essay on cinema

Essay on Impact of Cinema in Life for Students and Children

500 words essay on impact of cinema in life.

Cinema has been a part of the entertainment industry for a long time. It creates a massive impact on people all over the world. In other words, it helps them give a break from monotony. It has evolved greatly in recent years too. Cinema is a great escape from real life.

Furthermore, it helps in rejuvenating the mind of a person. It surely is beneficial in many ways, however, it is also creating a negative impact on people and society. We need to be able to identify the right from wrong and make decisions accordingly.

Advantages of Cinema

Cinema has a lot of advantages if we look at the positive side. It is said to be a reflection of the society only. So, it helps us come face to face with the actuality of what’s happening in our society. It portrays things as they are and helps in opening our eyes to issues we may have well ignored in the past.

Similarly, it helps people socialize better. It connects people and helps break the ice. People often discuss cinema to start a conversation or more. Moreover, it is also very interesting to talk about rather than politics and sports which is often divided.

Above all, it also enhances the imagination powers of people. Cinema is a way of showing the world from the perspective of the director, thus it inspires other people too to broaden their thinking and imagination.

Most importantly, cinema brings to us different cultures of the world. It introduces us to various art forms and helps us in gaining knowledge about how different people lead their lives.

In a way, it brings us closer and makes us more accepting of different art forms and cultures. Cinema also teaches us a thing or two about practical life. Incidents are shown in movies of emergencies like robbery, fire, kidnapping and more help us learn things which we can apply in real life to save ourselves. Thus, it makes us more aware and teaches us to improvise.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Disadvantages of Cinema

While cinema may be beneficial in many ways, it is also very damaging in various areas. Firstly, it stereotypes a lot of things including gender roles, religious practices, communities and more. This creates a false notion and a negative impact against that certain group of people.

People also consider it to be a waste of time and money as most of the movies nowadays are not showing or teaching anything valuable. It is just trash content with objectification and lies. Moreover, it also makes people addicts because you must have seen movie buffs flocking to the theatre every weekend to just watch the latest movie for the sake of it.

Most importantly, cinema shows pretty violent and sexual content. It contributes to the vulgarity and eve-teasing present in our society today. Thus, it harms the young minds of the world very gravely.

Q.1 How does cinema benefit us?

A.1 Cinema has a positive impact on society as it helps us in connecting to people of other cultures. It reflects the issues of society and makes us familiar with them. Moreover, it also makes us more aware and helps to improvise in emergency situations.

Q.2 What are the disadvantages of cinema?

A.2 Often cinema stereotypes various things and creates false notions of people and communities. It is also considered to be a waste of time and money as some movies are pure trash and don’t teach something valuable. Most importantly, it also demonstrates sexual and violent content which has a bad impact on young minds.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

• Essay On Impact Of Cinema On Life

Essay on the Impact of Cinema on Life

500+ words essay on the impact of cinema on life.

Cinema is a motion picture, or to put it simply, it means movies. Most of us love watching movies and wait eagerly for the next new release. These movies take us on an entertaining journey to a whole new world. From the time it came into existence, cinema has had a great impact on our lives. Cinema is also a great medium of education. From bringing different cultures and traditions across the globe together to raising awareness about important issues, cinemas educate us in many ways.

Origin of Cinema

Cinema is short for cinematography. Cinematography is the illusion of movement seen on a screen. This illusion of movement is a result of recording and then projecting several still photographs rapidly on the screen. This medium of mass communication and entertainment is a product of 19th-century science. Unlike most scientific inventions, the cinema doesn’t have just one inventor. Several scientists of the time, like Edison and the Lumiere brothers William Friese-Greene, worked to invent motion pictures and the cameras that recorded them.

The Edison company invented a device called the Kinetoscope, which allowed a person to view moving pictures through a peephole. In 1895, the Lumiere brothers invented a device called the Cinématographe, which could project moving pictures onto a screen. The Cinématographe was a three-in-one device, it was a camera, a projector and a film printer.

