration of apparent motion is Duncker’s induced motion referred to above, a cinematic effect because it is dependent on canonical projection within a frame. The best analytic examples are about the perception of events in filmed dance. Footnote 27 For Hochberg and Brooks an ecological approach to perception in the cinema needs to take the ecology of the cinema into account.

The necessity of cognitive schemas in film perception was pointed out most pregnantly in Hochberg’s dealing with the comprehension of shot transitions or cuts. It was argued that known sensory integration and Gibson’s extraction of invariants, fail to account for viewers’ comprehension of frequent and simple cinematic events like elision of space and time. Overlap in contents between successive shots can be hard to identify or lack at all. Hochberg and Brooks proposed a principled alternative: films play in the mind’s eye. Viewers construct an off-screen mental space from separate views, and they can link two successive views by the relation of each of these to this space. In constructing a mental space, overlap may even be overruled by other cues, that have nothing to do with any invariance. The construction must involve event schemas and cognitive principles removed from anything immediately given in the film. Schemas may indeed outperform (mathematical) invariants picked up from the optical array offered by the screen. Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996b ) show, for example how gaze direction of film characters or personae in subsequent shots may be more effective in the construction of a continuous mental scene than overlapping spatial or visual symbolic contents. Footnote 28 Mental schemas seem to be indispensable in the comprehension of sequences of completely non-overlapping cuts. A famous demonstration by Hochberg and Brooks is reproduced in Fig. 2 . The succession of shots is readily understood when it is preceded by the presentation of a cross, which provides the integrating schema. Viewers’ schema-based continuous perception of scenes is supported by the ways that traditional cinema tells its stories. The presentation of an overall view in so-called 'establishing shots' followed by a 'break-down' of its object into subsequently presented part views is a cornerstone procedure in classical continuity film style (Bordwell and Thompson, 1997 /1979).

Role of mental schemas in the comprehension of continuous space across shots as discussed in Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996 , 2007 ). a The sequence of eight static shots does not seem to make sense. b A static preview of the entire object as in A) would activate a mental schema of a cross. Subsequent shots are then recognised as consecutive camera relocations, counter-clockwise rotations offering subsequent views of corners From Hochberg and Brooks ( 2007 ). Adding a shot of the cross moving diagonally to the lower left corner of the frame would smoothen the transition between the entire object view and the view of its top right corner further and facilitate the perception of the subsequent parts. Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996 ) reported that replacing one of the shots by a blank frame does not lead to confusion. For example, if shot 7 were replaced by a blank frame, the view of the lower left angle of the cross would seem to have been skipped, and shot 8 would be recognised as to present a view of the lower left corner. That is, the trajectory of the views would remain intact in keeping with the overall view of the object. This illustrates all the more the leading role of the schema of a cross in the perception of its parts.

A smooth understanding of non-overlapping cuts may require dedicated knowledge of discursive story units and rules for their ordering that only literary analysis types of study can reveal (Hochberg, 1986 , pp. 22–50). Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996a , p. 382) pointed out that theoretical or empirical proposals as to the nature of such representations were lacking. They found Gestalt principles unsatisfactory (Hochberg, 1998 ). Current film psychologists have taken up this challenge as we shall see briefly.

As a final contribution of Hochberg and Brooks’ to the psychology of the film, we would like to highlight their view of film spectators as partners motivated to deliver their share in a communicative effort. Film viewers contribute to the canonical setup of the cinema in that they are astutely aware of the filmmaker’s communicative intentions: '… the viewer expects that the film maker has undertaken to present something in an intelligible fashion and will not provide indecipherable strings of shots' (Hochberg, 1986 , p. 22–53). Viewers must be assumed to have an associated motivation to explore the views presented to them. In a series of inventive experiments, Hochberg and Brooks gathered evidence for an impetus to gather visual information. Looking preference increased with cutting rate and with complexity of shot contents. Visual momentum , or viewer interest, (Brooks and Hochberg, 1976 ; Hochberg and Brooks, 1978 ) as they termed it is the absorbing experience typical of cinema viewing. These studies help us to understand how current cutting strategies meet the viewers’ typical motivation for cognitive enquiry. The reward of comprehension is carefully dosed by varying the time allowed to the viewer to inspect objects and scenes, dependent on their novelty and complexity.

Hochberg’s demonstrations of the involvement of mental structures in understanding portrayed events was in large part based on introspective evidence. They have been criticised for relying too heavily on top-down control of perception by too intricate mental structures, by Gibson and others. Footnote 29 Current research in the cognitive structure tradition uses more sophisticated experimental set-ups. Inspiration has been drawn from theories of discourse processing in cognitive science. In this research, the relationship of 'top-down' use of schemas in scene comprehension with 'bottom-up' processing of stimulus features has become an important question. Footnote 30 Zacks has extensively investigated how film viewers segment the ongoing stream of images and extract meaningful events and actions from it. Viewer segmentation depends on automatically detected changes in a situation (Zacks, 2004 ). Detection of the changes requires only minimal use of schemas, and triggers automated perceptual-motor simulations of events and subevents such as actions. Footnote 31 Segmentation follows the logic of events in the real world. Most importantly, multiple events can be organised in a hierarchical or linear fashion, as scenes, sets of events and subevents or actions (Zacks, 2013 ).

Theory of mind and layered meaning of events

Extracting events in understanding film scenes needs more than retrieving schemas of real world events. The fact that they are presented with an idea in mind, is reflected in their understanding. Understanding film scenes and especially characters, their actions, plans and goal has been argued to require a so-called Theory of Mind (Levin et al., 2013 ). TOM is a system of cognitive representations of what beliefs, needs, desires, intentions and feelings people have in their interaction with others and the world. It is acquired in early childhood, when children understand that others, too, have an internal life, similar to but also different from one’s own beliefs and feelings. Levin et al. explain how use of TOM, also referred to as mentalising is necessary for an elementary understanding of film character actions and feelings. For example, character gaze following that underlies our perception of what characters feel or want to do with respect to an object that they look at requires TOM. TOM underlies grasping spatial (and action-) relations in scene comprehension across cuts using gaze following. Understanding relations between more complex events require schema-controlled theorizing on what people believe, do, think, and feel. Finally, Levin et al. demonstrate through film analyses how film viewers construct multi-layered representations of a film’s action from the point of view of different characters, the viewer and even from the narrator’s or filmmaker’s. For example, viewer and character perspectives may clash as in dramatic irony , or the narrator may create false beliefs on story events in viewers.

Continuity of events and viewer attention

Hochberg’s question of what the mental schemas look like that enable us to perceive smooth progress of events across film cuts has recently been addressed by the next generation of film psychologists. They have sought answers in profound analyses of the canonical setup delivered by the founders of cognitive film theory in the humanities, such as Bordwell ( 1985 , 2008 ), and Anderson ( 1996 ). Bordwell’s extensive analyses of classical film narrative and his account of the viewer’s mental activity in the comprehension of the film’s story-world suggest a film-psychological hypothesis on the experience of continuity: Classical Hollywood film style serves smooth progress of the narrative. Continuity editing ensures fluency across shot transitions. Shot A cues cognitive schema-based or narrative expectations that are subsequently matched in shot B. Expectations can be perceptual or cognitive, i.e., requiring inferences supported by event schemas. Anderson added a Gibsonian perspective, arguing that the perception of film scenes mimics the perception of real world scenes. Continuity shooting and editing closely follow the constraints of the human perceptual systems that have evolved to 'extract' continuity from changing views of scenes in the real world. Recent research into the experience of smooth development of events and scenes across shot transitions draws on these principles of continuity narration. Footnote 32 Framing, editing and sound finetune the viewer’s top-down search to focus on candidate target stimuli. A quite complete and accurate explanation was offered by Tim Smith. His Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity ( 2012 ) explains the viewer’s sense of smooth progress by the continuity editing principles that mainstream filmmakers tend to adhere to. AToCC breaks away from Hochberg’s analyses to the degree that it holds that viewers do not need intricate spatial or semantic schemas to construct continuous events from separate shots. Rather it is built on the Gibsonian principle that perceiving continuity in film scenes derives from the continuity that we experience in perceiving scenes in the natural world. The ecology of the cinema renders it sufficient to follow a number of simple spatiotemporal guidelines. Continuity editing film style guides viewers’ attention in seamlessly following action across cuts. Attention, that is the focused selection of objects in a shot by the viewer, i.e., what and where the viewer directs their gaze, is led by the filmmaker. The viewers’ gaze in shot A is directed to the part of the screen where the target of interest in shot B, that is after the cut, will be. The shift of attention from one portion to another of the screen in shot A is shortly followed by the cut, and because the gaze 'lands' in the right place in shot B, the cut has become invisible. Footnote 33 The theory of continuity perception adds precise levels of analysis to the construction of mental scene spaces that Hochberg proposed. It distinguishes higher level and lower level control of attention. Higher-level ones include 'perceptual inquiries' as Hochberg and Brooks ( 1978a ) called them. The expectations or questions that guide the gaze may be minimally articulated, e.g., 'what or whom are these characters looking at' as in gaze following, but the operation of higher level cognitive schemas are not excluded. The best demonstration to date of the control of focus of attention by the narrative is given in research on suspense and its effects on film viewer gazes by Bezdek et al. ( 2015 ) and Bezdek and Gerrig ( 2017 ). Footnote 34 Their results can be taken to imply that suspense, a state of high absorption, is associated with focal attention to story-world details supervised by expectations created by the narrative (see also Doicaru, 2016 ).

The study of film viewers' attention has delivered a firm account of the role of the ubiquitous Hollywood continuity film style in the typical experience of smoothly flowing film scenes and stories that audiences allover the world have. (See for a review Smith, Levin & Cutting, 2012 ).

A lead role in perception for cinematic low-level features?

Experimental psychology has always aspired basic explanations of perceptual responses, preferably through transparent mechanistic associations with physically observable stimulus conditions. The role of high-level narrative schema-based attention in smooth film experiences discussed in the previous section, is subject to debates in which experimental data support arguments pro and con. To begin with, AToCC emphasises the role of leading expectations in following cuts, but more akin to the Gibsonian approach of visual perception than to Hochberg’s schema position as it is, it tends to stress lower level features as directing attention bottom-up, too or even more so. One lower level is given by film-stylistic devices, for instance the use of sound that can orient viewers to direct their gazes to the next shot’s portion of the screen where the sound’s origin will be shown. Another are lower level stimulus features in a narrower and technical sense, such as bright lights and movements with sudden onset that automatically attract attention due to the make-up of the senses and the brain. Especially movement was shown by Smith to be an extraordinary low level attentional cue. The power of low level feature control of attentional shifts has inspired Loschky et al. ( 2015 ) to speak of the 'tyranny of film'. They start from research findings suggesting that the use of low-level stylistic features can result in attentional synchrony across film audiences, that is individual viewers of a scene gaze at exactly the same portions of the screen at exactly the same time. Footnote 35 Remarkable degrees of inter-viewer synchronization of visual attention has also been established in studies of localisations of brain activity in film viewers (e.g., Hasson et al., 2003 ). However, Stephen Hinde’s research has recently shown that the distraction effect of inserted low-level attention triggers is quite limited (Hinde et al., 2017 ) In line with this notion of top-down attention control overriding bottom-up attention triggers, Magliano and Zacks ( 2011 ) demonstrated that the perception of cuts is suppressed by higher order processes related to the construction of complex events.

Gibson’s idea of invariants in optical arrays can now be made concrete, enabling the prediction of bottom-up controlled attention and perception from objectively identified features. Developments in computer vision, image and sound analysis have paved the way for automated extraction of features and patterns in visual and auditory stimuli in terms of multiple dimensions. For example, machine extraction of saliency as a feature predictive of bottom-up attention has been developed and applied in numerous computer vision applications. A much-cited article by Itti and Koch ( 2001 ) illustrates the idea for static images. Specialised neural network algorithms detect features such as colour, intensity, orientations, etc. in parallel over the entire visual field. Each feature is represented in a feature map, in which neurons compete for saliency. Feature maps are combined into a saliency map. A last network sequentially scans the saliency map, moving from the most salient location to the next less salient one and so on. Footnote 36 An excellent explanation of how to obtain saliency maps is given at a Matlab page. Footnote 37

Psychologists of film in their attempts to explain the extraordinary smooth and intense perceptual experience that mainstream film typically provides, currently seek to join forces with computer vision scientists. In a next step, they may seek collaboration with vision labs in the world that attempt to link their low-level film image feature analyses with film narrative structures and viewer responses. Footnote 38

Examples of computational film analyses. Number of shot transitions as a function of acts. Cutting ( 2016 ), Fig. 2 . Under Creative Commons License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ). Note that ordinates are inverted; lower positions of titles mean larger number of shots and decreased shot durations. Normalised time bins refer to units of duration standardised in view of variable film length of separate titles. Left panel displays distribution of cuts over time and acts, right panel of non-cut transitions such as dissolves, fades and wipes.

The work of perception researcher James Cutting has carried the psychology of the film into the next stage of the Gibsonian ecological approach, while also linking it with insights in the structure of film narrative from humanities scholarship. Footnote 39 In an interesting essay on the perception of scenes in the real world and in film Cutting ( 2005 ) summarised the ecological perspective on perception stating that understanding how we perceive the real world helps to grasp how we perceive film and vice versa. Footnote 40 In the last decade Cutting developed powerful computational content analysis methods that reveal the patterning of low-level features in relation to dimensions of film style and technology, in representative samples of Hollywood films of well over a hundred titles. The theoretical starting point of the approach is that movies exhibit reality. The psychologist Cutting subscribes to the analytical distinctions made in literary and film theories between plot, form and style of a narrative on the one hand, and the represented story-world on the other. The Gibsonian proposal is that analyses of the fabula or story-world (i.e., the action, events, characters and so on) should lead to identification of syuzhet features (i.e., formal and stylistic features that are physically given in the film stimulus or can be perceived without substantial instruction) functional in the perception and understanding of that story-world; vice versa, variations in form and style reflect variations in the portrayed story-world. Cutting’s definition of low-level film features used in the analyses was informed by analyses of narrative, style and technology by David Bordwell, and methods for statistical style analysis by Barry Salt ( 2009 ).

Low-level features analysed by Cutting and co-workers are physically and quantitatively determinable elements or aspects occurring in moving images, regardless of the narrative. They include shot duration, temporal shot structure, colour, contrast and movement. The value of each feature can be expressed as an index for an entire film, or for some segment targeted in an analysis. Footnote 41 Inspection by an analyst complements machine vision analyses, but I would qualify the indexing approach as computational (objective) film analysis , because of intensive tallying and numerical operations developed by specialists in psychological data-processing. The features do not constitute events or scenes, but they accentuate these. A recording of their measurements for an entire film would constitute an abstract backbone to be filled with scenes and events. One possible comparison is with the rhythmic score of a song without melodies and words. In the hands of capable film-makers they are indispensable for conveying the narrative, due to their direct, predictable and automated effects on the visual system.

The primary use of the approach is in film analysis. The multi-feature configurations of indices can be used to reliably 'fingerprint' films or sections. Reliably because the indices are derived from large numbers of measurements. Computational film analysis uses a historical corpus of films and has been deployed over the past decade to corroborate and enrich historical analyses of film style. Footnote 42 The climax so far of efforts to integrate computational content analysis with film theory and analysis is Cutting’s ( 2016 ) report on narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies. The corpus consisted of 160 English language films released between 1935 and 2010, ten for each year. As Figure 3 illustrates a typical course obtained of the number of shot transitions over film presentation time, interpretable as to mark the acts and the pace of narration, see Figure 3 . An important outcome of the analyses is that clear physical support was obtained for the four-act structure proposed by film historian Thompson ( 1999 ) across the entire period. It should be noted that Thompson’s act structure was identified largely on the basis of higher level narrative segmentation. Footnote 43 Shot scale was unrelated to the act structure. Cutting added analyses of higher order level film features that can be interpreted to co-vary with narration. Footnote 44 Cutting then ventured upon a multi-feature analysis of the entire corpus. Associations among all indices across all titles could be reduced to four dimensions: motion, framing, editing and sound. They correlated in a meaningful way. For example, shot scale was inversely related to shot duration; in classical narration close-ups tend towards briefer durations than wide shots. Each dimension represented polar opposites between features, e.g., music vs. conversation for sound and close-ups vs long shots for framing. Computational content analysis can explore the dynamics of the dimensional representations over subsequent acts of movies. Figure 4 reproduces Cuttings findings for prolog, setup, complication, development, climax, and epilog. Footnote 45 It would seem that the analysis winds up in a level of cinematic content representation that is grounded in directly given stimulus features, integrated with film-analytical features that can be readily indexed and seem relevant as production tools in regular filmmaking.

Five movie dimensions in narrational space. Reproduced from Cutting ( 2016 ) Fig. 9. under Creative Commons License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ). The displayed representation is obtained from dimensional reduction of the numerous associations between film titles in terms of their feature profiles. The results of the first stage of the analysis are not displayed here, see Fig. 8 in Cutting ( 2016 ). In that stage, the number of associations between all titles regarding all features was reduced to four dimensions (see main text) using principal component analysis. In the next stage the analysis was applied to the features and films for each separate act, to result in the configurations shown here. Arrows vary in length, correspondingly to differences in the range of values on the dimensions. Black dots indicate median values of the acts on the dimensions. Considering for example the sound dimension, it can be seen that the set-up tends to have more conversation and the climax has more music. The red bars indicate the dispersion of values on the dimension and the degree it is skewed towards one or the other end

What does computational content analysis mean psychologically, that is how do indices and dimensions function in the viewer’s perceiving and comprehending events? Patterns of features trigger changes in viewers’ physiological, attention, perception and emotion systems, according to Cutting ( 2016 , p. 27). Typical low-level configurations may correlate with possible effects on the viewer’s perception and experience of events. For example, shot duration may support interpretations of pace, mood and tension, think of drama’s long takes; temporal shot structure is functional for sustaining attention or suspense (e.g., when a sequence of brief shots abruptly merges into long duration shots), e.g., in thrillers; movement (of camera and objects on screen) serves arousal in the viewer, as in action movies; low luminance signals possible threat as in horror movies, while high luminance may lend 'a sense of other worldliness' (Brunick et al., 2013 , p. 141). All low-level features can help viewers in categorising films as to genre, and changes in these will support segmentation of events and scenes, which is at the basis of smooth narrative understanding. Combinations of indices enable more interesting interpretations of possible experience effects. Footnote 46 However, because the studies that the overarching computational content analysis was based on do not involve response measurement, a direct connection between cinematic form (especially narrative procedures) and cinematic meaning that Cutting argues for is open to further elaboration. Even in the face of the richness of directly given information that has been extracted using computers, Cutting sees room for the use of cognitive schemas. The very narrative acts that are underlined by immediately given information may be schematic in nature, but he finds it more likely that their functioning is less dependent on memory-processes than the very high-level cognitive structures implied in cognitive scripts and TOM reasoning.

