Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement

401 Pages·2021·24.567 MB·English

by  James E. Cutting

Movies on Our Minds

Movies on Our Minds
The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement
JAMES E. CUTTING
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978– 0– 19– 756777– 7
DOI: 10.1093/ oso/ 9780197567777.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
With gratitude and love for
the three women in my life
Claire, Isabelle,
and particularly Claudia
Every shade of feeling and emotion which fills the spectator’s mind
can mold the scenes in [a movie] until they appear the embodiment
of our feelings. . . . If this is the outcome of esthetic analysis on the
one side, of psychological research on the other, we need only com-
bine the results of both into a unified principle: The [movie] tells us
the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world, namely,
space, time, and causality, and by adjusting the events to the forms
of the inner world, namely, attention, memory, imagination, and
emotion.
— Hugo Münsterberg (1916, p. 74)
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
1. The Power of Movies and a Method to Study It 1
2. Popular Movies and Technology 20
3. Viewing and Lenses 47
4. Mise- en- Cadre 76
5. Transitions 102
6. An Interlude on Shots and Cultural Change 126
7. Shots and Sound 142
8. The Most Important Shot in Popular Cinema 168
9. Continuity, Discontinuity, and Scenes 185
10. Montages, Sequences, and Syntagmas 217
11. Stories and Their Parts 239
12. Narrational Complexity 260
13. The Web and Flow of Popular Cinema 280
14. Structure, Engagement, and Evolution 305
References 325
Index 355

Preface and Acknowledgments
Why are popular movies so engaging? Unsurprisingly, there are many
answers, and the field of psychology can provide some of them. One way to
approach this query is to divide it into four others. How do movies keep us
interested? Media specialists call this feature sustained focus. This is pertinent
to the psychological subfield called attention. How does movie form help us
comprehend the story? This is called diegetic understanding, where diegesis is
another word for narrative. This is relevant to the subfields of cognition and
discourse processing. How do movies ensure that we are emotionally attuned
to the protagonist’s situation? This is emotional commitment, relevant to the
subfields of motivation and emotion. And how do movies remove us from
our everyday surrounds and allow us to get into the story? This is an idea
borrowed from the subfield of virtual reality within computer graphics called
presence, a phenomenon rooted in the psychological subfield of perception.
Across these chapters, I provide empirical evidence in support of answers to
each of these four questions.1 But this is not a text on psychology; it is a book
on popular movies, how they are structured, and how that structure has been
crafted by a century’s worth of filmmakers to affect our minds.
This book is for anyone who likes popular movies and has an interest in
learning about some underpinnings of why that might be so. It is focally
addressed to the general reader, offering many examples of how movies work
from a micro level of frame structure, through shots and scenes, and all the
way up to the fluctuating patterns in whole movies. There is enough detail
about every concept, many of them illustrated, so that no one should get lost.
And more concretely, no reader will need to have seen the particular popular
movies that I write about.
But this book also contains many insights for film scholars about the ge-
neral structure of popular movies that were previously unknown, and it
contains many other findings for psychologists about how filmmakers con-
trol viewers’ perception, attention, cognition, and emotion. This book is
peculiar, perhaps unique, but designed to be approachable. Thus, it seems
reasonable to explain how I came to write it. Two personal roots underlie my
approach to movies.