The first films were short, lasting a few minutes and did not have synchronized sound or dialogues. But with more scientific innovations, production houses started making feature-length movies with colour and synchronized sound. Roundhay Garden Scene, which was recorded by English photographer Louis Le Prince is believed to be the first motion picture ever made. The motion picture was recorded in Leeds, England, in 1888. The first Indian cinema was Raja Harishchandra, which was recorded and shown to the public in 1913.

Impact of Cinema on Our Lives

Cinema is mainly a medium of entertainment and communication. It is also a great medium to educate the masses. A movie has the power to bring distant, unseen lands, their culture and traditions before the audience. It can help raise awareness about social and cultural issues and help people understand the difference between good and bad. It can be inspirational and push the audience towards achieving their goals and dreams. Cinemas are also great stress relievers. It helps transport the audience to a distant, make-believe land that helps them forget their troubles for a little while.

While it has its merits, cinema does have several disadvantages too. There are several ways in which it could affect our lives negatively. It is up to the individuals to choose what to watch.

Impact of Cinema on Students

Young children are very impressionable and pick up things quickly. While the educational part of films is a good influence on them, the negative aspects can be a bad influence. Movies can also fuel their imagination and creativity and introduce them to new concepts. It can also inspire them and push them to work hard towards achieving their goals. At the same time, some movies can have a negative impact on students. So, parents and educators should ensure that movies shown to young children and students should be properly vetted and age-appropriate.

In conclusion, cinemas have had a vast impact on our lives. From educating and entertaining us to opening our minds to new possibilities and inspiring us, movies have changed our lives in several ways. The best way to ensure cinema doesn’t have a negative impact is to appreciate and learn the good aspects while leaving out the bad.

Looking for more CBSE Essays ? Check BYJU’S to find a variety of essays on various topics.

• Share Share

Register with BYJU'S & Download Free PDFs

Register with byju's & watch live videos.

Counselling

Essays About Movies: 7 Examples and 5 Writing Prompts

Check out our guide with essays about movies for budding videographers and artistic students. Learn from our helpful list of examples and prompts.

Watching movies is a part of almost everyone’s life. They entertain us, teach us lessons, and even help us socialize by giving us topics to talk about with others. As long as movies have been produced, everyone has patronized them.  Essays about movies  are a great way to learn all about the meaning behind the picture.

Cinema is an art form in itself. The lighting, camera work, and acting in the most widely acclaimed movies are worthy of praise. Furthermore, a movie can be used to send a message, often discussing issues in contemporary society. Movies are entertaining, but more importantly, they are works of art. If you’re interested in this topic, check out our round-up of screenwriters on Instagram .

5 Helpful Essay Examples 

1. the positive effects of movies on human behaviour by ajay rathod, 2. horror movies by emanuel briggs, 3. casablanca – the greatest hollywood movie ever (author unknown).

• 4.  Dune Review: An Old Story Reshaped For The New 2021 Audience by Oren Cohen

5. Blockbuster movies create booms for tourism — and headaches for locals by Shubhangi Goel

• 6. Moonage Daydream: “Who Is He? What Is He?” by Jonathan Romney
• 7. La Bamba: American Dreaming, Chicano Style by Yolanda Machado

1. My Favorite Movie

2. movies genres, 3. special effects in movies, 4. what do you look for in a movie, 5. the evolution of movies.

“​​Films encourage us to take action. Our favourite characters, superheroes, teach us life lessons. They give us ideas and inspiration to do everything for the better instead of just sitting around, waiting for things to go their way. Films about famous personalities are the perfect way to affect social behaviour positively. Films are a source of knowledge. They can help learn what’s in the trend, find out more about ancient times, or fill out some knowledge gaps.”

In this movie essay, Rathod gives readers three ways watching movies can positively affect us. Movie writers, producers, and directors use their platform to teach viewers life skills, the importance of education, and the contrast between good and evil. Watching movies can also help us improve critical thinking, according to Briggs. Not only do movies entertain us, but they also have many educational benefits. You might also be interested in these  essays about consumerism .