To conclude the sections on the cognition of film scenes, we seem to have made important progress in understanding how movies construct events in film viewers' minds an brains, as put it in his state of the art review. Movies in part "dictate" events, actions and scenes to viewers' brains using an "alphabet" of visual and auditive features; viewers in turn contribute to the construction of story-worlds by developing and matching higher-order structural anticipations using embodied cognitive event, character and narrative schemas. Since 1916, the film units that have been analysed increased from paired single stimuli (as apparent motion experiments) to whole film acts (as in computational film analysis). Analyses of narrative structure from film theory have become for the psychology of film what harmonics and counterpoint analysis signify to the psychology of music or the theories of syntax and semantics to psycholinguistics. They inform psychological notions of film structure and organization.

The awareness of narrative film

The third part of The Photoplay deals with issues other than the psychological mechanisms or the psychology of film form namely the awareness offered by the photoplay. It was only natural to Münsterberg as a child of his time to designate the special awareness that film creates as the explanandum in psychological research, the mechanisms of film stimuli impinging on attention, perception and memory being the explanans . His characterisations of this conscious awareness, what it is like to watch theatrical films, or in other words the phenomenology of the film experience remains in my view as yet unparalleled. Apart from the sense of freedom that we have already discussed, they include attentional and affective experiences.

Münsterberg described enjoyment as the immediate effect of theatrical film, explaining it from the exceptional freedom of the imagination: "The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the form of our consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones. It is a superb enjoyment which no other art can furnish us" (Münsterberg, 1916 , p. 95). Light has been thrown on the remarkable fluency of the film experience noted by Münsterberg by current research in narrative procedures, and the mechanisms of continuity perception discussed in the previous section. Münsterberg also stressed that the enjoyment of photoplays depends on our experience of the film’s story as an emotionally meaningful world separate from reality: 'The photoplay shows us a significant conflict of human actions … adjusted to the free play of our mental experiences and which reach complete isolation from the practical world …' (p. 82). And finally, he singled out the role of focused attention in enjoyment. 'It is as if that outer world were woven into our mind and we were shaped not through its own laws but by the acts of our attention, …' (Münsterberg, 1916 , p. 39).

Twentieth century academic psychology did not develop much of a body of theory and research on human consciousness. Hence it is not surprising that alongside research into perception and comprehension one doesn’t find much work on the conscious experience of film. Measurements of perceptual, attentional, cognitive and affective responses in experimental psychology are extremely limited with regards to the contents of consciousness that they tap. Lab tasks enabling measurement are must be simple, e.g., identification, comparison or categorisation of visual stimuli, rather than free description or recall. Self-reports associated with such tasks must be quantifiable and take the shape of choice responses, simple intensity ratings or readily codifiable reports. Behavioural measures are farther removed from any contents of experience because these need to be inferred. Here, too, simple objective coding is a must. Descriptive and interpretative reports of the qualia and meaning of experiences afforded by film have been largely left to hermeneutic film criticism and phenomenologically oriented film philosophy in the humanities. Scholarship in these fields follows in the footsteps of Münsterberg. The present overview of the psychology of the film cannot go into it further; I refer to Sobchack’s ( 1992 ) volume on the phenomenology of the film experience. It opens with the proposition that film directly expresses perceptions, a proposition coming close to the observation in The Photoplay that the contents of the audience’s experience are perceptions, attention, thinking and emotion that are projected before them on the screen.

Absorption in film

Meanwhile, progress can be reported in understanding one aspect of the rich and complex film experience namely its intensity. Münsterberg observed that the film audience’s enjoyment is due to prolonged states of attention strongly focused on a fictional story-world, so strong in fact that the here and now escapes consciousness and it seems instead as if an 'outer world were woven into our mind'. Elsewhere we have proposed to refer to the experience of intense attention as absorption in a story-world (Tan et al., 2017 ), following Nell's ( 1988 ) groundbreaking description of "being lost in a book". Media psychologists specialised in research on media entertainment (Vorderer et al., 2004 , Bilandzic & Bussele, 2011 ) have developed a variety of measures capturing enjoyable absorption-like states afforded by narrative, television drama and video-gaming. We discuss four of these.

a. Narrative engagement (Bussele and Bilandzic, 2008 , 2009 ) is a pleasant state of being engrossed or entranced by the narrative as a whole as it is presented in a book or film, including the activity of reading or viewing it. Footnote 47 (Tele-)Presence (Schubert et al., 2001 ; Wirth et al., 2007 ; and others) refers to the embodied awareness of being in a virtual world: being there with your body, in other words absorption in a story-world. Footnote 48 The concept has its origin in research into the experience of virtual realities. Footnote 49 Attempts have been made to ground mechanisms of film-induced emotion on presence that is the audience’s basic and embodied awareness of being in the middle of the story-world as a witness to events befalling characters Anderson ( 1996 ); Tan (1994, 1996 ).

b. Green and Brock’s ( 2000 ) definition of transportation is the most frequently used conceptualisation of absorption in media-psychological research. It is considered a major gratification offered to readers of narrative and film viewers alike. It overlaps with presence in that it features a sense of being in the story-world, as well as a realistic and attentive imagery of details. The difference may be that as a metaphor transportation evokes associations with transition to or travel into the film’s story-world. Footnote 50 More than presence, the operationalisations of transportation entail personal relevance and participatory sympathetic feeling, amplifying the emotional quality of the experience.

c. Empathy is the common denominator for concepts referring to absorption in the inner life of fictional characters. Like transportation, it is seen as a major gratification in reading stories and watching drama and movies. Viewer empathy has been defined as perceiving, understanding and emotionally responding to character feeling in the seminal work on the subject by Zillmann (Zillmann, 1991 , 1996). Perceived similarity and sympathy for the character (grounded in moral attitudes) have been suggested and tested as determinants of spectator empathy in drama (e.g., Zillmann, 1996; 2000 ; 2003 ; 2006 ). Footnote 51 There is still a need to sort out possible forms of empathy specific to the canonical conditions of the cinema which may be quite different from situations in real life where we observe other persons. Footnote 52 Moreover, empathy with film characters can be less or more cognitively demanding. Footnote 53 Identification (e.g., Cohen, 2001 ) seems to stand for complete absorption of the viewer’s self by a represented character. Footnote 54 It can be argued that empathy is the rule in film viewing while identification is the exception (e.g., Zillmann, 1995; Tan, 1996 , 2013a , b ), as most mainstream film narratives are mainly geared towards provoking the former rather than the latter. According to Smith ( 1995 ) they use 'alignment' techniques that promote perspective taking and allegiance strategies that foster viewer sympathy for the character while the distinction between self and character is unaffected.

d. Finally, flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997 ) is the odd person out in the series of absorption-like experience concepts reviewed here, because it applies not only to absorption in movies, narratives or games, but to any activities that stand out for a certain intensity and intrinsic reward as well. The rather simple idea supporting the concept is that a pleasurable state is experienced when the challenges inherent in an activity just match the person’s capacities. In the canonical setup of mainstream film (and mainstream audiences) this balance is generally realised due to filmmakers’ skilful presentation of interesting story-events, and the overlap of it with attentional, perceptual and cognitive routines that film viewers have acquired in the real world. Mainstream movie continuity film style facilitates flow a great deal as it tedns to minimize challenges posed by transitions from one view or perspective to another. Smith's ( 2012 ) studies were discussed above as relevant to smooth continuity of visual attention, and I would also mention the research on comprehension of events by Schwann (2013; Garsofsky & Schwan, 2009 )

Obviously, these and other varieties of absorption are not mutually exclusive. Elsewhere we have presented qualitative empirical support for a dynamic interplay among the varieties of absorption (Bálint and Tan, 2015 ). Footnote 55

From the overview we may conclude that Münsterberg’s introspective psychology of the film experience is in large part echoed in the empirical observations gathered one century later. Viewers feel absorbed in another, exceptionally vivid reality, 'clothed in the [embodied] forms of our consciousness' (presence and transportation). Empathy is mentioned by Münsterberg as a prominent experience, and his notion of an unhampered stream of the imagination may correspond with the experience of flow. Focused attention is already in The Photoplay a major component of the film experience, that would later be investigated in research on bottom-up vs. top-down attention discussed above. Absorption, empathy and intensely focused attention can easily substantiate the enjoyability of watching films as Münsterberg already would have it. However, compared to Münsterberg’s conceptualisation of the typical film awareness, insights into how acts of imagination on the part of the spectatorcontribute to it have not advanced that much in the psychology of film. Footnote 56

A narrative simulation account of emotion in film viewing

Absorption is an affective state characteristic of the film expeirience. However, a description of the typical experience of narrative films is incomplete if more specific affective states are not considered. Watching movies has been identified with emotions. We go to the cinema to experience mirth, compassion, sadness, bittersweet emotions, thrill, horror, and soon in response to what we see and hear happening to characters and ourselves. Emotions of movie audiences have not received much attention since Münsterberg’s Photoplay . Twenty-first century film psychology has taken up where he left off, and a major step forward has been to regard the narrative structure of films as a fundamental starting point for explaining film viewer emotions. The narrative simulation account is, I think, dominant in today’s psychological approaches to the issue of why the cinema offers the intense and remarkable emotional experience that Münsterberg’s photoplays induced a century ago. Important work on emotion in media users has been done in media psychology, most on empathy with characters, but narrative induced emotion has not received much attention, as can be seen from a complete overview by Konijn ( 2013 ). Cognitive scholars in the humanities have highlighted different aspects of film narratives that induce perceptions of fictional events associated with intense emotional experiences (e.g., genre-typical film style: Grodal, 1997 , 2009 , 2017 ; Visch and Tan, 2009 ; narrative procedures, e.g., Smith, 1995 ; Plantinga, 2009 ; Berliner, 2017 ). I hope the reader will allow me to use my own work on the subject as an illustration. It is closely related to the cognitive - theoretical analyses just referred to. I have found a cognitive approach to emotion in general psychology fruitful for narrative modelling of emotion in film viewing. Footnote 57 Investigations of film-induced emotion have raisedthe issue of apparent realism : how can a clearly fictional world be taken for real to the effect of intensely moving emoting viewers? Oatley introduced a cognitive theory of narrative fiction as simulation ( 1999 , 2012 , 2013 ) that applies to film as a stimulus for possibly complex emotions. Narrative runs simulations on the embodied mind just as programs run simulations on computers. Footnote 58 I would add that filmviewers take part in a playful simulation in which the film leads them to imagine they are present in a fictional world, where they witness fictional events that film characters are involved in (Tan, 1995 , 1996 , 2008 ). Being a witness involves embodied perceptions of what happens in a fictional world, as well as in the imagination constructing and participating in events, without acting on these. In the process, events are taken for real for the sake of playful entertainment. This position is related to Walton’s ( 1990 ) well-known account of fiction as make-believe.

Frijda’s cognitive theory of the emotions (Frijda, 1986 , 2007) is the starting point for further explanation of emotional experiences in response to film. The theory posits that the emotion system has evolved for adaptive action in the first place. For example, the sight of a monster will spawn a strong urge to flee due to a basic concern for safety being jeopardised. Of course, film audiences do not run out of the auditorium. According to the cognitive theory of emotion, action responses are not fixed responses to emotional stimuli, but the result of appraisals of what they mean for a person’s concerns in light of the situational context. Playful simulation provides the contextual frame for the complex appraisal of apparent realism of film events. The appraisal has three stages: perceptual, imagination based and self-involved. Footnote 59

1. Many popular film stimuli provoke immediate and automated appraisals of concern relevance and ensuing emotional responses, due for instance to their nature of unconditioned stimuli in the real world. A snake popping out from the bush would be an example. Emotional appraisals in the cinema can be and often are empathetic. That is they include perspectives on events taken by film characters. Film technology in mainstream movies is used to emphasise emotional triggers; editing could strengthen the suddenness of the snake’s appearance, and photography could render fear releasers such as the typical movements of the snake more salient. Footnote 60 But popular films also present us with emotional stimuli that are immediately perceived as fake, for example a rubber prop snake. Due to the playful simulation frame further cognitive processing of perceptions takes place. In the first case, film viewers realise that just perceived events are not real but must be held true for the sake of a playful simulation. In the second, they realise that the fake stimulus is only a prompt, and comply with its invitation to hold the stimulus true and allow it to appeal to their concerns, also for the sake of playful simulation.

2. Once imagination takes over from perception, the reality status of stimuli is traded for believability. As part of the imagination fictional events are matched with higher order genre-specific narrative schemas, and then dealt with as possibilities in a particular world . As Frijda ( 1989 ) argued when he discussed the apparent reality of fiction: 'Seeing a fake snake approach a real person is not scary. But watching an imaginary snake approach an imaginary Jane is. The first is seen as unreal in a real word, and the second as real in an imaginary world. And this is how we appraise events in fiction. The fun of art is in the play with the duality' (p. 1546). Play with the possibility of events in the imagined world and entertaining as-if emotions can suffice for genuine emotion to arise. As I argued elsewhere (Tan, 1996 ) the appraisal of the possibility of events in a particular fictional world can and usually does lead to genuine emotion, because humans have been equipped with a capacity to have emotions in response to mental representations of counterfactual and imaginary events. Footnote 61

3. The genuine emotion can—but does not need to—open up considerations of the believability of fictional events in the real world. Moreover, it can lead to imaginations in which the viewer’s self is involved in the events or their ramifications. The appraisal of fictional film events is treated in more detail in Tan and Visch (2018). The search for film style and technology features that are conducive to particular emotional appraisals has only slowly lifted off. Cutting's computational content analyses were already mentioned There are scattered empirical studies e.g. of camera angle and editing pace by Kraft (1987) and Lang et al. 1995, respectively. Film technique manuals and critical anayles provide abundant intuitively convincing examples of how to produce emotionally appealing sequences. It is to be expected that computational film analysis will soon enable large scale studies of the use of style and technology in emoting scenes.

Back to emotion and action. As film viewers perceive film scenes to be projections on screen of a fictional world, they understand they cannot act, and their action tendencies are suppressed. Footnote 62 As importantly, one’s inability to act upon a fictional world is a strong trigger for emotional responses involving the imagination of action. Driven by sympathy, viewers desire that protagonists escape from a horrific situation. In their imagination they anticipate and hope that the protagonist is saved by someone or something and if need be by a fictional miracle. Footnote 63 Thus, they experience or exhibit a virtual form of action readiness (Frijda, 1986 ). Footnote 64 This readiness for action can be directly observed in film viewers from their "participatory responses" (Bezdek, Foy & Gerrig, 2013 ) - such as overt expressions of sympathy for a character (see also Tan, 2013b ). However, there is one thing that film-viewers as witnesses invariably do when properly emoted: eagerly watch the events on screen.

Following cognitive film theory further, I consider the emotional experience of film as the sum total of experience of the appraisal, internal and external bodily expressions and changes in action readiness integrated in consciousness in accompanying the sensory intake of units of film.

Film, interest and enjoyment

An account of `film - audience emotion is incomplete if it does not go into the question why we actually take the trouble of watching movies. Münsterberg already wondered how mature people can become so emotionally absorbed in fantasy worlds. Narrative films can be argued to address two basic emotional concerns in particular, curiosity and sympathy (Tan, 1996 ). All sorts of narrative fiction, including film provoke interest by presenting events with uncertain consequences. Thus, they address a basic curiosity , that is a need for novelty, knowing and exploration. Interest is the emotion that responds to appeals involving this concern. Interest in film viewing does have a real action readiness to it referred to above: watch eagerly. Because the response in interest includes spending and focussing attention to specific story-world events, its experience goes hand in hand with absorption. Mainstream film’s narrative is perfectly designed to support a characteristic systematic unfolding of interest as an emotion. Movies continuously present cognitive challenges that viewers know they can meet. Footnote 65 Silvia ( 2006 ) has shown in a greater number of studies that this is the condition for optimal interest. I have referred to the core appraisal of narrative interest as promise of rewarding outcomes , in terms either of desirability for a protagonist or mankind in general, or of coherence, completeness or elegance of a narrative’s structure, or both (Tan, 1996 ). In addition, the prospect of sought emotions, such as excitement, enjoyment and appreciation is as well part of the promise that ongoing film narratives constantly offer. Footnote 66 Interest is closely linked with enjoyment, the primary gratification that movies offer their audience. In the cinema interetst is pleasant because it is fun to entertain anticipations of as yet uncertain story-outcomes. Moreover, every outcome, even if it is unanticipated or unfavorable, is greeted with enjoyment because it answers one's curiosity. (In the case of sad, horrific or otherwise hedonically negative or mixed outcomes, "enjoyment" is not the proper label for the rewarding emotion. We return to the fun of unpleasant emotion in a later section).On a final note, interest in film viewing is a case of narrative interest as a broader category of emotions, but the sensory qualities of the medium are relevant for how interest feels. Curiosity to know is in part a desire for the closure of a propositional narrative structure, but in the cinema we do not only want to know but also to see and hear . The enjoyment of seeing a couple kiss or a heroine return after an odyssee of some sort is in the cinema incomplete when it is not shown. In the cinematic appraisal of interest, an anticipation of embodied completion of our narrative-led imagination is a major ingredient of the promise of reward.

Emotional responses to fiction film worlds

The second concern that movies touch upon is sympathy . That this concern is active throughout the reception of all traditional movies answers the question why film viewers care about damsels, hobbits or gorilla’s in distress. There is a fundamental human need for bonding with others and recognising whatever fictional character as someone 'like us' supposedly suffices for sympathy to arise. Footnote 67 Mainstream films activate the concern to the full as their sympathetic protagonists meet with ups and downs in on the way to their goals. Sympathy-based emotions like disappointment, regret, awe, mirth, suspense, hopes and fears, compassion and sadness occur in response to obstacles or their removal on the way to protagonists realising their projects. Footnote 68 Because these emotions arise in response to events (appraised as desirable or undesirable) in a fictional world, we refer to these emotions as responding emotions . Footnote 69 Some frequently experienced sympathetic responding emotions such as fear, sadness, compassion and being moved, can be empathetic , that is require mentalising a character’s inner life. Said more precisely, empathetic emotion requires that the viewer’s appraisal of any fictional events reflects the perspective of a character; the event is understood from a character’s imagined point of view and with her concerns, and feelings. In its most intense forms, sympathy can look and feel like self-indulgent sentiment . However, there is no point in condemning tears of sadness or joy as silly. The term sentiment is not necessarily pejorative. The appraisal of a character’s suffering or good doing can involve an acknowledgment of its superior measure, notably in relation to the self’s suffering or good doing. In my compassion with or admiration for a beloved character I can feel that her fate is really woeful compared to mine, or that her altruistic achievements make mine totally insignificant. Being moved , awe and having goose bumps are emotional responses accompanying such appraisals (Tan and Frijda, 1997 ; Tan, 2009 ; Wassiliwizky et al., 2017 ; Schubert et al., 2018 ) Footnote 70

However, not every responding emotion requires empathy or sympathy. Footnote 71 The sympathy concern does not only drive our siding with characters and responding emotionally to the ups and downs in their projects. As I proposed (Tan, 1996 ) it can make us invest affectively 'film-long' in characters, on top of going along in their hopes and fears, successes and failures. We are also witnesses of characters’ slower and more profound development into personae we would want them to be. The share of action or plot development relative to that of character differs from one genre to another. Footnote 72 Generally, action movies and especially comedies tend to allow for only minimal character development, whereas the drama genres may indulge into it. In these genres, viewer interest may depend in larger part on characterisation and character development.

Another class of emotions responding to the fictional world are 'spectacular' that is spectacle based . The spectacle of landscapes, buildings, natural objects and artifices, human or animal figures in motion, can surprise us and touch on a sense of beauty and invoke appraisals of harmony, elegance, or serenity. In some genres the spectacle of explosions, injury, cruelty disfiguration, etc. may incite disgust, fear raise emotions. Spectacle-based emotions do not rely on empathy of any depth, their stimulus being the mere view or sound of a fictional scene; they are neither dependent on sympathy. In more traditional terms, image and sound combinations of objects, events, and figures in the fictional world can be emotionally appraised as spectacular, beautiful, sublime, horrific, bizarre, absurd and so on. Amazement, enjoyment, awe (the wow-feeling), entrainment, being moved and aesthetic appreciation are apt labels for ensuing emotions. Like all emotional responses to fiction worlds, spectacle-based emotions can also arise when we read narratives, but in the cinema, they compete conspicuously with plot and character-driven interest and sympathy-based affective response. It seems like the viewer’s witness role is temporarily swapped for a spectator role. Footnote 73 The viewer can identify even further with patterns of motion or sequences of image and sound that lack reference to the film’s story-world. Viewers may contemplate lyrical associations of visuals, sounds, music and symbolic concepts in embodied consciousness as Grodal ( 1997 ) proposed. If story action imaginations give rise to emotions, lyrical associations are responded to with moods, e.g., nostalgic, tense or relaxed ones. The seemingly immediate representations on screen of emotions through camera movements and associative editing editing that Münsterberg described would be examples.

Emotion structure of narrative film

As a way to profile the dynamics of emotion across an entire film I proposed to represent these in a succinct model, the affect structure of a film (Tan, 1996 ). The model represents the course of interest and of responding emotions in time as predicted by theevents as they are subsequently presented by the film. Footnote 74 Generalising across titles, a most general hypothesis is that the level of interest during mainstream movies tends to rise globally. This is because on the way to protagonists’ goals, stakes tend to go up every novel complication. This will lead to increasing promise of reward roughly between the prologue and climax acts. Locally though, interest peaks and dips alternate over subsequent scenes, depending on genre and particular film. Figure 5 displays an example course of interest measured in viewers of the film In for treatment . In this study of emotions induced by a tragic drama on a terminally ill hospital patient, we found that an initial appraisal of the protagonist as increasingly suffering under the yoke of an oppressive hospital regime, was associated with a responding emotion of compassion. After the complication act, the protagonist’s acts of resistance against the hospital’s regime gave way to admiration due to an appraisal of the protagonist’s sense of self-determination. Both measures determined the level of interest measured continuously using a seven-point slider device (Tan and van den Boom, 1992). Affect structures can be more or less generic. That is, responding emotions are just like the plots, characters, and events that prompt these, characteristic for a certain genre. The study of genre-based emotion has been concentrated in research of undesirable effects of watching violence, sensation or horror in entertainment fare, see e.g. a volume edited by Bryant and Vorderer (2006). Psychological research into the role of viewer genre knowledge is on its way (e.g. Tan & Visch, 2009 ).

Continuous interest over the course of In for treatment; N = 21; from Tan and Van den Boom (1992). Interest was registered every second using a slider rating device. Measurement was validated by self-report interest ratings. Numbers under the abscissa represent subsequent scenes. 1–6: prolog; 7–18: complication, 19–20 development; 24: climax followed by epilog.

The appeal of unpleasant emotions

A brief glance at the success rates of films featuring sad, violent or horrific content illustrates the appeal that unpleasant emotions can have to audiences at large. Münsterberg already objected to vicious effects of violent and repulsive imagery in 1910s photoplays, contents that he observed to be worryingly attractive. The psychology of the film holds various explanations in stock, but none as yet chosen. The best documented proposal is Menninghaus et al.’s distancing-embracing model that stipulates two complmentary mechanisms. One rids painful, disgusting or otherwise unpleasant aesthetic stimuli from an impact that would prevent any enjoyment or appreciation of the stimulus. The other allows for experiences that are 'intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful' (Menninghaus et al., 2017 , p. 1). The model is meant to explain the prevalence of negative emotion in all art forms, and harbours a great many classical approaches to the issue. Media psychologists have proposed what I think are regulation accounts of the pleasures of negative emotion. An emotion such as horror results from appraisal of monsters etc. as threatening and repulsive, but the emotion itself, too, can be subject to appraisal. Likewise, your crying in the cinema may induce embarrassment upon your realising that it is only a film you are watching. Footnote 75 Serious drama, the contents of which can be appraised as poignant or thought-provoking (Oliver and Hartmann, 2010 ), and more in particular independent arthouse titles that tend to provoke appreciation and elevation rather than enjoyment seem to compensate the most painful experiences they offer by a high instruction or (self-) reflection potential (Oliver & Bartsch, 2013 ). They offer continuous promises of broadening insights or revising one’s views of the world and the self, possibly only materialising to the full long after the show. In my own work I have pointed at the modulating effects of genre schemas (Tan & Visch, 2017) and narrative interest on negative emotions. Footnote 76

In closing the sections on film-induced emotion we need to note that the account of the cognitive appraisal of emoting events given here is simplified. Even straightforward film narratives can have complexities in terms, e.g., of plot lines, or character and narrator perspective that affect the intricacies of emotional events. I refer readers to Oatley’s ( 2012 ; 2013 ) discussion of in this sense more sophisticated appraisals of fictional events. More generally, film psychological research is needed into the use of more complex TOM heuristics in the comprehension of film narrative, and in emotional appraisals of film events.

The conclusion on the psychology of film awareness must be, I think, that the gripping nature of the film experience is as astonishing today as it was to early film audiences. Media psychologists have started to measure it, and cognitive film scholars have forwarded theoretical frameworks for an account of film viewer affect and emotion. But the phenomenology of film has not been expanded by film psychologists beyond the descriptions of what it is like to watch a movie provided in The Photoplay .

The psychology of film as art

Whether or not the awareness of film entails appreciations of artistry can only be a rhetorical question, but the psychology of the film has not explicitly addressed the subject. After Münsterberg and Arnheim hardly any psychologist considered film as an art form at all. And neither have general psychological aesthetics taken film into consideration. The psychology of narrative film as it developed since the 1990’s has addressed the aesthetics of movies, but rather implicitly. We have discussed psychologists’ efforts to explain the natural fluency in the perception of story-events that Münsterberg already found characteristic for the film experience. They pointed at the conventional use of continuity film style. Mainstream cinema’s narration has been demonstrated by cognitive film theorists to be at best marginally self-conscious (Bordwell, 1985 , 2006 ). That is formal features of a film’s composition, style and use of technology are non-salient and subservient to the viewer’s reconstruction of and absorption in a fabula . The viewer’s construction of a story-world is only discretely cued by the narration, and formal or stylistic patterns that do the job tend to escape consciousness to a more than considerable degree (see Tan et al., 2017 ). We could say, I believe, that the psychological aesthetics of popular film is as it stands, first and foremost about absorption , the intense and fluent imagination of being in a fictional world. And it should be added that a psychological aesthetics of forms other than popular narrative fiction film is missing. Available knowledge suffices to propose a psychology of the thriller, the romance drama or the coming-of age film, but not for a psychology of the documentary, the expressionist, the surrealist or the postmodern film, let alone of experimental, avant-garde and other museum film art forms. After all then, at present we are not far removed from Münsterberg’s speculation on the aesthetic experience of theatrical film as intense absorption due to the inner harmony of a film’s parts and conditional on only modest deviations from realistic photo-representations of the worlds that it plays.

However, as we write, everything seems set to embark on research in the film audience’s aesthetic appraisals of movies. We can rest assured that at present 'the inner parts' of mainstream film in terms of contents, style and technology have been well-described by film theorists such as those referred to above. They can help psychologists teaming up with computer vision and hearing specialists to develop computational analyses of 'the inner harmony between the parts'. As a favourable sign of the times we also note a growing interest in the implicit knowledge that the regular film audience has of patterned uses of film style and technology in various forms and genres (see, e.g., Visch and Tan, 2009 ). Moreover, the first attempts have been made to identify the psychological dimensions that underlie film audience aesthetic tastes. Footnote 77 Dimensions of what I called the Artefact emotions , that is the affective evaluations of films as aesthetic products will soon be identifiable from reviews by critics and the film audience at large that are already available in large data repositories. Footnote 78 Large scale highly data-intensive research can be accompanied by smaller scale laboratory studies of whether and how viewers attend to aesthetically relevant patterns of formal and stylistic features. Footnote 79

Concluding remarks

The agenda that Hugo Munsterberg set for the psychology of the film, explaining the film experience through revealing psychological mechanisms underlying it, and accounting for its aesthetic functions is after a century still leading. I believe that psychologists of film have over the century not added new questions, while the ones he posed have been shown to be complex or even resilient. Nonetheless the field has gradually expanded. After the 1970's growth accelerated and today we face what in modesty may be called a surge. Two film-psychological books, Art Shimamura’s Psychocinematics (2013) and Jeffrey Zacks’ Flicker: Your brain on movies ( 2014 ), have recently filled the void left after The Photoplay .

The review of psychological studies into the film experience presented in this contribution is highly selective. It was not meant at all to cover the entire field, if only because we selected achievements from the vast research area of moving images and their perception. This is why the essay is titled 'A psychology of the film' rather than 'The etc.'. Granted its basic limitations, an overview of a century of film psychology could conclude with a comparison with research agenda that was set in Münsterberg’s Photoplay . The typical gripping experience that mainstream movies offer the audience has now come to be characterised as a sense of being absorbed by and quasi-physically present in a film scene that feels like going on as smoothly and continuously as a scene in real life. Considerable progress has been made in understanding how the basic psychological functions attention, perception and memory contribute to viewers’ comprehension of film. An understanding has developed of how attentional, perceptual and cognitive mechanisms dovetail with the solutions and norms of traditional cinemascopy. In the conventional 35 mm theatre set-up, the dark environment where high-density projections extend over the limits of the foveal acuity field, screens are big enough to allow for sufficient stimulation of the peripheral motion-sensitive visual field and the spinning projector shutter makes for smooth stroboscopic movement. Moreover, the visual system is quite resistant against perspective transformations due to less optimal viewing points, probably through extracting invariants under transformation (Cutting, 1986 ). Mainstream narrative continuity film-style ensures a fluent perception and comprehension of a film’s story-world, action, characters and their inner lives. Emotional responses can be explained from the development of the story and the progress of protagonists’ projects.

And yet, a lot less effort has been spent in theoretically elaborating further on what the film experience is. There is a general disbelief that it would involve a mere recognition of events, situations, persons etc. as we know them in the real world. But what exactly the spectator’s imagination contributes to the typical awareness of the film is still mysterious. And how filmic events, and the ways they have been staged, acted, framed, photographed and edited exactly influence and prompt acts of imagination on the part of audiences, has only in part been understood.

Meanwhile, the supply of "photoplays" has immensely multiplied and diversified since 1916, but the mainstream narrative film has by far remained the most popular form. Today’s ubiquitous access to moving images through a multiplicity of screens has made it more urgent than ever for psychologists to understand the experiences associated with extremely different cinematic devices. They range from handheld phones to giant 3-D multiplex screens and surround installations in museums. Canonical set-ups of the cinema also tend to diverge because of networked interaction technologies seeking application in the production, distribution and exhibition of motion pictures. Psychologists of the film can use their current understanding of how audiences experience mainstream cinema as a basis for differentiating what film semiologists call 'dispositives': clusters of production, exhibition and reception practices characterised by specific expectations, attitudes and competences of their end users. Footnote 80

The psychology of film is rapidly developing into an interdisciplinary field. Münsterberg’s psychological study already reflected inspiration from fields far removed from experimental psychology such as the then conventional practice of the photoplay as well as from Aristotelian poetics of the theatre play. In the same vein, current psychologists of film as we have seen, improve their understanding of the perception and cognition of film in a collaboration with experts in the analysis of narration in the fiction film. Advances in current models of film viewer attention featuring narrative cuing are profoundly informed by (historical) film analyses. Footnote 81 Scholars in cognitive film studies, such as those collaborating within the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image are steadily producing in-depth analyses of film at work conjointly with the viewer’s mind. Footnote 82 The same goes for the (more modest) advances made in psychological models of film-produced emotion. Further collaborations with specialists in machine-analysis of image and sound can be expected to add to an objective identification of formal and stylistic film structures, also beyond the domain of traditional mainstream film, 'in the wild' of cyberspace, and in experimental art cinemas.

The technology of measuring psychological responses to film structures (perception, attention, memory and affect) has also developed tremendously since Münsterberg founded the perception lab at Harvard. Gaze tracking, fMRI and TMS have been added to the psychophysical and cognitive response registrations. Integration of large scale image analysis data with behavioural measures obtained in the lab or as 'big data' is the next step in the development of film psychology. The study of integral responses to units of film extending beyond a few seconds entailing entire actions, events, scenes and acts, or even films as a whole, requires new response recording devices and data models. Perhaps it will be feasible within a decade or so to append large emotional response datasets obtained from social media and filmdatabase metadata to computational content analyses described above. We will then be able to categorise films into meaningful clusters, e.g., genres and subgenres based on relations between themes, plots, film style and emotion profiles. Small scale lab experiments can tell us more about what exactly the mind adds to the image on screen and the sound from cinema loudspeakers remains. Let me single out as the leading issue the question how bottom-up and top-down mechanisms interact in producing the film experience. Footnote 83 Diversification of the set-up of in-depth studies is also necessary following the multitude of conventional set-ups of film viewing on various screens and in on-line or 'live'(?) exhibitions.

And just as in 1916, a select but growing minority of researchers in academic, empirical psychology want to understand why and how it is we perceive and what it is like to enjoy movies. They want an understanding because first they are movie-loving psychologists and second they find film a challenging testing ground for fundamental models of attention, perception, memory, imagination, emotion and aesthetics.

A more detailed discussion of the functions in photoplay viewing can be summarised thus: As regards the perception of film scenes, Münsterberg argued that in the cinema depth is seen without spectator’s taking it for real, that movement is perceived not without the spectator’s mind adding the quality of smooth motion to merely seeing a succession of positions. For example, apparent movement of in fact stationary lines is '… superadded by the action of the mind, to motionless pictures' (1916, p. 29). Attention in the cinema concentrates the mind on details that acquire an unusual vividness and become the focus of our impulses and feelings. Close-ups objectify this weaving 'of the outer world into our minds' (p. 39). Attention is characterised by a series of subsequent shifts in its object. Shifts are provided by scene or action details made salient by spatial mise-en-scène, notably actor expression (movement and gestures), and mobile framing. Memory is used at any moment to remember events presented earlier in the film. Just as attention and perception are an instrument of the imagination, memory enables the fusing of events in our consciousness that are physically apart. Münsterberg’s view of the emotions showed similarities with James’ theory on the subject, as it stressed their embodied character; emotions cannot do without behavioural and physiological expressions. Münsterberg proposed that emotions that film audiences experience are portrayed on screen. The viewer’s imagination transforms what they see into their own felt emotion: The 'horror, pain and the joy' that spectators go through are 'really projected to the screen' (p. 53). In addition, he introduced a distinction between what we would refer to today as emotions based on empathy with characters on the one hand, and on the other emotions responding to the scenes they are in.

Münsterberg’s observation of how film expresses the basic psychological functions has been compellingly argued by Baranowski and Hecht’s ( 2017 ) in their excellent review of Münsterberg’s Photoplay .

Even if what we call today automated responses do have a place in the psychological functions, perception, attention, and memory are according to Münsterberg in the end acts of the mind, and imagination is even more so.

The aesthetic experience is grounded in a Kantian conception emphasising the completeness of the work of art in itself, and an explicit denial of the contemplant’s desires or practical needs in it.

This in turn requires that we 'enter with our own impulses into the will of every element, into the meaning of every line and colour and tone. Only if everything is full of such inner movement can we really enjoy the harmonious cooperation of the parts' (p. 73).