“Many people involving children and adults can effect with their sleeping disturbance and anxiety. Myths, non-realistic, fairy tales could respond differently with being in the real world. Horror movies bring a lot of excitement and entertainment among you and your family. Horror movies can cause physical behavior changes in a person by watching the films. The results of watching horror movies shows that is has really effect people whether you’re an adult, teens, and most likely happens during your childhood.”

In his essay, Briggs acknowledges why people enjoy horror movies so much but warns of their adverse effects on viewers. Most commonly, they cause viewers nightmares, which may cause anxiety and sleep disorders. He focuses on the films’ effects on children, whose more sensitive, less developed brains may respond with worse symptoms, including major trauma. The films can affect all people negatively, but children are the most affected.

“This was the message of Casablanca in late 1942. It was the ideal opportunity for America to utilize its muscles and enter the battle. America was to end up the hesitant gatekeeper of the entire world. The characters of Casablanca, similar to the youthful Americans of the 1960s who stick headed the challenge development, are ‘genuine Americans’ lost in a hostile region, battling to open up another reality.”

In this essay, the author discusses the 1942 film  Casablanca , which is said to be the greatest movie ever made, and explains why it has gotten this reputation. To an extent, the film’s storyline, acting, and even relatability (it was set during World War II) allowed it to shine from its release until the present. It invokes feelings of bravery, passion, and nostalgia, which is why many love the movie. You can also check out these  books about adaption . 

4.   Dune Review: An Old Story Reshaped For The New 2021 Audience by Oren Cohen

“Lady Jessica is a powerful woman in the original book, yet her interactions with Paul diminish her as he thinks of her as slow of thought. Something we don’t like to see in 2021 — and for a good reason. Every book is a product of its time, and every great storyteller knows how to adapt an old story to a new audience. I believe Villeneuve received a lot of hate from diehard Dune fans for making these changes, but I fully support him.”

Like the previous essay, Cohen reviews a film, in this case, Denis Villeneuve’s  Dune , released in 2021. He praises the film, writing about its accurate portrayal of the epic’s vast, dramatic scale, music, and, interestingly, its ability to portray the characters in a way more palatable to contemporary audiences while staying somewhat faithful to the author’s original vision. Cohen enjoyed the movie thoroughly, saying that the movie did the book justice. 

“Those travelers added around 630 million New Zealand dollars ($437 million) to the country’s economy in 2019 alone, the tourism authority told CNBC. A survey by the tourism board, however, showed that almost one in five Kiwis are worried that the country attracts too many tourists. Overcrowding at tourist spots, lack of infrastructure, road congestion and environmental damage are creating tension between locals and visitors, according to a 2019 report by Tourism New Zealand.”

The locations where successful movies are filmed often become tourist destinations for fans of those movies. Goel writes about how “film tourism” affects the residents of popular filming locations. The environment is sometimes damaged, and the locals are caught off guard. Though this is not always the case, film tourism is detrimental to the residents and ecosystem of these locations. You can also check out these  essays about The Great Gatsby .

6. Moonage Daydream:  “Who Is He? What Is He?” by Jonathan Romney

“Right from the start, Brett Morgen’s  Moonage Daydream  (2022) catches us off guard. It begins with an epigraph musing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead,” then takes us into deep space and onto the surface of the moon. It then unleashes an image storm of rockets, robots, and star-gazers, and rapid-fire fragments of early silent cinema, 1920s science fiction, fifties cartoons, and sixties and seventies newsreel footage, before lingering on a close-up of glittery varnish on fingernails.” 

Moonage Daydream  is a feature film containing never-before-seen footage of David Bowie. In this essay, Romney delves into the process behind creating the movie and how the footage was captured. It also looks at the director’s approach to creating a structured and cohesive film, which took over two years to plan. This essay looks at how Bowie’s essence was captured and preserved in this movie while displaying the intricacies of his mind.

7. La Bamba:  American Dreaming, Chicano Style by Yolanda Machado

“A traumatic memory, awash in hazy neutral tones, arising as a nightmare. Santo & Johnny’s mournful “Sleep Walk” playing. A sudden death, foreshadowing the passing of a star far too young. The opening sequence of Luis Valdez’s  La Bamba  (1987) feels like it could be from another film—what follows is largely a celebration of life and music.”