This probably not in the least due to the stability of the experimental and social have been on the agenda of the psychology of film ever since. The functions and mechanisms of the mind that experimental research focuses on have globally remained the same, and the interest in aesthetics has not waned.

Constancies in visual perception are disrupted due to the optical and mechanic qualities of film. Examples in point include reduced depth, absence of colour, object shape and volume distortions due to insufficient information on object size or camera’s distance.

A famous example is the ballet sequence in René Clair’s Entr’Act (1924). Filmed through a glass plate on which the dancers move, they are seen from a most unusual angle, at least compared to the canonical views that theatre audiences have, i.e., from below, and from an as unusual distance, i.e., from nearby. So close indeed that their robes fill the entire frame, and the spectator is struck by their expanding contours in the 2D plane of the screen.

To be sure, his treatment of the perception of movement, dynamics and expression in works of all arts, seem to be modelled after the organisational principles the mind uses in shaping the film experience.

Cutting has often convincingly argued that stroboscopic motion is a better label than apparent motion. His definition is 'a series of discrete static images can sometimes render the impression of motion'(Cutting, 2002 , p. 1179)

Why and how we see motion has been as basic to the study of visual perception as questions of perception of colour, depth, and shape. Helmholtz proposed that what we need to explain is how retinal images that correspond one-to one, i.e., optically with a scene in the world are transformed into mental images, or percepts that we experience. In the case of apparent motion, we need to understand in addition how a succession of retinal images are perceived as one or more objects in motion.

By smooth is meant that no transitions or flicker are seen, and no blurring of superposed images occurs. The problem of apparent motion in film has been formulated in this way by the Dutch perception psychologist and filmmaker Emile van Moerkerken in an unpublished chapter written in 1978 . The issue of why and when flickering instead of smoothly projected images are seen has been technically resolved through trial and error. Cinematic projectors need to present at least 24 frames per second if flicker is to be avoided, and higher frequencies, for instance 72 fps are even better (e.g., Anderson, 1996, pp. 54–59). These frequencies are above the human perception system’s critical fusion frequency, at least for the conventional luminance ranges in cinematic projection.

In the late nineteen sixties the organisation of the cortical cell complexes for visual perception in layered columns were identified by neurophysiologists Hubel and Wiesel ( 1959 ). Cells in Brodman areas 17 and 18 were found sensitive to different aspects of motion (e.g., orientation and spatial vs. temporal resolution), while integration into forerunners of motion perception is assumed to take place in areas V4 and MT.

Luminance and colour identification have been shown to interact with the more motion dedicated complexes in delivering impressions of motion, while the phenomenon of perceiving depth from movement has been very well documented.

For example, form-invariant apparent motion—that seems to require somewhat less elementary integration has been shown attributable to specialised MT cells for slower and faster motion (O’Keefe and Movshon, 1998 ). And as another example, Anstis (1980) discovered a system based on comparison of subsequent locations for apparent horizontal motion of a single dot, and another one for the perception of wave-form motion of an array of dots.

For example, it has been reported that test participants accurately perceive velocity of motion of a grating pattern only when they pay attention to its details (Cavanagh, 1992 ).

As another example, tension in a static work of art is perceived due to the brain’s synthesis of forces from implied movements, such as outward-directed tensions perceived in symmetrical geometric shapes. These can be observed in 'gamma movement', Arnheim, 1974 , p. 438.

The presentation times are short (flashes), say two-hundred milliseconds. The objects differ between the two presentations only in spatial position, we refer to these as A1 for object A in position 1, and A2. Depending on the interval between presentations apparent motion can be seen. With a briefest interval simultaneity of objects A1 and A2 is seen; less brief (appr. 100 Ms) makes us see 'pure motion'; that is 'objectless movement'; with still briefer intervals (appr. 60 Ms) we see 'optimal movement' of the object A1 to A2; and with briefest interval partial movement.

Wertheimer believed that perceived motion patterns reflected a short-circuiting between cells in the brain that were successively stimulated.

For example, among Korte’s laws, proposed in 1915, was a rule stating that the ratio of spatial distance between shapes and the interval between successive presentations was constant for the perception of 'good motion', clearly a Gestalt-like pattern. This coupling of the two features obtained in controlled studies, is surprising until today because purely mechanistic intuition would have it that increases in spatial distance would need 'compensation' by briefer inter-stimulus intervals to preserve smooth apparent motion. A related discovery, reported by Kolers (1972, p. 39 also militates against light-hearted use of an analogy with mechanics: Decreasing the spatial distance between successively presented shapes does not necessarily result in better movement.

First, the physiological account resting on 'prewired' neurocircuitry cannot do without integrative operations at a higher level of mental processing involving integration across separate cortical modules. Even if such operations are prewired, they represent contributions of the mind. Second, as importantly, the impact of visual stimulus features has on the perception of movement, and especially more complex forms, have been shown sensitive to control by the will within certain bounds. Third, figural processes in apparent motion appear to be extremely plastic, defying explanations by stimulus factors, as the example of induced motion illustrates.

As an illustration, even a somewhat forgotten proposal by Van der Waals and Roelofs ( 1930 ) according to Kolers, seems to go. They proposed that in apparent motion, the intervening motion is constructively interspersed in retrospect that is, only after the second presentation of the Koler object. And after Kolers' volume on apprent motion, several proposals have been forwarded on possible mechanisms. For example Kubovy and Gepshtein ( 2007 ) demonstrated in two experiments that spatial and temporal distances act either in trade-off or coupled to one another to provide for smooth apparent motion; the one at low speeds and the other at high speeds. None of the proposals have been accepted as the final solution, also because different definitions of the factors or the criterion for motion have been used.

Michotte (1946) attempted with some success to capture configurations of moving objects that would be perceived as instances of causation , a mentally represented concept. For example, block A is seen to 'push' block B forward if A approaches B (that is standing still) with an appropriate speed, and contact time. Alternatively, B will be perceived to 'depart' if some time in contact has elapsed before B moves away from A. In fact, Michotte’s experimental phenomenology was influenced by Brentano who was a major inspiration to the early Gestalt psychologists as well. Another great contribution by Michotte to the psychology of the film was that he was one of the first to analyse the problem of the apparent reality of cinematic scenes that Münsterberg and Arnheim had signalled. His diagnosis was that we see non-real objects, that is shapes projected on the screen. However, we do perceive—physiologically—real movement of these, and this is a condition presumed to be decisive for perceiving reality. Heider and Simmel are known for their demonstration of the inevitability of event, person and story-based schema-based inferences that viewers of simple animated geometric figures tend to make (Heider and Simmel, 1944).

Note that objects are not part of an optic array, as the latter refers to the metrical organisation of patterns of light.

There are certainly limits to the likeness of the dynamical optical flow offered by film images to real world ones. First, the flow is interrupted by cuts, and second the projected image in the cinema constrains the optic flow in a variety of ways. (Thanks to one the anonymous reviewers).

The discussion of Hochberg and Brooks’ psychology of the film is based on an earlier essay (Tan, 2007 ).

Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996a ) provided wonderful examples of the intricate aesthetics of camera movement when filming a human figure in motion, examples that require frequent analyses of filmed dance, or to film dance oneself, as Brooks has done indeed. Movement may be seen where there is actually none, apparent reversals of direction or apparent stasis may all occur, even in parallel. Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996b ) demonstrated that complex movements need to be ‘parsed’ by viewers into components depending on factors such as fixation point and even viewer intentions. Direct realist explanation of the film awareness would soon stumble on degrees of stimulus complexity too high to capture in optical array invariants; input from other cognitive structure-based mechanisms capable of selecting candidates for 'pick-up' would be necessary.

Hochberg ( 1986 ) stated that in some cases only the most complex cognitive efforts could explain an understanding of shot transitions, that could only be conveyed through literary analysis. Here he was probably referring to cases in artistically highest end productions.

For example, Hayhne (2007) criticised Hochberg’s stipulation that mental schemas used in understanding shot transitions cannot be spatially precise or complete. She quoted evidence of the use of self-produced body movements following a mental map with extreme precision.

According to one such theory (the so-called Event Indexing Model, Magliano, Miller & Zwaan, 2001 ) viewers of film like readers of stories generate embodied cognitive models of (story-) situations. These mental models represent sequences of events, people and their goals, plans and actions, in spatiotemporal settings. The situation model is continuously updated while the film proceeds. Updates follow upon the identification of changes in story-entities (e.g., movement of characters or objects), time, causality and intentionality.

This synthetic response by the viewer can be taken as the actual recognition and categorisation of an event or action. Neuroscience research has identified areas of the brain involved in recognising—and 'simulating' actions such as grasping an object, or exhibiting a facial expression, e.g., Hasson et al. (2004).

As an example study, Garsoffky et al. ( 2009 ) demonstrated that the recognition of events by film viewers improved when framing objects or events across shots adheres to viewpoints that are common in real world perception. Other studies tested the notion that movies adhering to this style present viewers with simplified event views that they can readily integrate in an available event schema (e.g., Schwan, 2013 ).

The cueing of attentional shifts to the target portion of screen B can assume distinct forms, such as through match on action, establishing and shot/ reverse shots, and point shot. The attentional shift has carried the conscious experience across the discontinuity in views. The theory is documented by numerous analyses of scene perception, in which analysed shot contents are overlaid with dynamic gaze maps. The model can explain how violations of continuity principles result in less efficient gaze behaviours. Artistically motivated violations are taken seriously, but dealt with as atypical for the canonical set-up.

Bezdek et al. ( 2015 ) report a study in which participants were shown a film scene at the centre of fixation while checkerboard patterns were flashed in the periphery of vision. The results of fMRI analyses showed that activity of peripheral visual processing areas in the brain was diminished with increasing narrative suspense of the scenes, whereas activity in areas associated with central vision, attention and dynamic visual processing increased.

In one experiment, viewers were presented with a sequence from Moonraker in which James Bond jumps out of a plane and can be expected to fall 'safely' onto a circus tent. This high-level event schema-based cognitive expectation was enhanced in one condition but not in another, through providing a written context before the sequence was shown. It turned out that providing context knowledge led to the critical inference and to less surprise, pointing at the functionality of high-level attention cues. However, gaze behaviour did hardly differ between the high-level cued vs. non-cued viewers. Moreover, effects predicted from a tyranny of film analysis of the sequence—that is where viewers looked and what, were much stronger than the subtle effects of high-level cognitive processes.

The computation of visual salience can easily be extended to the case of film by replacing the input image by a series of frames and the output by an array of saliency maps. Furthermore, low-level features such as colour and orientation need to be integrated over successive images into dynamic ones, e.g., changes in orientation, and into motion features.

See: http://bitsearch.blogspot.nl/2013/05/saliency-maps-and-their-computation.html#!/2013/05/saliency-maps-and-their-computation.html (accessed 31 Jan 2018).

For example, an international group from the universities of Brescia and Teesside has recently shown able to predicts movie affect curves that is, dynamic patterns of emotional responses, from low-level features such as colour, motion and sound, while taking into account the influence of film grammar (e.g., sequences of varying shot-types) and narrative elements (e.g., script or dialogue analysis classifications). The analysis of the grammatical and narrative features can be supported by the computer but are not entirely machine-executably algorithmic. The emotional responses were measured using physiological and self-report measures (Canini et al., 2010 ).

In his earlier widely acclaimed work in general visual perception, Cutting continued the Gibsonian ecological approach to the perception of real world scenes, attempting to find formal extraction and coding principles sustaining the direct pick-up of behaviourally relvant information. See, e.g., Cutting ( 1981 ), in which ecological tenets regarding the perception of events based on invariant structures in the information offer of the visual stimulus. This line of research also included cinematic perception. An example is his study on the perception of rigid shapes when viewers are seated at extreme angles vis-à-vis the centre of projection, e.g., front row side aisle (Cutting, 1987 ).

In the essay Cutting lists the cues in the optical array that sustain the perception of distance in the real world, and then elaborates on how filmmakers manipulate depth cues in order for the audience to perceive scenes exactly the way the narrative requires them to.

Following the convenient overview in Brunick et al. ( 2013 ) they are for duration average shot duration in seconds; for temporal shot structure the distribution of shot durations; for movement the degree of difference between pixels in adjacent frames (zero when frames are identical means no movement); for luminance the degree of black vs white of images; and for colour the distribution of hues and degrees of saturation of frames.

For example, in the analyses just mentioned Cutting et al. established in their Hollywood sample an increase of movement between 1905 and 1935 and could relate this finding to film-analytic accounts of stylistic changes supporting growing emotional impact of movies. As another example, consider the well-documented finding that shot duration tends to decrease across the history of popular film. Salt (2009) reported a linear decrease of average shot length. Cutting and Candan ( 2015 ) could use his data and added nuances to the general linear decrease trend that they replicated. One was that different slopes for shot classes obtained, especially in the post 1940s’ Hollywood films, another that shot scale, in particular increasing use of wide angle shots, contributed considerably to the decrease in shot duration.

The climax works towards the minimum as the narrative tends to progress here presenting focused events without disruption, while its scope is wider and shifting in the set-up and epilogue acts. Consistently, during the climax movement is more frequent while shots also tend to be darker compared to the remaining acts. The set-up and epilogue contrast most conspicuously with the climax, while complication and development exhibit steady in-between values for the low-level feature parameters.

They do not manifest physically, but their indexing is perceptually straightforward. One is time shifts, a structural feature. It decreased over the time of a film, in line with the film-narratological notion that a film’s action thickens towards a deadline. Three other higher-level features were more semantic in nature. Character appearances dropped after the set-up. Action shots were most numerous at the end of the set-up and the beginning of the climax, while conversations levelled down during the climax.

Cutting’s ( 2016 ) interpretative qualifications illuminated the stylistic distinctions among the acts. They are most informative and any summarisation would be detrimental to the value of the analyses. To give just one example For example: 'The development also has several characteristics in contrast to the complication: its shot durations are a bit longer (Study 1), it has more noncut transitions (Study 2), and it is dimmer (Study 4) so that by its end the luminance falls to the psychological and literal “darkest moment” for the protagonist' (Cutting, 2016 , p. 24). I encourage the reader interested in the stylistic comparison of the acts to reading the original article.

An example is an analysis by Cutting et al. ( 2011 ) of 150 historical films were indexed as to movement and shot duration. They observed a decrease of movement with decreasing shot durations, and reasoned that a basic perceptual mechanism could be at the basis of this correlation: people can only follow so much movement in a duration-limited view. The researchers then analysed newer films that far exceeded the maximum movement-to- shot duration ratio, and it was found from the public discourse around the titles that viewers could not cope with the overload stimulation.

Dimensions captured in the instrument include comprehension of the narrative, a sense of being in the story-world, emotional responses to story-world events and characters, and attentional focus on story-world details. The remaining experience concepts refer to experiences of entertainment or story-worlds excluding awareness of a narrative or any other constructions underlying these.

Hinde ( 2017 ) has recently presented evidence showing that self-reported presence is positively related to response latencies in a dual attention task in which participants were required to respond to a distractor signal while watching a movie. This result supports the notion of absorption and loss of awareness of the real world.

Variants of presence stress embodied apparent reality of the portrayed world, and the loss of awareness of mediation. Loss of awareness and apparent reality point to the illusion of being absorbed by the story-world. Presence seems the most immediate experiential outcome of natural or real-world scene perception and event comprehension mechanisms. It was implied in Gibson’s summary of the awareness of film: 'We are onlookers in the situation, …, we are in it and we can adopt point of observation within its space'.

In this respect, the concept of transportation builds on Gerrig’s ( 1993 ) seminal work on the experience of narrative worlds. Transportation requires a 'deictic shift' (Segal, 1995) from the real to the story-world (Segal, 1995 in Bussele and Bilandzic, 2009 ). When the narrative ends the spell is broken and the audience returns into the previously inaccessible real world.

In line with general psychological research on empathy, a distinction has been made between embodied simulation of film character feeling and a cognitively more demanding forms of empathy with characters (e.g., Tan, 2013a , b ). Complex forms of empathy that require TOM cognition presuppose that there is an awareness of the distinction between self and other. The highest degrees of absorption by characters (measured by items such as 'I became the character') seem characterised by a complete fusion of the viewers’ self with the character and are properly referred to as identification (e.g., Cohen, 2001 ). In this case, viewer emotion is identical with character emotion.

For example, cinematic techniques of selective or emphatic framing of character expression can lead to stronger mimicry or embodied simulation on the part of the viewer than observation of a person in the real world would allow (e.g., Coplan, 2006 ; Raz et al., 2013 ).

The less demanding forms are based on automated embodied simulation or mirroring, for instance mimicry. Complex forms involve mentalising, or reasoning supported by general Theory of Mind schemas and inferencing. The most demanding occur when the film’s narration withholds information about a character’s inner life in relation to story-events as in some arthouse films (Tan, 2013a , b ). Mentalizing has like cognitively less demanding forms of empathy been shown to be affected by film style. Rooney and Bálint ( 2018 ) recently demonstrated that close-ups of the face stimulate the use of TOM in the perception of characters.

Identification has been empirically observed and isolated from other forms of absorption by Cohen (2001); Tal-Or and Cohen ( 2010) ; Bálint and Tan (in press).

In an attempt to qualify what it is like to be absorbed in a film, Bálint and Tan (2015) synthesised a summarising dynamic image schema, from a study of film viewers’ reports on their own experience of absorption while watching a film. Image schemas are culturally shared embodied cognitive structures that have been identified by cognitive linguists and are hypothesised to underlie cognition and experience and are more specifically used in metaphorical thinking and use of language. The schema entails the viewer’s self-travelling into the center of the story-world. The self exerts forces to remain inside the story-world, and is taken there in some cases notably by the author. In Bálint and Tan’s study, readers of novels turned out to use the same image schemas to describe their experience as film viewers.

It is noteworthy that Münsterberg considers the activity of the basic functional mechanisms perception, attention and memory as consisting of 'acts', rather than responses as it would become common in mainstream experimental psychology, see, e.g., p. 57. 'Imagination' refers to acts resulting in 'products of the active mind' (p. 75) in particular memories, associations and emotions added to perceptions as 'subjective supplements' (p. 46).

For an overview of current cognitive emotion theories see Oatley and Laird ( 2013 ).

Through procedures such as suggestion and juxtaposition of fictional elements and perspectives, and due to strong coherence of elements, simulations are as engaging as to allow for recipients’ explorations of social situations, involving the self. This results in emotions ranging from the more basic to the social and culturally sophisticated type.

The stages correspond to Oatley’s ( 2013 ) direct, imaginative and self-related modes of appraisal in film-induced emotion.

There is some literature on the affective potential of mainstream film techniques. See for example experiments on camera angle and image composition on emotional appraisal of objects and characters such as weakness, tenseness, dominance or strength reported in Kraft ( 1991 ), and an overview of formal and presentation features of media messages in relation to their emotional effects by Detenber and Lang ( 2011 ).

This capacity has the obvious adaptive advantage of learning proper responses to critical situations before they are met in the actual world. The same point has been made by Currie ( 1995 ); see also Currie and Ravenscroft ( 2002 ). See also Tan ( 2008 ) on pretense play as exercising emotions and adaptive responses in film viewing. My position on the issue of the authenticity of emotion in response to fictional narrative is opposed to Walton (1990) who proposed that make-believe worlds can only induce 'as-if emotions'.

Neuropsychological accounts of film viewer emotions, such as those by Grodal (2009) and Zacks’ ( 2014 ) emphasise suppression of actions such as fight or flight, by prefrontal circuits following appraisals, e.g., of threats or provocations. In my related application of the cognitive theory to film viewing, viewers can experience a tendency to flee as an initial tendency, due to automated mimicry or simulation.

An attempt to measure virtual forms of emotional action readiness in response to several film genres was reported in Tan ( 2013a , b ).

In the end virtual action responses in the cinema should be understood as an example of the situatedness of emotion in general. (See Griffith & Scarantion, 2009 ). The conventional set-up of the cinema positions spectators as witnesses to fictional events and appraisals, experiences, expressions and action readiness take shape according to the cinematic situation.

In the end, viewers know on the basis of their narrative and genre schemas, the film will provide answers to extant questions they have underway.

Needs of mood management and the occurrence of emotions that help to improve moods have been shown to explain preference for entertainment products such as movies (Zilmann, 2003).

Sympathy for mainstream protagonists is probably rather immediately induced by our felt similarity and familiarity with them, and more especially in terms of moral values (Zillmann, 2000 ).

The nature of the events and their outcomes corresponding to ups and downs in the life of a protagonist vary from one genre to another. For example, the action heroine meets with assaults on her life and deals blows to her stalker; the romance protagonist with separation and reunion. See also Zillmann’s theory of the enjoyment of drama.

I have introduced these emotions earlier (Tan, 1996) under the heading of Fictional World emotions or F emotions, because they are responses to events in a fictional world. F emotions include empathetic and non-empathetic emotions. Non-empathetic emotions can either be based on sympathy, for example, when we fear that a bomb will explode to the harm of a protagonist, or not based on sympathy. Awe induced by the sight of a sublime landscape would be an example. F-emotions are defined in opposition to A emotions. The latter category consists of responses to the film as a human-made artefact instead of a fictional world produced in the viewer’s imagination.

The point has been made in Tan and Frijda ( 1997 ) and Tan ( 2009 ), and more recently underscored in psychophysiological research using film by Wassiliwizky et al. ( 2017 ). Schubert et al. ( 2018 ) refer to the emotion as kama muta a socio-relational emotion of feeling closeness when an intensification of communal sharing relations is appraised. In the study just referred to such moments had been analysed in film fragments.

An example is the fear we have when we watch a horror monster in a view not aligned with any character’s, or without a character being in the neighbourhood of the monster.

See, for example, study of interest during character vs. action development oriented films Doicaru (2016, Ch. 2).

See for empirical comparative analyses of absorbed modes of witnessing drama and detached modes of spectatorship in watching nature documentaries Tan ( 2013b ).

Films are segmented (from larger to smaller units) in acts, scenes and events. All subsequent events induce interest. Every scene offers answers or matches to anticipations induced earlier, leading to enjoyment. Enjoyment tends to reinforce interest—as it stimulates intake and rewards past efforts. Every scene, too, induces novel questions and affective anticipations, keeping interest at least alive.

Some researchers of media entertainment refer to such regulatory reappraisals as meta-emotions (Bartsch et al., 2008). Positive gratifications may be derived from such reappraisals and associated emotions. Viewers of sad drama may appreciate their own moral stance that transpires through their experience of a character’s losses and suffering from injustice. Horror lovers may like the emotion because they explicitly seek it, and younger male audiences of extremely violent films have been shown to test, and pride themselves on their coping abilities (Hill, 1997). A related act of emotion regulation is male viewers’ display of protective attitudes towards their female company during horror shows (Zillmann and Weaver, 1997).

In Tan ( 1996 ) I proposed that, in contrast to aversive situations witnessed in real life, popular fiction scenes on separation, isolation, violence, terror and horror and so on are due to their being part of a story always signal that we are in medias res ; the narrative is to be continued, we are curious to know where it is heading, and it is virtually impossible to completely abort expectancies and imaginations of a turn to the positive. Entertaining these is in itself not unpleasant, especially when viewers are open to the possibility that they can learn from the unpleasant events.

Doicaru (2016) reviewed general models of aesthetic appreciation as to their suitability for explaining aesthetic appreciation of film. She reported a validation study of a measurement instrument in which five general factors were identified that may be used to describe dimensions of aesthetic appraisal in film viewing. They were Cognitive stimulation, Negative emotionality, Self-reference and Understanding. A corpus of films from different genres and aesthetic categories (e.g., mainstream, arthouse and experimental were used, and according audiences were involved.

Movies can move us not only in our role of witnesses of events in a fictional world, but also as artefacts made by filmmakers with some formal intention in mind; appreciation of visual beauty etc. are an example. They have the construction of the artefact as their object, and need to be distinguished, as artefact emotions from emotional responses to witnessed events in fictional worlds. They are aesthetic emotions because they involve appraisals of artefact features, such as form, style, use of technology and implied meaning. Untrained audiences can recount their artefact emotions: Professional critics can add elaborations of the appraisals they made while viewing. They have as their object the complex of film form, use of style and technology and intended or unintended meanings. We can further our understanding of appraisals in Artefact emotions using such intuitions available in critical film analyses. They are massively represented in internet user groups like Youtube and Metacritics. Machine learning algorithms are now being developed to extract and categorise emotions from film forums, and differentiate both films and target audiences, see, e.g., Buitinck et al. ( 2015) .

A few example studies on effects of foregrounding procedures in narrative film and their effects on cognitive strategies and aesthetic appreciation can be found in Hakemulder ( 2007 ) and Bálint et al. ( 2016 ).

The concept has developed over the past three decades, see Casetti ( 2015 ). I have freely summarised meanings to fit the purpose of sketching a research agenda for psychologists.

The large project started by Bordwell et al. (1985) on the historical poetics of American mainstream cinema, already have provided psychological research into the mechanisms underlying the film experience with major concepts and reference norms for conventional structuring of film narratives and their stylistic parameters. Among these are continuity, spatiotemporal segmentation and stylistic emphasis.

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In the role of top-down influences I emphatically include the Münsterbergian acts of imagination on the part of the spectator.

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Acknowledgements

The research for this article has been supported in part by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), grant number 360-30-200 for the project 'Varieties of Absorption'.

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Tan, E.S. A psychology of the film. Palgrave Commun 4 , 82 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0111-y

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Received : 10 October 2017

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0111-y

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7 Painful Lessons Learned While Making My Thesis Film

There's no better classroom than being on set..

It was my last semester in film school but our professors had been preparing us for almost a year for the biggest project we had to make so far. I had written the script for my thesis film almost a year and a half before that time. It was stored away in the depths of my desktop for a while and I pulled it out for our thesis screenwriting class. The 13-minute movie The Funniest Person Ever is about a struggling stand up comedian who makes a wish to be...you guessed it...the funniest person ever. Her wish is granted but she soon finds out it's not all its cracked up to be.

The thought “Damn, this is going to be hard but exciting to make“ came about in that same screenwriting class. So that’s where my first piece of advice comes in. I hope you can learn from my lessons below to make your thesis film dreams come true.

Hearing your own script read aloud by others will shatter the tunnel vision.

1. Don't be afraid of rewrites

All screenwriters know about rewrites. Doing it is dreadful but it helped me weed out the flaws in my script. At a certain point, I was actually excited to do another rewrite in the hopes of making my script better. I never rewrote the entire script from scratch. I just pulled out scenes and replaced them with more empathetic ones. Then, one of my professors brought up table reads. The first round was with my fellow filmmakers. I received great feedback, and did yet another rewrite. Next up was another table read but with actual actors. So I brought in my comedy friends and I was in awe of how well it sounded with a few flaws here and there in the screenplay. Hearing your own script read aloud by others will shatter the tunnel vision, and open your eyes and mind to new possible directions for your script.

2. Record your table reads

My professor introduced the great idea of recording our table reads to me. The table read can come home with you for further analysis if you record it using video or a voice note feature on your smartphone. I only did this once but it did help for another round of rewriting.

3. Reverse the roles

One of my early struggles in the pre-production of my thesis film was casting. My lead role was a male comedian. My lead actor was lacking interest in the project so I reached out to another person I was acquainted with, a young and hilarious lady known on Instagram as Dee Nasty . I was able to get her phone number from my previous lead actor, so I pitched her the idea and she agreed to play the lead role. The male lead was now a female. Best decision I made simply because her skills as a comedienne and actress are amazing and, quite frankly, she made my film funnier. Little did I know that my new lead would bring me issues later in production. (Dramatic music plays)

4. How to get extras and clone them

I needed about 30 extras for my film. The comedy club scenes were going to be the hardest scenes to film. I had to make one location look like four, with a large number of actors in the room. I figured the best way to get more people was to ask people who were already interested in me or my project. I asked the extras to bring friends interested in acting. I asked friends who like acting to come be an extra themselves. I also posted an ad on casting websites. Despite all my outreach, only about 10 extras showed up, which was 20 less than my desired goal. Problematic. I resolved this by making the same person look like multiple people. I asked my actors to bring an extra piece of clothing, hat, hoodie or jacket and I had them wear the hat or hoodie and grabbed shots from behind. They looked like a whole new group of people.

5. Adapt to the situation

The greatest tool I learned as a filmmaker is to adapt, quickly. Luckily the program director of my film school at City College had invited a filmmaker a few days before shooting who brought up that exact same piece of advice. A man who has made more than five feature films, well-funded, huge cast, big names; he told us “when you're on set and a few pieces of your puzzle are missing, you make it work no matter what, adapt.”

I had a small group of extras, I had one comedy club, and the support of my cousin and friends. I adapted and made it happen. I had promised lunch to all the actors during the comedy club scenes, but I was running out of time. So we pushed through and I gave everyone a $10 stipend. At that point, I was glad 30 people didn't show up.

I was forced to shoot scenes weeks apart.

6. Use pictures to maintain continuity

My lead actress's career was taking off. I was forced to shoot scenes weeks apart. At one point, there was a month of inactivity during my production phase. I was running out of time and I had to make this film to graduate. I made it, but where I slacked off was on continuity. This is not recommended. Don’t laugh when I say this, but it was the hair. Dee’s hair was always straight in the movie which made it easier, but the differences were the placing of the bun and ponytail, a few strands of hair, and some jewelry. In one shot, her ponytail is higher up with no necklace; in the next it's lower and she’s wearing a necklace. Small details count. Take pictures and write down key aspects of the wardrobe and hair.

7. Use your crew

I love the process and I love the challenge of filmmaking, but I learned the hard way not to be a one-person army. I felt like the weight of world was on my shoulders. I needed an assistant director, a production assistant, and a script supervisor. My friend John and my cousin Erick took on some of these roles on set when they were available. But I learned that I needed more people on the crew side. My instinct was that, the less crew you have, the easier it is to have a grasp of everything. Erick made me aware that I can’t wear all those hats. I don’t even like hats, but you know what I mean. Build a tribe, so that you can film the movie.

What was the best lesson you learned making your thesis film? Let us know in the comments.

Follow Romel Rodriguez on instagram @Romelcreates

The 'Longlegs' Ending Explained

Osgood perkin's horrific thriller is the talk of the town..

On Saturday night I sat in a packed theater in Century City and watched Osgood Perkin's terrifying boiler piece Longlegs . The unsettling horror gem seems to be on everyone's minds after the weekend, especially after it made over $20 million in the US.

Congrats to Legally Blonde all-star Perkins for writing and directing an original horror movie that's bringing everyone to the movie theater.

Today, I wanted to go over the film's controversial ending, talk about its themes, and even touch on the plot.We'll do our best to not make it too cryptic.

Beware, spoilers for LONGLEGS below.

Sound good? Let's dive in.

The Plot of 'Longlegs'

Longlegs follows FBI agent Lee Harker, a gifted new recruit assigned to an unsolved cold case involving a serial killer known as "Longlegs." Longlegs targets families with daughters born on the 14th and leaves cryptic, Satanic coded messages at the crime scenes.

As Lee delves deeper into the investigation, she uncovers a series of occult clues and disturbing discoveries that suggest a connection between the murders and her own past. Lee is able to decipher the messages, and we learn this may be because Longlegs is connected to her past, when he visited her as a child, but spared her, even though she was born in the 14th.

Lee must race against time to decipher the clues and stop Longlegs before he claims the lives of another innocent family. Eventually, she discovers Longlegs has to have an accomplice to these murders. She's able to capture Longlegs with the helps of other FBI agents, but in her interrogation with him, he kills himself.

The clues he gives her leads her home, where she finds out her mother actually works with Longlegs , and he's been living in her basement all along. It turns out they put the spirit of Satan into dolls that she then delivers, and it convinces people inside homes to kill themselves and their families.

Her Mom does this because she agreed to trade these horrible deeds in order to save her daughter's life when she was a kid. All these repressed memories come back to Lee, as her mom explains how this happened to her. Lee's Mom uses the satanic doll to knock her out. Then she heads to Lee's boss's house whose kid is having a birthday on the 14th.

Lee tries to stop her, but when she gets there, the doll has already possessed with father who kills the mother. Lee is able to shoot her mom and her boss but she's out of bullets before she can shoot the doll.

The movie ends on a cliffhanger, with us wondering if Lee can shake the devil and save the girl, or if the doll is going to get her to kill herself and the kid.

Explaining the Longlegs Ending

The ending of Longlegs leaves a lot to the viewer's interpretation.

Like I said above, after a harrowing investigation, FBI agent Lee Harker discovers that her own mother was Longlegs' accomplice over the past for decades, helping him murder ten families with the help of bespoke satanic dolls. In a devastating final confrontation, Lee is forced to kill her mother to prevent further harm, understanding that she made this horrific sacrifice to save Lee's life.

But with the satanic doll still in play, Lee is out of bullets. She is left staring at the doll while holding the girl's hand. This ambiguous ending leaves lingering questions about whether the cycle of evil has truly ended or if Lee, now potentially influenced by the doll and Longlegs, will carry on his sinister legacy and murder the child, and possibly herself.

The film concludes with a sense of unease, suggesting that the darkness they confronted may not be fully vanquished. What really resonates is that it brings into question whether or not evil can be truly defeated.

The Themes of Longlegs

In a sense Longlegs is one big look at Lee's trauma. Will she ever get over the interaction with Longlegs as a child, and the memories she repressed? Will her future be defined by her past?

You can also ask if her mother, who became defined by the evil she committed, ultimately practiced the perfect act of love, sacrificing her own sanity and belief in God to save her daughter's life.

Another thing that came up in my discussions once those credits rolled in reverese was the ambiguous nature of good and evil in this film. We don't see many good things happen, so it thematically seems to tell us that maybe the only tangible thing in the world is the bad, and the good is much more ethereal.

There's a lot to unpack with this one. I'd love to know what interpretations you have and what you think it all means.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Dissertation Structure & Layout 101: How to structure your dissertation, thesis or research project.

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) Reviewed By: David Phair (PhD) | July 2019

So, you’ve got a decent understanding of what a dissertation is , you’ve chosen your topic and hopefully you’ve received approval for your research proposal . Awesome! Now its time to start the actual dissertation or thesis writing journey.

To craft a high-quality document, the very first thing you need to understand is dissertation structure . In this post, we’ll walk you through the generic dissertation structure and layout, step by step. We’ll start with the big picture, and then zoom into each chapter to briefly discuss the core contents. If you’re just starting out on your research journey, you should start with this post, which covers the big-picture process of how to write a dissertation or thesis .

Dissertation structure and layout - the basics

The Caveat

In this post, we’ll be discussing a traditional dissertation/thesis structure and layout, which is generally used for social science research across universities, whether in the US, UK, Europe or Australia. However, some universities may have small variations on this structure (extra chapters, merged chapters, slightly different ordering, etc).

So, always check with your university if they have a prescribed structure or layout that they expect you to work with. If not, it’s safe to assume the structure we’ll discuss here is suitable. And even if they do have a prescribed structure, you’ll still get value from this post as we’ll explain the core contents of each section.

Overview: S tructuring a dissertation or thesis

Acknowledgements page
Abstract (or executive summary)
Table of contents , list of figures and tables
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Literature review
Chapter 3: Methodology
Chapter 4: Results
Chapter 5: Discussion
Chapter 6: Conclusion
Reference list

As I mentioned, some universities will have slight variations on this structure. For example, they want an additional “personal reflection chapter”, or they might prefer the results and discussion chapter to be merged into one. Regardless, the overarching flow will always be the same, as this flow reflects the research process , which we discussed here – i.e.:

The introduction chapter presents the core research question and aims .
The literature review chapter assesses what the current research says about this question.
The methodology, results and discussion chapters go about undertaking new research about this question.
The conclusion chapter (attempts to) answer the core research question .

In other words, the dissertation structure and layout reflect the research process of asking a well-defined question(s), investigating, and then answering the question – see below.

A dissertation's structure reflect the research process

To restate that – the structure and layout of a dissertation reflect the flow of the overall research process . This is essential to understand, as each chapter will make a lot more sense if you “get” this concept. If you’re not familiar with the research process, read this post before going further.