La Bamba  is a well-known movie about a teenage Mexican migrant who became a rock ‘n’ roll star. His rise to fame is filled with difficult social dynamics, and the star tragically dies in a plane crash at a young age. In this essay, Machado looks at how the tragic death of the star is presented to the viewer, foreshadowing the passing of the young star before flashing back to the beginning of the star’s career. Machado analyses the storyline and directing style, commenting on the detailed depiction of the young star’s life. It’s an in-depth essay that covers everything from plot to writing style to direction.

5 Prompts for Essays About Movies

Simple and straightforward, write about your favorite movie. Explain its premise, characters, and plot, and elaborate on some of the driving messages and themes behind the film. You should also explain why you enjoy the movie so much: what impact does it have on you? Finally, answer this question in your own words for an engaging piece of writing.

From horror to romance, movies can fall into many categories. Choose one of the main genres in cinema and discuss the characteristics of movies under that category. Explain prevalent themes, symbols, and motifs, and give examples of movies belonging to your chosen genre. For example, horror movies often have underlying themes such as mental health issues, trauma, and relationships falling apart. 

Without a doubt, special effects in movies have improved drastically. Both practical and computer-generated effects produce outstanding, detailed effects to depict situations most would consider unfathomable, such as the vast space battles of the  Star Wars  movies. Write about the development of special effects over the years, citing evidence to support your writing. Be sure to detail key highlights in the history of special effects. 

Movies are always made to be appreciated by viewers, but whether or not they enjoy them varies, depending on their preferences. In your essay, write about what you look for in a “good” movie in terms of plot, characters, dialogue, or anything else. You need not go too in-depth but explain your answers adequately. In your opinion, you can use your favorite movie as an example by writing about the key characteristics that make it a great movie.

From the silent black-and-white movies of the early 1900s to the vivid, high-definition movies of today, times have changed concerning movies. Write about how the film industry has improved over time. If this topic seems too broad, feel free to focus on one aspect, such as cinematography, themes, or acting.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the  best essay checkers .

If you’re looking for more ideas, check out our  essays about music topic guide !

Meet Rachael, the editor at Become a Writer Today. With years of experience in the field, she is passionate about language and dedicated to producing high-quality content that engages and informs readers. When she's not editing or writing, you can find her exploring the great outdoors, finding inspiration for her next project.

View all posts

609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema

Welcome to our list of cinema essay topics! With our unique writing ideas, you are sure to write an excellent film analysis or a study of the movie industry. Besides, we’ve included writing samples you can use for inspiration. Have fun with our film essay topics!

🏆 Best Film Essay Topics

📚 catchy cinema essay topics, 👍 good argumentative essay topics about movies, 🌶️ hot movie essay topics to write about, 🎓 most interesting research topics about cinema, 💡 simple film analysis essay topics, 📌 easy cinema essay topics, ❓ research questions about movies.

• Watching Movies in Cinemas and at Home
• Strengths of the Moview ”Titanic”
• Movie Analysis: “Hacksaw Ridge”
• Analysis of Gwen’s Addiction in the Film “28 Days”
• What Does the Red Balloon Symbolize? Movie Analysis
• Psychology in The Pursuit of Happyness Film
• Books vs. Movies: Comparison of Features
• Film “Split” Psychotherapy Analysis The film Split is centered around the main character Kevin, who struggles with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), also known as multiple personality disorder.
• “The Green Mile”: Movie Analysis “The Green Mile” is a mirror of today’s generation where vices surpass the virtues in society. It describes how crimes are left unsolved in the name of capital punishment.
• 10 Things I Hate About You Movie Analysis 10 Things I Hate About You is a romantic comedy that portrays teenage love through an engaging story about two sisters and the boys’ attempts to impress them. The movie is based on the play The Taming of the Shrew written by Shakespeare in the sixteenth century, yet adapted to…
• Sociological Concepts in “The Truman Show” Film “The Truman Show” by Peter Weir is a movie that provides viewers with a description of how society can influence individuals and shape their beliefs and actions.
• “My Sister’s Keeper” Ethics Essay The paper outlines the plot and themes of the “My Sister’s Keeper” film and explores the key ethical issue presented in it from the standpoint of 10 different ethical theories.
• Developmental Theories in Docter’s “Up” Movie In the movie “Up” by Pete Docter, two protagonists of different ages are featured, which allows the integration of two developmental theories into the assessment.
• Why Movies Are Popular All Over the World Movies provide entertainment as well as knowledge to people. They give people an opportunity to learn about different cultures, religions, and histories.
• Comparing Literature and Film: Rapunzel and Tangled The paper states that Rapunzel is a traditional tale that has been passed through generations. Tangled is the animated movie adaptation.
• Remember the Titans: Leadership Examples Boone did not want to accept the leadership because of racial prejudices and because he felt like he was doing the same thing that was once done to him.
• Raise the Red Lantern: Summary and Analysis Raise the Red Lantern is a beautiful and simple story of a young girl with a number of complex issues represented through effective mise-en-scène and roof-top level shots.
• “Miss Representation” Documentary Film Analysis The film “Miss Representation” depicts the reality of the disproportionate objectification of women and girls in the contemporary media-constructed culture.
• Interstellar: An Analysis of the Film This essay analyzes Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar. It is described through the receptive theory of criticism because of the depth of the story.
• The Effects of Violent Video Games and Movies The paper discusses the effects of violent video games and movies. There is a debate over the relationship between violent video games and movies and aggressive behavior.
• Gran Torino Essay – Clint Eastwood’s Film Analysis Gran Torino film, shot by Clint Eastwood, represents the life of Walter Kowalski, a veteran of the Korean War and a true American with his views and moral principles.
• Film “Sybil” by Joseph Sargent: Plot Summary and Analysis This paper tells about Sybil which highlights the importance of timely professional care in the case of multiple personality disorder, while showing the risks.
• Mi Familia Movie Analysis My Family ? (1995) is an American film by Gregory Nava ?. Learn more about the plot and the characters of Mi Familia from this movie analysis ? essay!
• “Act Without Words I” by Beckett: Response to the Movie “Act Without Words I” by Samuel Beckett is an example of the Theater of the Absurd, a designation of the particular type of plays written by different playwrights.
• Going to the Movies Cinemas have giant screens that would not fit into your home and offer quality surround sound which makes watching a movie a truly immersive experience.
• The Documentary Film “The Corporation”: Review It would be interesting to know more examples of how corporations take the responsibilities of the government and what are the costs and benefits of such actions
• “Good Will Hunting” Movie: Abandonment, Love, and Attachment The movie Good Will Hunting is a prime example of how cinema can provide the audience with a comprehensive narrative of one’s complex psyche and its role.
• The Analysis of the Film “Dune” Watching the film “Dune” allows us to assert that characteristics such as music, special effects, acting, and an interesting plot influenced the quality of the film.
• Why Are Fantasy Films so Popular? Once people escape into this irrational world of fantasy, they are allowed to wonder and question conventions that have been accepted as truths.
• Character Analysis of the Film “Secret Window” The film “Secret Window” is based on the fictional novel Secret Garden written by Stephen King. This paper tries to analyze the characters of the film.