Right. Now that we’ve covered the big picture, let’s dive a little deeper into the details of each section and chapter. Oh and by the way, you can also grab our free dissertation/thesis template here to help speed things up.

The title page of your dissertation is the very first impression the marker will get of your work, so it pays to invest some time thinking about your title. But what makes for a good title? A strong title needs to be 3 things:

Succinct (not overly lengthy or verbose)
Specific (not vague or ambiguous)
Representative of the research you’re undertaking (clearly linked to your research questions)

Typically, a good title includes mention of the following:

The broader area of the research (i.e. the overarching topic)
The specific focus of your research (i.e. your specific context)
Indication of research design (e.g. quantitative , qualitative , or mixed methods ).

For example:

A quantitative investigation [research design] into the antecedents of organisational trust [broader area] in the UK retail forex trading market [specific context/area of focus].

Again, some universities may have specific requirements regarding the format and structure of the title, so it’s worth double-checking expectations with your institution (if there’s no mention in the brief or study material).

Acknowledgements

This page provides you with an opportunity to say thank you to those who helped you along your research journey. Generally, it’s optional (and won’t count towards your marks), but it is academic best practice to include this.

So, who do you say thanks to? Well, there’s no prescribed requirements, but it’s common to mention the following people:

Your dissertation supervisor or committee.
Any professors, lecturers or academics that helped you understand the topic or methodologies.
Any tutors, mentors or advisors.
Your family and friends, especially spouse (for adult learners studying part-time).

There’s no need for lengthy rambling. Just state who you’re thankful to and for what (e.g. thank you to my supervisor, John Doe, for his endless patience and attentiveness) – be sincere. In terms of length, you should keep this to a page or less.

Abstract or executive summary

The dissertation abstract (or executive summary for some degrees) serves to provide the first-time reader (and marker or moderator) with a big-picture view of your research project. It should give them an understanding of the key insights and findings from the research, without them needing to read the rest of the report – in other words, it should be able to stand alone .

For it to stand alone, your abstract should cover the following key points (at a minimum):

Your research questions and aims – what key question(s) did your research aim to answer?
Your methodology – how did you go about investigating the topic and finding answers to your research question(s)?
Your findings – following your own research, what did do you discover?
Your conclusions – based on your findings, what conclusions did you draw? What answers did you find to your research question(s)?

So, in much the same way the dissertation structure mimics the research process, your abstract or executive summary should reflect the research process, from the initial stage of asking the original question to the final stage of answering that question.

In practical terms, it’s a good idea to write this section up last , once all your core chapters are complete. Otherwise, you’ll end up writing and rewriting this section multiple times (just wasting time). For a step by step guide on how to write a strong executive summary, check out this post .

Need a helping hand?

This section is straightforward. You’ll typically present your table of contents (TOC) first, followed by the two lists – figures and tables. I recommend that you use Microsoft Word’s automatic table of contents generator to generate your TOC. If you’re not familiar with this functionality, the video below explains it simply:

If you find that your table of contents is overly lengthy, consider removing one level of depth. Oftentimes, this can be done without detracting from the usefulness of the TOC.

Right, now that the “admin” sections are out of the way, its time to move on to your core chapters. These chapters are the heart of your dissertation and are where you’ll earn the marks. The first chapter is the introduction chapter – as you would expect, this is the time to introduce your research…

It’s important to understand that even though you’ve provided an overview of your research in your abstract, your introduction needs to be written as if the reader has not read that (remember, the abstract is essentially a standalone document). So, your introduction chapter needs to start from the very beginning, and should address the following questions:

What will you be investigating (in plain-language, big picture-level)?
Why is that worth investigating? How is it important to academia or business? How is it sufficiently original?
What are your research aims and research question(s)? Note that the research questions can sometimes be presented at the end of the literature review (next chapter).
What is the scope of your study? In other words, what will and won’t you cover ?
How will you approach your research? In other words, what methodology will you adopt?
How will you structure your dissertation? What are the core chapters and what will you do in each of them?

These are just the bare basic requirements for your intro chapter. Some universities will want additional bells and whistles in the intro chapter, so be sure to carefully read your brief or consult your research supervisor.

If done right, your introduction chapter will set a clear direction for the rest of your dissertation. Specifically, it will make it clear to the reader (and marker) exactly what you’ll be investigating, why that’s important, and how you’ll be going about the investigation. Conversely, if your introduction chapter leaves a first-time reader wondering what exactly you’ll be researching, you’ve still got some work to do.

Now that you’ve set a clear direction with your introduction chapter, the next step is the literature review . In this section, you will analyse the existing research (typically academic journal articles and high-quality industry publications), with a view to understanding the following questions:

What does the literature currently say about the topic you’re investigating?
Is the literature lacking or well established? Is it divided or in disagreement?
How does your research fit into the bigger picture?
How does your research contribute something original?
How does the methodology of previous studies help you develop your own?

Depending on the nature of your study, you may also present a conceptual framework towards the end of your literature review, which you will then test in your actual research.

Again, some universities will want you to focus on some of these areas more than others, some will have additional or fewer requirements, and so on. Therefore, as always, its important to review your brief and/or discuss with your supervisor, so that you know exactly what’s expected of your literature review chapter.

Now that you’ve investigated the current state of knowledge in your literature review chapter and are familiar with the existing key theories, models and frameworks, its time to design your own research. Enter the methodology chapter – the most “science-ey” of the chapters…

In this chapter, you need to address two critical questions:

Exactly HOW will you carry out your research (i.e. what is your intended research design)?
Exactly WHY have you chosen to do things this way (i.e. how do you justify your design)?

Remember, the dissertation part of your degree is first and foremost about developing and demonstrating research skills . Therefore, the markers want to see that you know which methods to use, can clearly articulate why you’ve chosen then, and know how to deploy them effectively.

Importantly, this chapter requires detail – don’t hold back on the specifics. State exactly what you’ll be doing, with who, when, for how long, etc. Moreover, for every design choice you make, make sure you justify it.

In practice, you will likely end up coming back to this chapter once you’ve undertaken all your data collection and analysis, and revise it based on changes you made during the analysis phase. This is perfectly fine. Its natural for you to add an additional analysis technique, scrap an old one, etc based on where your data lead you. Of course, I’m talking about small changes here – not a fundamental switch from qualitative to quantitative, which will likely send your supervisor in a spin!

You’ve now collected your data and undertaken your analysis, whether qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods. In this chapter, you’ll present the raw results of your analysis . For example, in the case of a quant study, you’ll present the demographic data, descriptive statistics, inferential statistics , etc.

Typically, Chapter 4 is simply a presentation and description of the data, not a discussion of the meaning of the data. In other words, it’s descriptive, rather than analytical – the meaning is discussed in Chapter 5. However, some universities will want you to combine chapters 4 and 5, so that you both present and interpret the meaning of the data at the same time. Check with your institution what their preference is.

Now that you’ve presented the data analysis results, its time to interpret and analyse them. In other words, its time to discuss what they mean, especially in relation to your research question(s).

What you discuss here will depend largely on your chosen methodology. For example, if you’ve gone the quantitative route, you might discuss the relationships between variables . If you’ve gone the qualitative route, you might discuss key themes and the meanings thereof. It all depends on what your research design choices were.

Most importantly, you need to discuss your results in relation to your research questions and aims, as well as the existing literature. What do the results tell you about your research questions? Are they aligned with the existing research or at odds? If so, why might this be? Dig deep into your findings and explain what the findings suggest, in plain English.

The final chapter – you’ve made it! Now that you’ve discussed your interpretation of the results, its time to bring it back to the beginning with the conclusion chapter . In other words, its time to (attempt to) answer your original research question s (from way back in chapter 1). Clearly state what your conclusions are in terms of your research questions. This might feel a bit repetitive, as you would have touched on this in the previous chapter, but its important to bring the discussion full circle and explicitly state your answer(s) to the research question(s).

Next, you’ll typically discuss the implications of your findings . In other words, you’ve answered your research questions – but what does this mean for the real world (or even for academia)? What should now be done differently, given the new insight you’ve generated?

Lastly, you should discuss the limitations of your research, as well as what this means for future research in the area. No study is perfect, especially not a Masters-level. Discuss the shortcomings of your research. Perhaps your methodology was limited, perhaps your sample size was small or not representative, etc, etc. Don’t be afraid to critique your work – the markers want to see that you can identify the limitations of your work. This is a strength, not a weakness. Be brutal!

This marks the end of your core chapters – woohoo! From here on out, it’s pretty smooth sailing.

The reference list is straightforward. It should contain a list of all resources cited in your dissertation, in the required format, e.g. APA , Harvard, etc.

It’s essential that you use reference management software for your dissertation. Do NOT try handle your referencing manually – its far too error prone. On a reference list of multiple pages, you’re going to make mistake. To this end, I suggest considering either Mendeley or Zotero. Both are free and provide a very straightforward interface to ensure that your referencing is 100% on point. I’ve included a simple how-to video for the Mendeley software (my personal favourite) below:

Some universities may ask you to include a bibliography, as opposed to a reference list. These two things are not the same . A bibliography is similar to a reference list, except that it also includes resources which informed your thinking but were not directly cited in your dissertation. So, double-check your brief and make sure you use the right one.

The very last piece of the puzzle is the appendix or set of appendices. This is where you’ll include any supporting data and evidence. Importantly, supporting is the keyword here.

Your appendices should provide additional “nice to know”, depth-adding information, which is not critical to the core analysis. Appendices should not be used as a way to cut down word count (see this post which covers how to reduce word count ). In other words, don’t place content that is critical to the core analysis here, just to save word count. You will not earn marks on any content in the appendices, so don’t try to play the system!

Time to recap…

And there you have it – the traditional dissertation structure and layout, from A-Z. To recap, the core structure for a dissertation or thesis is (typically) as follows:

Acknowledgments page

Most importantly, the core chapters should reflect the research process (asking, investigating and answering your research question). Moreover, the research question(s) should form the golden thread throughout your dissertation structure. Everything should revolve around the research questions, and as you’ve seen, they should form both the start point (i.e. introduction chapter) and the endpoint (i.e. conclusion chapter).

I hope this post has provided you with clarity about the traditional dissertation/thesis structure and layout. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below, or feel free to get in touch with us. Also, be sure to check out the rest of the Grad Coach Blog .

Psst... there’s more!

This post was based on one of our popular Research Bootcamps . If you're working on a research project, you'll definitely want to check this out ...

36 Comments

many thanks i found it very useful

Glad to hear that, Arun. Good luck writing your dissertation.

Such clear practical logical advice. I very much needed to read this to keep me focused in stead of fretting.. Perfect now ready to start my research!

what about scientific fields like computer or engineering thesis what is the difference in the structure? thank you very much

Thanks so much this helped me a lot!

Very helpful and accessible. What I like most is how practical the advice is along with helpful tools/ links.

Thanks Ade!

Thank you so much sir.. It was really helpful..

You’re welcome!

Hi! How many words maximum should contain the abstract?

Thank you so much 😊 Find this at the right moment

You’re most welcome. Good luck with your dissertation.

best ever benefit i got on right time thank you

Many times Clarity and vision of destination of dissertation is what makes the difference between good ,average and great researchers the same way a great automobile driver is fast with clarity of address and Clear weather conditions .

I guess Great researcher = great ideas + knowledge + great and fast data collection and modeling + great writing + high clarity on all these

You have given immense clarity from start to end.

Morning. Where will I write the definitions of what I’m referring to in my report?

Thank you so much Derek, I was almost lost! Thanks a tonnnn! Have a great day!

Thanks ! so concise and valuable

This was very helpful. Clear and concise. I know exactly what to do now.

Thank you for allowing me to go through briefly. I hope to find time to continue.

Really useful to me. Thanks a thousand times

Very interesting! It will definitely set me and many more for success. highly recommended.

Thank you soo much sir, for the opportunity to express my skills

Usefull, thanks a lot. Really clear

Very nice and easy to understand. Thank you .

That was incredibly useful. Thanks Grad Coach Crew!

My stress level just dropped at least 15 points after watching this. Just starting my thesis for my grad program and I feel a lot more capable now! Thanks for such a clear and helpful video, Emma and the GradCoach team!

Do we need to mention the number of words the dissertation contains in the main document?

It depends on your university’s requirements, so it would be best to check with them 🙂

Such a helpful post to help me get started with structuring my masters dissertation, thank you!

Great video; I appreciate that helpful information

It is so necessary or avital course

This blog is very informative for my research. Thank you

Doctoral students are required to fill out the National Research Council’s Survey of Earned Doctorates

wow this is an amazing gain in my life

This is so good

How can i arrange my specific objectives in my dissertation?

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Dissertations

Listed by year of graduation

Geneveive Newman , Online Editor, New Review of Film and Television Studies

Dissertation Title: “ Of Victims and Survivors: Representing Collective and Individual Rape Trauma ”
Chair: Adam Lowenstein
Readers: Neepa Majumdar, Mark Lynn Anderson, Bridget Keown (Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies), and David Pettersen (French)

Silpa Mukherjee , Assistant Professor of Film & Media, Global South, and Cultural Studies, University of California San Diego

Dissertation Title: “ Cinema as Contraband: Bombay’s Cine-Crime Nexus, 1977-1991 ”
Chair: Neepa Majumdar
Readers: Mark Lynn Anderson, Adam Lowenstein, Randall Halle (German), and Ranjani Mazumdar (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

Jonah Jeng , Visiting Lecturer, University of Pittsburgh Film & Media Studies

Dissertation Title: “ The Long Take: A Spectacular Film Realism for the Anthropocene ”
Readers: Neepa Majumdar, Zachary Horton, and Randall Halle (German)

Jordan Parrish

Dissertation Title: “ A Phantom Experience: Traumatic Embodiment in Temporal Body Horror Cinema ”
Readers: Zachary Horton, Jennifer Waldron, and Charles Exley (East Asian Languages & Literatures)

Nikhil Titus

Dissertation Title: “ Curated Desires: Intersections of Low-Grade Cinema, Migration, and Gentrification in Mumbai ”
Readers: Robert Clift, Zachary Horton, and Randall Halle (German)
Dissertation: " Aluminum Lesbians: Recycling Lesbian Legacy in Classical Hollywood"
Chair: Mark Lynn Anderson (English)
Readers: Jules Gill-Peterson (English), Nancy Glazener (English), David Pettersen (French & Italian)
Dissertation: " Process over Product: Kinesthetic Cinema, Sporting Bodies, and Media Milieux"
Readers: Randall Halle (German), Adam Lowenstein (English), Neepa Majumdar (English)
Dissertation: White Design: Engineering the Visualization of Race and Racism in Social Media
Chair: Jinying Li (English) & Zachary Horton (English)
Readers: Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Brenton Malin (Communication), Elizabeth Reich (English)
Dissertation: From Women's Cinema to Women's Horror Cinema: Genre and Gender in the Twenty-First Century
Chair: Adam Lowenstein (English)
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Neepa Majumdar (English), David Pettersen (French & Italian)
Dissertation: Soviet Tableau: Cinema and History under Late Socialism (1953-1985)
Chair: Nancy Condee (Slavic)
Readers: David Birnbaum (Slavic), Randall Halle (German), Neepa Majumdar (English), Marcia Landy (English), Vladimir Padunov (Slavic), Dan Morgan (Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago)
Dissertation: Cinema in Fragments: Transmediating Popular Hindi Cinema on Small Screens
Chair: Neepa Majumdar (English)
Readers: Nancy Condee (Slavic), Jinying Li (English), Aswin Punathambekar (Communication Studies, University of Michigan), Jennifer Waldron (English)
Dissertation: The Interstate Logic: How Networks Change the Cinematic Representation of Time and Space
Chair: Lucy Fischer (English)
Readers: Randall Halle (German), Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Neepa Majumdar (English)
Dissertation: "Quiet on Set!": Craft Discourse and Below-the-Line Labor in Hollywood, 1919-1985
Chair: Mark Lynn Anderson (English)
Readers: Adam Lowenstein (English), Neepa Majumdar (English), Randall Halle (German), Dana Polan (NYU), Dan Morgan (Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago)
Dissertation: The Matter of Identity: Digital Media, Television, and Embodied Difference
Chair: Jane Feuer (English)
Readers: Brenton J. Malin (Communication), Jinying Li (English), Jennifer Waldron (English)
Dissertation: The Rehearsal for Terror: Form, Trauma, and Modern Horror
Chair: Marcia Landy (English)
Readers: Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Adam Lowenstein (English), Dan Morgan (Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago)
Dissertation: FEEL IT ALL AROUND: ART MUSIC VIDEO, ART CINEMA, AND SPECTATORSHIP IN THE STREAMING ERA
Chair: Adam Lowenstein (English)
Readers: Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Neepa Majumdar (English), Randall Halle (German), Dan Morgan (Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago)
Dissertation: The Cinematic Animal: Animal Life, Technology, and the Moving Image
Readers: Neepa Majumdar (English), Adam Lowenstein (English), Akira Lippit (Cinema & Media Studies, University of Southern California)
Dissertation: Sustaining Life During the AIDS Crisis: New Queer Cinema and the Biopic
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Randall Halle (German), Marcia Landy (English)
Dissertation: Pataphysical Networking: Virtuality, Potentiality and the Experimental Works of the Collège de 'Pataphysique, the Oulipo, and the Mouvement Panique
Dissertation: "Everything new is born illegal." Historicisizing Rapid Migration through New Media Projects
Chair: Randall Halle (German)
Readers: Nancy Condee (Slavic), Sabine von Dirk (German), John B. Lyon (German)
Dissertation: Impasse in Multilingual Spaces: Politics of Language and Identity in Contemporary Francophone Contact Zones
Chair: David Pettersen (French & Italian)
Readers: Nancy Condee (Slavic), Neil Doshi (French & Italian), Giuseppina Mecchia (French & Italian)
Dissertation: Press Play: Video Games and the Ludic Quality of Aesthetic Experiences across Media
Readers: Randall Halle (German), Jinying Li (English), Neepa Majumdar (English), Dan Morgan (Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago)
Dissertation: Shopping the Look: Hollywood Costume Production and American Fashion Consumption, 1960-1969
Chair: Neepa Majumdar (English)
Readers: Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Jane Feuer (English), Brenton J. Malin (Communication)
Dissertation: Another Habitat for the Muses: The Poetic Investigations of Mexican Film Criticism, 1896-1968
Readers: Neepa Majumdar (English), Adam Lowenstein (English), Joshua Lund (University of Notre Dame)
Dissertation: Frame and Finitude: The Aporetic Aesthetics of Alain Resnais's Cinematic Modernism
Co-Chairs: Adam Lowenstein (English), Daniel Morgan (Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago)
Readers: Neepa Majumdar (English), Marcia Landy (English)