• Films and Their Role in Society Films are part of an industry traditionally devoted to providing “pure entertainment”. However, more recently, there is a focus on the impact of films on society.
• Deontology and Ethical Relativism in “The Founder” Film The essay aims to review the movie The Founder, starring Michael Keaton, from the perspective of ethical theories: deontology and ethical relativism.
• “Interstellar” Film Under Sociological Analysis Interstellar is a 2014 cinematographic masterpiece by Christopher Nolan that portrays a near-future dystopian society placed on Earth.
• Video Games Versus Movies The current paper discusses three reasons that make video games a more rewarding and immersive entertainment medium than movies.
• Violence in Movies: Adverse Effects on the Adolescents Violence in films and television programs has negatively affected adolescents’ general mental and physical behavior while also desensitizing some in real life.
• “Cast Away” by Robert Zemeckis: Movie Review The movie “Cast Away” focuses on one’s capability to survive and challenges faced in such an environment, where many critical details are considered.
• Critique of the Movie “Contagion” The paper states that “Contagion” is a movie that is not only enjoyable due to its non-standard plot and impressive acting but also highly educational.
• Emotions in the “Up” Movie by Pete Docter The movie “UP” is one of the highly emotional and impactful animated films made by Pixar. The story describes the importance of appreciation, love, and friendship.
• “Whiplash”: The Creation and Key Observations Whiplash, directed by Damien Chazelle in 2014, still conveys a powerful message that is brought to the audience through creative directing.
• Environmental Issues in The Lorax Movie The movie The Lorax narrates the story of a walled city that is characterized by an artificial way of life. This essay gives a detailed summary and discussion of the film.
• “Django Unchained”: Discussion of Film Techniques This essay discusses in detail the two cinematic techniques — light control and camera angles — that Tarantino used to reinforce the subthemes of the film “Django Unchained.”
• Main Idea and Characters of “Dead Poets Society” Film “Dead Poets Society” is a great representation of building relationships between adolescents of the opposite sex, teachers, and parents, with an emphasis on the topic of suicide.
• Movie Reflection – “Contagion” by Steven Soderbergh Towards the end of the film, the spread of the disease is halted after the discovery of a vaccine that can counter its effects. Steven Soderbergh directed the film.
• Les Intouchables Summary & Analysis “Les Intouchables” explores life in Paris and the clash of the representatives of two different social classes. This is a French film directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano.
• Business Ethics and Dilemmas in the Film ‘Michael Clayton’ The movie “Michael Clayton” addresses a wide range of ethical issues faced by corporations and advocates. One of the ethical issues addressed entails the impacts of capitalism on morality.
• “Inception” Directed by Christopher Nolan: Film Analysis This paper analyzes the “Inception” movie, which explores issues such as family dynamics and crime from a psychoanalytic perspective.
• Viewing Movies: The Problem of Age Restriction Although movies have been known to be a source of negative influence on children, they also have benefits, and the age restriction should be eliminated to allow children to watch.
• Organizational Behavior in the “Up in the Air” Film The goal of this paper is to summarize the concepts in Up in the Air and analyze the links between the story told in the movie and well-known theories of organizational behavior.
• Cinematography of “Scarface” Film by Brian De Palma In his film Scarface, the director Brian De Palma is focused on demonstrating Montana’s violent way towards the American dream through cinematography, music, and acting techniques.
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Play and Movie Michael Hoffman’s 1999 movie version of the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream seeks to meet the demands of an audience of the late twentieth century – it has wrestling in the mud.
• Urbanization and Poverty in “Slumdog Millionaire” Film Boyle’s movie, “Slumdog Millionaire,” is one of many successful attempts to depict the conditions in which people who are below the poverty level live.
• “The Crucible” (1996) Film Analysis The Crucible is a film that dramatizes real-life events that took place in Salem where people accused as witches became subjects of mass executions.
• The Films “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale” and “Hachiko Monogatari” The film “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale”, is a memorable drama featuring Richard Gere. The movie was remade in 2009 from a Japanese film of 1987 named “Hachiko Monogatari”.
• The Relevant Aspects of the Movie “A Beautiful Mind” The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relevant aspects of “A Beautiful Mind”, the topic of mind and motivation, and the lessons learned from this masterpiece of cinema.
• An Analysis of the movie “Crash” by Paul Haggis In the movie “Crash” by Paul Haggis the characters tend to assume certain socioeconomic status and behaviour with certain cultures.
• Symbolism in Disney’s Movie “Encanto” One of those movies that people will remember ten years from now is Encanto. The movie has flawless execution, and many people may relate to its topic.
• Plot and Main Idea of “Back to the Future” Film The “Back to the Future” film’s main idea seems important and modern, as it says that people can influence both their own and others’ future through actions in the present.
• The “Hidden Figures” Movie by Ted Melfi The movie “Hidden Figures” by Ted Melfi tells the story of three African-American women who played a significant role in developing the American space program.
• Adolescence: Social Concepts in “Mean Girls” Film The film “Mean Girls” depicts the confrontation of the “new vs. popular students.” The film’s social concepts are presented in a sophisticated and exciting manner.
• The Language of Dance in the “La La Land” Movie The purpose of this paper is to describe how movement is used to portray the intention and theme of the movie La La Land.
• “A Quiet Place”: Film Analysis The film heavily relies on sound effects and narrative structure to convey its central motif, a dreadful life in which silence is a means of survival.
• Documentary Movies Review The paper discusses several films. It includes “The Mask You Live In”, “Women Who Make America”, and “Miss Representation”.
• “Black Panther”: Dealing With Real-Life Social Issues Black Panther is an example of such a movie, which demonstrates how science interacts with literature and society.
• The US Film Industry’s History and Competitiveness This study will evaluate the history of the US film industry, the industry’s competitiveness, and the prospects of inward and outward foreign direct investment.
• The Movie “Titanic”: A Survey of Semiotics This paper will give a semiotic survey of the film ‘Titanic’ directed by James Cameron. Media Semiotics will be the approach in studying features of communication.
• Movie Theatre Business: Porter’s Five Forces Analysis The movie industry should expand the target audience and stop relying on youths whose unpredictable behavior significantly affects the profits generated by companies.
• The Film Review: “Scarface” DePalma’s Scarface (1983) creates a new gangster genre reorganizes the problems faced by earlier gangster movies and create a larger than life depiction of the issue.
• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the Fearless Film In the Fearless movie, Max has been suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that has affected his everyday life, personality, perceptions, and behaviors.
• Gender Stereotyping in the “Pretty Woman” Movie The movie Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, created quite a bit of stirring among the feminist supporters of the country.
• Theoretical Concepts in “Freedom Writers” Movie The analysis of the movie gives an opportunity to observe the introduction of theoretical sociology and psychology.
• “Mean Girls” by Mark Walters Movie Analysis Mean girls’ is a teenage movie that bring about, certain aspects of teenage or adolescent issues mostly amongst the female gender.
• Pride and Prejudice (2005): Movie Analysis The character of the move that has been chosen for this analysis of personality is Keira Knightley’s character of Elizabeth Bennet directed by Joe Wright.
• The Film “The Help” from a Sociological Perspective The paper states that due to the change of narrative situations in the film “The Help”, the ideological point of view of the focal characters is manifested.
• Roma by Alfonso Cuarón: A Film Analysis The movie provides a comprehensive image of Mexico in the 1970s. The film highlights the major impact of class, race, and gender on the life of people in Mexican society.
• Analysis of “Sleepy Hollow” Film Directed by Tim Burton Tim Burton, the director, employed creativity in developing the story by improving the plot of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and creating a new one with modified characters.
• Love, Simon’ by Greg Berlanti: Movie Analysis Love, Simon is an excellent example of a movie that expresses the difficulties of people who are afraid to open their sexual orientation to others.
• “Death in Venice”: Mann’s Novel v. Visconti’s Film The purpose of this paper is to discuss the similarities and differences between Thomas Mann’s novel “Death in Venice” and Luchino Visconti’s cinematic adaptation.
• “Don’t Look Up” Movie Directed by Adam McKay The Netflix video ‘Don’t Look Up’, directed by Adam McKay, pays attention to two astronomers who endeavor to alert humans.
• The Film “The Fisher King” by Terry Gilliam: Psychological Analysis The film “The Fisher King” by Terry Gilliam, showcases a possible permutation of symptoms that people suffering from schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder may adopt.