Natalie Ryabchikova

Dissertation: The Flying Fish: Sergei Eisenstein Abroad, 1929-1932.
Chair: Mark Lynn Anderson (Film)
Readers: William Chase (History), Nancy Condee (Slavic), Randall Halle (Film), Vladimir Padunov (Slavic)

Kelly Trimble

Dissertation: The Celebrification of Soviet Culture: State Heroes after Stalin, 2017
Chair: Vladimir Padunov (Slavic)
Readers: David Birnbaum (Slavic), Nancy Condee (Slavic), Randall Halle (German)
Dissertation: A Hidden Light: Judaism, Contemporary Israeli Film, and the Cinematic Experience
Chair: Lucy Fischer (English)
Readers: Adam Lowenstein (English), Neepa Majumdar (English), Adam Shear (Religious Studies)
Dissertation: Global Russian Cinema in the Digital Age: The Films of Timur Bekmambetov
Chair: Nancy Condee (Slavic)
Readers: Vladimir Padunov (Slavic), Randall Halle (German), Daniel Morgan (Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago)
Dissertation: The Flying Fish: Sergei Eisenstein Abroad, 1929-1932
Chair: Vladimir Padunov (Slavic)
Readers: Mark Lynn Anderson (English), William Chase (History), Nancy Condee (Slavic), Randall Halle (German)

Anne Wesserling , Visiting Assistant Professor, University of North Georgia

Dissertation: Screening Violence: Meditations on Perception in Recent Argentine Literature and Film of the Post-Dictatorship
Chair: Daniel Balderston (Hispanic Languages & Literature)
Readers: John Beverley (Hispanic Languages & Literature), Gonzalo Lamana (Hispanic Languages & Literature), Adam Lowenstein (English)
Dissertation: The British War Film, 1939-1980: Culture, History, and Genre
Readers: Adam Lowenstein (English), Colin MacCabe (English), David Pettersen (French & Italian)
Dissertation: Unseen Femininity: Women in Japanese New Wave Cinema
Readers: Nancy Condee (Slavic), Marcia Landy (English), Neepa Majumdar (English)
Dissertation: Visualizing the Past: Perestroika Documentary Memory of Stalin-era
Readers: Nancy Condee (Slavic), David J. Birnbaum (Slavic), Jeremy Hicks (Languages, Linguistics, Film)

Gavin M. Hicks

Disseration: Soccer and Social Identity in Contemporary German Film and Media
Readers: John B. Lyon (German), Sabine von Dirke (German), Clark Muenzer (German), Gayle Rogers (English)
Dissertation: Film Dance, Female Stardom, and the Production of Gender in Popular Hindi Cinema
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Marcia Landy (English), Ranjani Mazumdar (Cinema Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Dissertation: Overlooking the Evidence: Gender, Genre and the Female Detective in Hollywood Film and Television
Readers: Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Adam Lowenstein (English), Brenton J. Malin (Communications)

Christopher Nielsen , Educator, Institute for Health and Socioeconomic Policy/National Nurses United

Dissertation: Narco Realism in Contemporary Mexican and Transnational Narrative, Film, and Online Media
Chair: Juan Duchesen-Winter (Hispanic Languages & Literature)
Readers: John Beverley (Hispanic Languages & Literature), Joshua Lund (Hispanic Languages & Literature), Giuseppina Mecchia (French & Italian)
Dissertation: New Korean Cinema: Mourning to Regeneration
Readers: Kyung Hyun Kim (East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of California, Irvine), Adam Lowenstein (English), Colin MacCabe (English)
Dissertation: “Insubordinate” Looking: Consumerism, Power, Identity, and the Art of Popular (Music) Dance Movies
Readers: Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Lucy Fischer (English), Randall Halle (German)
Dissertation: Sustaining Feminist Film Cultures: An Institutional History of Women Make Movies
Readers: Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Neepa Majumdar (English), Randall Halle (German Language), David Pettersen (French & Italian)

Yvonne Franke , Assistant Professor of German, Midwestern State University

Dissertation: The Genres of Europeanization - Moving Towards the "New Heimatfilm"
Readers: Lucy Fischer (Film), John B. Lyon (German), Sabine von Dirke (German)

Olga Kilmova , Visiting Lecturer, University of Pittsburgh

Dissertation: Soviet Youth Films under Brezhnev: Watching Between the Lines
Chair: Nancy Condee (Slavic)
Readers: Vladimir Padunov (Slavic), David J. Birnbaum (Slavic), Lucy Fischer (Communication), Alexander V. Prokhorov (Slavic)
Dissertation: The Toy Like Nature: On the History and Theory of Animated Motion
Chair: Daniel Morgan
Readers: Marcia Landy (English), Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Scott Bukatman (Film & Media Studies, Stanford University)
Dissertation: Cinematic Occupation: Intelligibility, Queerness, and Palestine
Readers: Mark Lynn Anderson (English), Troy Boone (English), Todd Reeser (French & Italian)

Yahya Laayouni , Assistant Professor of Arabic and French, Bloomsberg University of Pennsylvania

Dissertation: Redefining Beur Cinema: Constituting Subjectivity through Film
Co-Chairs: Giuseppina Mecchia (French and Italian) & Randall Halle (German)
Readers: Todd Reeser (French and Italian), Mohammed Bamyeh (Sociology & Religious Studies), Neil Doshi (French & Italian)
Dissertation: Image to Infinity: Rethinking Description and Detail in the Cinema
Chair: Marcia Landy (English)
Readers: Troy Boone , Adam Lowenstein (English), Colin MacCabe (English), Randall Halle (German)
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Dissertation: Screen Combat: Recreating World War II in American Film and Media
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Marcia Landy (English), Randall Halle (German)
Dissertation: Modern Kinesis: Motion Picture Technology, Embodiment, and Re-Playability in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twenty-First Centuries
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Adam Lowenstein (English), Giuseppina Mecchia (French & Italian)
Dissertation: Research in the Form of a Spectacle: Godard and the Cinematic Essay
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Marcia Landy (English)
Dissertation: Immaterial Materiality: Collecting in Live-Action Film, Animation, and Digital Games
Readers: Marcia Landy (English), Adam Lowenstein (English), Randall Halle (German)
Dissertation: Nation, Nostalgia, and Masculinity: Clinton/Spielberg/Hanks
Readers: Marcia Landy (English), Adam Lowenstein (English), Brent Malin (Communications)
Dissertation: Body Image: Fashioning the Postwar American
Readers: Jane Feuer (English), Marianne Novy (English), Carol Stabile (English, University of Oregon)

Natalia Maria Ramirez-Lopez ,

Dissertation: MARGINALIDAD Y VIOLENCIA JUVENIL EN MEDELLÍN Y BOGOTÁ: NARRATIVAS LITERARIAS Y FÍMICAS DE LOS AÑOS 80 Y 90 EN COLOMBIA
Chair: Hermann Herlinghaus (Latin American Literature, University of Freiburg)
Readers: Aníbal Perez-Linán (Political Science), Bobby J. Chamberlain (Hispanic Languages & Literature), Gerald Martin (Hispanic Languages & Literature)

Dawn Seckler , Associate Director of Development, Bridgeway Capital

Dissertation: Engendering Genre: The Contemporary Russian Buddy Film
Readers: David MacFadyen (University of California, Los Angeles), Lucy Fischer (Film), Nancy Condee (Slavic)
Dissertation: The Ethnic Turn: Studies in Political Cinema from Brazil and the United States, 1960-2002
Readers: Adam Lowenstein (English), Shalini Puri, Neepa Majumdar (English), John Beverley (Hispanic)
Dissertation: Acting Social: The Cinema of Mike Nichols
Readers: Mark Anderson (English), Marcia Landy (English), Colin MacCabe (English), David Shumway (English, Carnegie Mellon University)
Dissertation: Ruins and Riots: Transnational Currents in Mexican Cinema
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Adam Lowenstein (English), John Beverly (Hispanic)
Dissertation: The Word Made Cinematic: The Representation of Jesus in Cinema
Readers: Troy Boone , Adam Lowenstein (English), Vernell Lillie (Africana Studies)
Dissertation: Fathers of a Still-Born Past: Hindu Empire, Globality, and the Rhetoric of the Trikaal
Readers: Paul Bové (English), Ronald Judy (English), Nancy Condee (Slavic)
Dissertation: Excavating the Ghetto Action Cycle (1991-1996): A Case Study for a Cycle-Based Approach to Genre Theory
Readers: Jane Feuer (English), Neepa Majumdar (English), Paula Massood (Cinema and Media Studies, Brooklyn College, CUNY)
Dissertation: "The World Goes One Way and We Go Another": Movement, Migration, and Myths of Irish Cinema
Readers: Adam Lowenstein (English), Colin MacCabe (English), Nancy Condee (Slavic Languages and Literatures)
Dissertation: The Writing on the Screen: Images of Text in the German Cinema from 1920-1949
Readers: Paul Bové (English), Lucy Fischer (English), Linda Shulte-Sasse (German, McAllister College)
Dissertation: Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-Televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema
Readers: Paul Bové (English); Eric Clarke (English); Colin MacCabe (English); M. Prasad (Film Theory, Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages, Hyderabad)
Dissertation: Hollywood Youth Narratives and the Family Values Campaign 1980-1992
Readers: Troy Boone (English), Marcia Landy (English), Carol Stabile (Communications)
Dissertation: Reading Scars: Circumcision as Textual Trope
Chair: Philip Smith (English)
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Mariolina Salvatori, Greg Goekjian (Portland State University)
Dissertation: Dreaming in Crisis: Angels and the Allegorical Imagination in Postwar America
Chair: Colin MacCabe (English)
Readers: Ronald Judy (English), Jonathan Arac , Nancy Condee (Slavic)
Dissertation: Laying Down the Rules: The American Sports Film Genre From 1872 to 1960
Readers: Jane Feuer (English), Moya Luckett, Carol Stabile (Communications)

Elena Prokhorova

Dissertation: Fragmented Mythologies: Soviet TV Series of the 1970s
Readers: Carol Stabile (Communications), Jane Feuer (English and Film), Martin Votruba (Slavic), Nancy Condee (Slavic)
Dissertation: Nickels and Dimes: The Movies in a Rampantly American City, 1914-1923
Readers: Moya Luckett, Jane Feuer , Gregory Waller (University of Kentucky)
Dissertation: As Far As Anyone Knows: Fetishism and the Anti-Televisual Paradoxes of Film Noir
Readers: Valerie Krips, James Knapp, Henry Krips (Communications)

Alexander Prokhorov , Associate Professor, College of William and Mary

Dissertation: Inherited Discourse: Stalinist Tropes in Thaw Culture
Chair: Helena Goscilo (Slavic)
Readers: Lucy Fischer (Film), Mark Altshuller (Slavic), Nancy Condee (Slavic), Vladimir Padunov (Slavic)
Dissertation: “Dig If You Will The Picture”: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense
Chair: Marcia Landy (English)
Readers: Paul Bové (English), Colin MacCabe (English), Amy Villarejo (Cornell), Wahneema Lubiano (Duke)
Dissertation: French Film Criticism, Authorship, and National Culture in the Mirror of John Cassavetes’s Body, His Life, His Work
Readers: Marcia Landy (English), James Knapp
Dissertation: In The Shadow of His Language: Language and Feminine Subjectivity in the Cinema
Chair: Colin MacCabe (English)
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Lynn Emanuel, Patrizia Lombardo (French and Italian)
Dissertation: Being In Control: The Ending Of The Information Age
Chair: Paul Bové (English)
Readers: Jonathan Arac , Marcia Landy , Carol Stabile (Communications)
Dissertation: The Emergence of Date Rape: Feminism, Theory, Institutional Discourse, and Popular Culture
Readers: Nancy Glazener (English), Lucy Fischer (English), Carol A. Stabile (Communications)
Dissertation: Gender and the Politics and Practices of Representation in Contemporary British Cinema
Readers: James Knapp, Marcia Landy (English), Colin MacCabe (English), Sabine Hake (German)
Dissertation: Telling the Story of AIDS in Popular Culture
Chair: Jane Feuer (English)
Readers: Eric Clarke (English), Marcia Landy (English), Danae Clark (Communications)
Dissertation: Technology, the Natural and the Other: The Case of Childbirth Representations in Contemporary Popular Culture
Readers: Marcia Landy (English), Dana Polan, Iris M. Young (Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh)
Dissertation: Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire
Readers: Paul Bové (English), Colin MacCabe (English), Gayatri Spivak (Columbia)
Dissertation: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Science Fiction: Gender and Ways of Thinking Otherwise
Chair: Philip Smith
Readers: Marica Landy (English), Lucy Fischer (English), Dana Polan, Tamara Horowitz (Philosophy)
Dissertation: Camp and the Question of Value
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Marcia Landy (English), Eric Clarke (English), Janet Staiger (University of Texas–Austin)
Dissertation: Culture in a State of Crisis: A Historical Construction in Cinematic Ideology in India, 1919-75
Readers: Paul Bové (English), Colin MacCabe (English), Keya Ganguly (Carnegie Mellon University)
Dissertation: The Ethics of Transgression: Criticism and Cultural Marginality
Chair: Paul Bove (English)
Readers: Lucy Fischer (English), Marcia Landy (English), Dana Pollan, Danae Clarke
Dissertation: Sally Bowles: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Politics of Looking
Readers: Marcia Landy (English), Dana Polan, Sabine Hake (German)

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, chaz's journal, great movies, contributors.

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Everything about Osgood Perkins ’ “Longlegs” is designed to rattle you, unsettle you, and make you think about it hours or even days later. It’s a very purposefully exaggerated film, from the oppressive sound design to the heavily mannered performances, going for something closer to a cinematic nightmare than anything approaching realism. To that end, despite obvious narrative influences, comparisons to Jonathan Demme ’s “ The Silence of the Lambs ” feel a bit off. Sure, there’s a female FBI agent and a serial killer, but Perkins is seeking something different tonally. It's basically like watching the scene where Clarice hunts around the storage unit in the dark for 100 minutes. There's little room to breathe.

Perkins sometimes loses his grip on that fever dream tone, such as in a late-film exposition dump that too directly and bizarrely seeks to explain what’s happened for the previous hour and change. Nightmares don’t need exposition dumps. It might sound nitpicky, but it’s indicative of an overall problem that hampers “Longlegs.” Despite the notable pre-release work by Neon to build buzz, and the incredibly low Cinemascore likely coming its way, this strange film sometimes doesn’t seem willing to commit to its creepy weirdness all the way, pulling back or explaining its intentions when it should be seeking confusion as much as explanation. We remember the nightmares we're still trying to understand more than anything.

“Longlegs” opens with arguably its most effective sequence, a flashback framed like you’re watching someone’s home movie through a family room projector. A car pulls up to a remote home, from which a young girl emerges. Immediately, Perkins is playing with perspective, not only locking us into the tight frame but basically giving us a child’s POV on the encounter that happens next, one that will impact everything that follows.

Cut to years later, sometime in an exaggerated ‘90s – there’s a photo of Clinton on the wall of the FBI Director’s office to set the time, but a lot of the production design feels even older than that era, once again creating a sort of dream-logic disconnect – where new agent Lee Harker ( Maika Monroe ) arrives for her first case. Acting on a sort of psychic hunch, she captures a serial killer, leading the FBI to suspect she may not be just another ordinary agent, sending her through a series of mental tests to prove she has unique abilities. Sadly, this thread gets lost a little bit as the film goes on, mostly used to set Lee up as “special,” but Perkins' screenplay does too little with that aspect of her character. It’s one of several places in which “Longlegs” could have leaned even more into its quirks. Sure, this movie is weird for the multiplexes of America, but my argument would be that it should have been weirder .

One person certainly giving it his weird all is Nicolas Cage (and he has more weird in his bag of acting tricks than most), who plays the title character, a Satan-worshipping serial killer who seems sort of inspired by Ted Bundy and Tiny Tim (the singer, not the urchin). Harker is brought in by Agent Carter ( Blair Underwood ) to investigate a series of family murders, those horrible events we hear about wherein a parent, usually the father, slays the children and spouse before taking their own life. No one would even think these were anything but tragic, self-contained events if there wasn’t a mysterious figure out there sending cryptic, Zodiac-esque notes about the crimes, tied to specific dates on a calendar. How is Longlegs orchestrating such brutality? And what do the dates mean? Alicia Witt plays Ruth, Lee’s ultra-religious mother, who’s always asking her daughter if she’s said her prayers. One senses Lee is going to need those prayers.

Everything in “Longlegs” feels very deliberately crafted and chosen by the undeniably talented writer/director of “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” and “ I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House .” From the consistently low camera angles that enhance tension by giving us a reduced POV to the quick bursts of imagery and sound that feel nearly subliminal to possibly even the names of the characters. Without spoiling anything, Lee has a connection to the very vampiric Longlegs that made me wonder if Harker was a Bram Stoker ’s Dracula reference (pretty sure it is). And is it a coincidence that the only survivor’s surname is Camera (played by Kiernan Shipka , in an impressive single-scene performance)? After all, it’s Lee’s camera, and, by extension, Perkins’ camera that keeps the story alive.

This kind of mental unpacking of a film can be fun and will almost certainly lead to hours of TikToks and YouTube videos drawing connections like the paragraph above. But it’s hard for a film to be calibrated this carefully and feel as unhinged as this story should at the same time. There’s a version of “Longlegs” that hides its strings better, one that doesn’t feel the need to explain everything away with an insanely long exposition-dump monologue. "Longlegs" has one that is so misguided, not only because nightmares are better with a few lingering questions, but because the scenes that follow basically serve the same purpose through plotting. This is a movie with a haunted doll, psychic FBI agent, and a serial killer with a connection to Satan. We don’t need to connect all the dots.

And yet, Perkins is simply too talented when it comes to framing, mood, and tension to completely dismiss “Longlegs.” The film will likely draw horror fans through its unapologetic brutality – the murders here are bloody and often crunchy – but there are also some themes worth unpacking about how much can be hidden by faith, marred by evil, and even the roles our own parents play in shaping those narratives. (A fascinating read of the film comes when one considers how much Osgood’s father Anthony Perkins hid from his family and the fact that his mother died on 9/11 given how much the film is about generational trauma.) Absolutely no one is phoning in “Longlegs,” and that commitment to craft and mood has an impact. It may be disappointing that it doesn’t land with the same force promised by the viral marketing, but nightmares are unpredictable like that.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Longlegs (2024)

101 minutes

Maika Monroe as Agent Lee Harker

Nicolas Cage as Longlegs

Blair Underwood as Agent Carter

Alicia Witt as Ruth Harker

Michelle Choi-Lee as Agent Browning

Osgood Perkins

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Alec Baldwin 'Rust' case dismissed by judge over 'suppressed' evidence

The involuntary manslaughter charge against Alec Baldwin in the 2021 shooting death of "Rust" cinematographer Halyna Hutchins has been abruptly dismissed on the grounds that prosecutors and law enforcement withheld evidence that might be favorable to the actor's defense.

The conclusion of the case arrived more than two years after Baldwin's prop gun discharged during a rehearsal for the movie, killing 42-year-old Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.

First Judicial District Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer handed down her surprise ruling on the third day of the "30 Rock" actor's trial .

Sommer dismissed the charge Friday afternoon with prejudice, meaning prosecutors cannot refile the same claim. Baldwin, 66, sobbed into his hands as the judge read out her order, with wife Hilaria Baldwin, sister Elizabeth Keuchler and brother Stephen Baldwin leaning forward in their seats behind him.

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Earlier in the day, the judge made the unusual move of excusing the jury for the day so the court could consider the merits of Baldwin's latest motion to dismiss the case, which was filed Thursday evening.

Baldwin's lawyers alleged in their filing that Santa Fe sheriffs and state prosecutors "concealed from Baldwin" evidence that could be linked to the source of the bullet that killed Hutchins. Prosecutors and sheriffs argued the evidence had no relevance or value to Baldwin's case.

USA TODAY has reached out to Baldwin's lawyers and a representative for Hutchins' family for comment.

Baldwin and the film's other producers still face civil lawsuits over the shooting from Hutchins' family.

On Saturday, attorney Gloria Allred, who represents Hutchins' parents and sister, said in a press conference that she "respectfully disagrees" with the court's decision.

"The dismissal only strengthens our resolve to pursue justice in the civil case that we have filed against him in Santa Fe, New Mexico," she added.

'Rust' judge blasts prosecutors for failing to disclose 'critical evidence'

"The late discovery of this evidence during trial has impeded the effective use of evidence in such a way that it has impacted the fundamental fairness of the proceedings," Sommer said while delivering her decision. "The defense is not in a position to test the state’s theory as to the source of the live rounds that killed Ms. Hutchins."

The judge reprimanded lead state prosecutor Kari Morrissey and her team as "they have continued to fail to disclose critical evidence to the defendant."

"The state’s willful withholding of this information was intentional and deliberate," Sommer said. "If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching."

As such, she said, "Dismissal with prejudice is warranted to ensure the integrity of the judicial system and the efficient administration of justice.”

Dismissal came after Alec Baldwin's lawyers claimed prosecutors 'concealed evidence'

The trial – which began Tuesday in Santa Fe, New Mexico, following jury selection on Monday – was initially scheduled to last until July 19.

On Friday, Baldwin's lawyers said the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office was in possession of live rounds they argued might be connected to the one that killed Hutchins but failed to list them as evidence in the "Rust" investigation file or disclose their existence to defense lawyers.

On Thursday, testimony revealed Troy Teske, a friend of "Rust" armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed 's stepfather, had delivered Colt .45 live rounds to the sheriff's office on March 6. Baldwin's team claimed this was evidence that could have established a connection to Seth Kenney, the prop supplier for "Rust."

Baldwin's attorneys alleged the rounds were evidence that the bullet that killed Hutchins came from Kenney. Kenney, who testified during Friday's motion hearing, has denied supplying live ammunition to the production and has not been charged in the case.

In their filing, defense attorneys argued "The State affirmatively concealed evidence potentially pointing to an external source of the live ammunition (Seth Kenney) because the evidence would be favorable to Baldwin."

They added, "The State not only failed to disclose the evidence — it affirmatively hid it under a file number that is unaffiliated with the Rust case and then failed to disclose the only documentation that it claims to have created that would have alerted Baldwin to the existence of the evidence."

Baldwin's team has blamed Gutierrez-Reed , who is serving 18 months in prison for involuntary manslaughter, and first assistant director Dave Halls for negligence that led to Hutchins' death. Meanwhile, prosecutors argued Baldwin handled the gun irresponsibly, exhibited "bullyish behavior on set" and changed his story to cast blame on others.

Biggest revelations: What we learned from Alec Baldwin's 'Rust' tria

Crime scene technician, state prosecutor deny hiding evidence

Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office crime scene technician Marissa Poppell said in her testimony that the live rounds were not hidden from Baldwin. She disputed defense attorney Alex Spiro's assertion that the Colt .45 ammunition handed in to police matched the round that killed Hutchins and said she did not believe the ammunition proved Kenney supplied the fatal live round.

She said the rounds Teske provided were placed in a separate case file as they did not match those collected on the set, which were sent for FBI testing.

But when defense lawyers inspected them, they found some had brass casings with the “Starline Brass” logo, just like the live rounds found on the set of "Rust." Others looked like inert dummy rounds taken into evidence on the set.

When questioned by Sommer, Poppell said it was a joint decision by her supervisor, prosecutors and herself to filed the live rounds under a different case number.

The lead investigator with the sheriff's office, Alexandria Hancock, testified Friday that the ammunition in question was not similar in appearance to the live rounds found on the "Rust" set but admitted they appeared "similar" to the dummy rounds used on set.

On Friday, in one of the day's more surprising moments, prosecutor Morrissey voluntarily called herself as a witness. She had only seen a photo of the ammunition Teske shared with sheriffs, she said.

"I did not intend to mislead the court," she said. "My understanding of what was dropped off at the sheriff's office is on this computer screen and it looks absolutely nothing like the live rounds from the set of Rust."

Morrissey also revealed during cross-examination that the other lead prosecutor, Erlinda Ocampo Johnson, resigned from the case Friday, explaining Johnson "didn't agree with the decision to have a public hearing."

What was Alec Baldwin on trial for?

On Oct. 21, 2021, Baldwin was pointing a pistol at Hutchins during a rehearsal for the Western film when the gun went off, killing Hutchins and wounding Souza. The tragedy marked Hollywood's first on-set shooting fatality in three decades.

More than two years later, in January, Baldwin was charged for the second time in the fatal shooting of Hutchins. Later that month, he pleaded not guilty to involuntary manslaughter.

Baldwin, also a producer on the film, had claimed he'd pulled back the hammer — but not the trigger — and the gun fired.

In March, a jury found Gutierrez-Reed guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Her team has appealed the conviction.

In 2023, assistant director Halls pleaded no contest to negligent use of a deadly weapon and the unsafe handling of a firearm. He received a suspended six-month sentence with unsupervised probation.

Contributing: Andrew Hay, Reuters

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‘Touch’ Review: An Old-School Tear-Jerker, With a Twist

An Icelandic widower revisits London, the site of his first romance, in this film from Baltasar Kormakur.

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A woman in a light blue shirt stands next to a man in a white T-shirt at a counter. They are in a restaurant kitchen, with pots and pans in the background.

By Beatrice Loayza

“Touch,” a globe-trotting romance from Iceland, is an epic, old-fashioned weepie in the vein of “Atonement” and “The Notebook” — it’s mushy and ridiculous, then, suddenly, you’re in the throes of an ugly cry.

Based on the novel by Olafur Johann Olafsson, the film straddles two timelines — 2020, at the very outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Swinging Sixties London — and plays out, at first, like a mystery. Kristofer (Egill Olafsson), an ex-restaurateur and widower, is diagnosed with dementia and spurred into action before the disease might incapacitate him: He books a flight from Reykjavik to London, unfazed by the imminent lockdown. He’s the only guest at his London hotel, his flights are near-empty, and his anxious daughter keeps calling, urging him to get back home.

As Kristofer revisits his old stamping grounds — he was a student in London — the source of his longing becomes clear. In the earlier timeline, a young Kristofer (Palmi Kormakur), a devoted leftist, abandons his studies and takes a dishwashing job at a Japanese restaurant. The rest of the staff is Japanese, but the restaurant owner, Takahashi-san (Masahiro Motoki), takes a liking to this Icelandic gentle giant, whose passion for Japanese culture is convincing. (Plus, there’s a humorous parallel between Iceland and Japan — the love of fish!) The trope of the white guy with an Asian fetish certainly comes to mind, but Kormakur’s soft-spoken charisma wards off this pigeonholing, creating space for the Japanese characters to become three-dimensional as they tease Kristofer out of his shell.

Then there’s the girl: Miko (Koki), Takahashi-san’s daughter, with whom Kristofer is smitten. The film tracks the twists and turns of their friendship, which unfold tragically when Miko’s origins — she’s a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing — come to light.

Directed by Baltasar Kormakur, the father of Palmi, a veteran filmmaker with big-budget Hollywood credits (“Beast,” “Adrift,” “2 Guns”), “Touch” rekindles a treacly genre that I didn’t realize I missed. Its tender performances and gut-punch reveals are classic tear-jerker ingredients. Add to this a natural, inordinately sensitive approach to intercultural love — mercifully, without a sense of righteousness or obligation.

Touch Rated R for sex, references to abortion and images of atomic bomb casualties. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters.

How The Shining Changed Shelley Duvall Forever

In a now-infamous video shot by a 19-year-old Vivian Kubrick, her father Stanley calls action for Shelley Duvall before a scene in "The Shining." Perhaps it's because Kubrick is outside and Duvall is behind a large door to the set of the Overlook Hotel, or perhaps the sound of Kubrick calling for action is muffled by the snow machine blasting at the set, but Duvall misses her cue. Kubrick calls "cut," and then meets Duvall at the door not to figure out why the cue was missed but instead to ream her out, telling her, "You're wasting everyone's time."

Following this clip, Vivian Kubrick's making-of documentary shows Duvall saying that she doesn't think her performance would have been as good if Kubrick hadn't gotten a rise out of her, and she also notes that Kubrick knowingly treated her this way in order to get the performance. She looks calm. She smiles.

She seems positive, but that was over 40 years ago. In the years since the release of "The Shining," much has been revealed about the horrendous working conditions for all of the cast and crew of the film, but no one experienced anything quite as extensive or exhausting as Shelley Duvall. In fact, her experience on "The Shining" is one of the worst things an actor has ever had to suffer while making a horror movie . At the time, Duvall was a star on the rise, but Kubrick's treatment of her on set almost made her walk away from acting for good.

Stanley Kubrick completely mistreated Shelley Duvall on the set of The Shining

The magnum opus of Stanley Kubrick's cruelty toward Shelley Duvall came in the form of one of "The Shining's" most iconic scenes — the baseball bat confrontation on the stairs. Kubrick made Duvall and Nicholson shoot the scene in a record-setting 127 takes, something that horror fans love to spout off as a fun bit of trivia. The result of the constant takes were Duvall's hands were shredded raw from gripping the bat for such a prolonged period of time, her voice was hoarse from crying, her eyes became swollen, and she left the set completely dehydrated. The moments we see on screen of Duvall crying in pain, fear, and exhaustion were not acting but an actor delivering lines while enduring a trauma response.

Kubrick's psychological brutalization of Duvall was so severe that her hair began falling out. "To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying," Duvall said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter . In the equally iconic "door scene," Jack Nicholson destroyed nearly 60 doors to get the shot to Kubrick's liking, filming this one moment over the course of three days. The scene was mostly improvised, and Kubrick reportedly kept information regarding Nicholson's choices to tear down the door with an axe from Duvall, meaning her horrified reactions are authentic . This isn't acting, this is responding to trauma.

The difference between acting and reacting

There's a quote from actress Dee Wallace in an interview she did for "Eli Roth's History of Horror" where she recounts the exhaustion from shooting "Cujo." In it, she states, "What most people don't understand is that your body does not differentiate between a perceived threat and an actual threat. So I blew all my adrenals out because for eight weeks, literally, I was in fight or flight."

This helps explain what was going on with Shelley Duvall. No matter how much she tells herself "I'm acting" and no matter how much she knows the actions she's performing are scripted, the body is going to respond to the circumstances as if they're truly happening. The documentary "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures" doesn't shy away from the filmmaker's ridiculous methods, with co-star Jack Nicholson admitting that Kubrick acted like "a different director" when dealing with her.

Many of Duvall's lines were unexpectedly cut, she was frequently kept isolated, and she was forced to wait for extensive periods of time before performing her scenes to throw her off. "A Life in Pictures" even shows moments of Kubrick not acting alone but instead requiring the rest of the crew to follow his lead. "Don't sympathize with Shelley," he says to the crew. He also made the decision to never compliment her work, and instead, he criticized every choice or impulse she had for the character. At one point, he encourages the rest of the crew to ignore her and tells them to disregard any needs she expresses. Kubrick is notorious for being a perfectionist , but at what cost?

'I don't know how I did it'

Stanley Kubrick chose to shoot "The Shining" chronologically, which pushed filming to last around 56 weeks. This means Shelley Duvall spent over a year of her life being tormented by a man in an untouchable position of power. Kubrick was already considered an auteur at this point in his career, with his unconventional (see: abusive) techniques hailed as genius rather than correctly identified as harmful. He was awarded and given the space to direct anything he wanted. Many have tried to defend Kubrick by referencing the clips from "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures," where Duvall speaks positively about the director's choice to treat her sub-humanly, but never do they put it in context. If the daughter of the man with enough power to make or break the rest of Duvall's career puts a camera in her face and asks how she feels about his process ... what else do people expect her to say?

In The Hollywood Reporter interview, Duvall said, "I don't know how I did it. Jack [Nicholson] said that to me, too. He said, 'I don't know how you do it.'" Author Stephen King has not shied away from his hatred of Kubrick's film , and the treatment of Duvall as Wendy is part of it. "She's basically just there to scream and be stupid and that's not the woman that I wrote about."

Shelley Duvall had an anxiety attack during The Shining

At one point in Vivian Kubrick's documentary, Shelley Duvall is shown lying on the floor with assorted cushions around her. It was a clear attempt to highlight the grueling process of moviemaking, but in actuality, this was footage of the aftermath of an on-set panic attack. Duvall confirmed this in an interview with ComingSoon.net , where she said, "For the longest time I couldn't remember what exactly was happening at that moment, but I do recall I had a really bad anxiety attack on set, and I believe that was what is shown in the documentary." Duvall continues to explain that the shooting days were often 15-16 hours long, and breaks were hard to come by. "The shoot was very hard on me and I got to the point where I just couldn't take anymore, I needed a break, but taking a break costs money and people need the shot done, so I had a little breakdown," she said.

"[Kubrick] has a vision in his head of what he wants to see through his camera and if you don't quite understand where he is coming from he gets frustrated and angry," she said. "Communication and understanding plays a big part of film sets, I just wasn't getting it, I did in the end." It's hard to hear Duvall speak about the experience because despite describing what is clearly an unacceptable work environment and mistreatment, she's still optimistically trying to justify what happened to her. The reality is that no actor should be pushed to the point of having an anxiety attack on set, and if the circumstances become this extreme, protective measures need to be taken. Duvall deserved better.

We need to call it what it is

Shelley Duvall appeared on the "Dr. Phil Show" in 2016, clearly in need of legitimate help and speaking incoherently. Dr. Phil treated it like sensationalist exploitation, but when he asked about "The Shining," her response was the most honest she'd been in years. "I guess this is what most people know me for, right? And look, I won't get into too much detail now, but that film was hell to be a part of," she said. She followed by saying:

"I mean, there was a great cast — Jack, Scatman [Crothers], Danny [Lloyd]. They were all wonderfully hilarious people, but then there was Stanley Kubrick, the director of this iconic masterpiece. All I'll really say for now is that if he hadn't directed the way he did, if he hadn't done everything with force and cruelty, then I guess it wouldn't have turned out to be as it was."

There's a tragic acceptance to Duvall's perspective, as if she has bought into the lie that she wouldn't have been as good in the role without having endured harm or as if she has convinced herself that the torture she underwent was necessary for the film to be as beloved as it became. Duvall didn't have the opportunity to act because she was too busy trying to maintain sanity while being psychologically exploited. That's not the sign of a bad actor, that's the sign of a bad director. To put a person in the position of feeling threatened and fearing for their life for 127 takes on a staircase is not legendary or the work of a perfectionist — it's abuse, and we need to start calling it what it is.

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Essay Film
The term "essay film" has become increasingly used in film criticism to describe a self-reflective and self-referential documentary cinema that blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction. Scholars unanimously agree that the first published use of the term was by Richter in 1940. Also uncontested is that Andre Bazin, in 1958, was the ...
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1940 - Hans Richter's The Film Essay. The term "essay film" was originally coined by German artist Hans Richter, who wrote in his 1940 paper, The Film Essay: "The film essay enables the filmmaker to make the 'invisible' world of thoughts and ideas visible on the screen...The essay film produces complex thought - reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can also ...
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Writing a film analysis requires you to consider the composition of the film—the individual parts and choices made that come together to create the finished piece. Film analysis goes beyond the analysis of the film as literature to include camera angles, lighting, set design, sound elements, costume choices, editing, etc. in making an argument.
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'Touch' Review: An Old-School Tear-Jerker, With a Twist
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"I mean, there was a great cast — Jack, Scatman [Crothers], Danny [Lloyd]. They were all wonderfully hilarious people, but then there was Stanley Kubrick, the director of this iconic masterpiece.

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Essay Film by Yelizaveta Moss LAST REVIEWED: 24 March 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 24 March 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0216

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