• Applying Psychological Principles to Girl Interrupted Film The Girl Interrupted film’s psychodynamic perspective is clearly portrayed through the different characters’ behavior, feelings, and actions.
• Comedy Movies: Positive Psychological Effects Comedy movies make people feel relaxed, especially after stressful events or when they are extremely exhausted.
• Postmodernism Film: Run Lola Run Analysis The postmodern cinema invites the audience to participate in the dialogue. Run Lola Run, a movie produced by Tom Tykwer, is the specimen of the era that characterizes it quite accurately.
• Sociology of “Avatar” Movie by James Cameron “Avatar” is a science fiction movie created and produced by James Cameron. The movie follows the colonization of Pandora by the humans whose aim was to exploit the resources.
• Shakespeare’s Othello Movie Adaptation Overview and Social Relevance William Shakespeare’s “Othello” has been adapted to a variety of media forms, and among the most contemporary versions is Olive Parker’s movie with the same name.
• The Most Beautiful Thing: Short Film Review The short film “The Most Beautiful Thing” brings to life the important themes of love, disability, and communication due to the effective use of film direction.
• Cultural Analysis and Inferences from the Movie 42 The movie 42, which was released in 2013, has been applauded for its relevance. Branch Rickey is a renowned manager of America’s famous Baseball Team-the Brooklyn Dodgers.
• “Hotel Rwanda” Directed by Terry George: An Analysis of the Film The British film “Hotel Rwanda” directed by Terry George is one of the most emotional historical dramas of this millennium, which is not a big box office movie.
• The “Hero” Film: Shot-by-Shot Analysis The plot of the film “Hero” (2002) by Zhang Yimou unfolds the historical events that took place in the 3rd century B.C..
• The Aviator’ by Martin Scorsese Film Analysis The Aviator is a biographical film about the life of Howard Hughes. The film concentrates on the Hughes’ life from early adulthood and ends towards the end of his life.
• Race and Culture in The Hate You Give Movie The Hate You Give movie reveals society issues, particularly how society can be cruel even when one wants to amend his/her ways and make right for the errors they did.
• Analysis of the Movie “Thank You for Smoking”: The Propaganda The movie presents the deceitful nature of Tobacco Academy Studies that use the skills of their lobbyist Nick Naylor to confuse the public that cigarette smoking is good for their.
• ”Boy” Directed by Taika Waititi as a Representation of the Local Culture The film “Boy” (2010), directed by Taika Waititi, is a comedy-drama that tells the story of a young Maori boy’s relationship with his father, who returns from prison.
• “Get Out” Movie: Genre, Medium, and Pathos The movie Get Out is an exciting illustration of interracial interactions combined with pseudoscientific forces, such as the transfer of consciousness.
• Principles of Suspense in the Film “The Fugitive” The film “The Fugitive” is an action thriller film. This essay will focus on the principles of suspense shown in particular scenes of the film and provide a detailed discussion.
• The “Juno” Movie Under Communication Analysis The movie “Juno” brings out the challenges, ethical dilemmas, and emotional conflicts that Juno had to go through due to teenage pregnancy.
• Sociological Themes in the “Taxi Driver” Film The movie Taxi Driver discusses the sociological themes of deviance and socialization, showing the world through the eyes of a war veteran unable to adjust to a healthy life.
• Film Analysis of “Titanic” by James Cameron Its production techniques and the movie’s connection with society will be discussed over the course of this essay as well.
• The Devil Wears Prada Film’s Critical Analysis The Devil Wears Prada film tells the story of how the chief can be stubborn, but the courage of potential employees can surprise them.
• Rhetorical Analysis of a Film “Us” By pointing out metaphors, symbols, dialogues, and details in various scenes, The Film Theorists make a convincing argument about the film’s “Us” deeper meaning.
• “Life Is Beautiful” Film by Roberto Benigni The “Life Is Beautiful” film is an illustrative example of a work of art that appeared during the period of the exploration of the Holocaust.
• Caregivers, Teachers, and Children in “Matilda” Film Based on the film “Matilda,” this paper discusses the roles of caregivers, teachers, and children and the interventions parents can use to improve their relationship with children.
• Psychotherapy. “A Beautiful Mind” Film by Ron Howard The well-known movie A Beautiful Mind provides a scope of assumptions and suggestions regarding hidden capabilities of the mind.
• Justice Miscarriage in “The Shawshank Redemption” Film A major theme depicted in “The Shawshank Redemption” film is the inherent failure of the criminal justice system which creates conditions for the miscarriage of justice.
• Acculturation and Assimilation in the Mi Familia Movie The movie Mi Familia by Gregory Nava tells the story of a Mexican family, the Sanchez, who immigrated to the United States. The plot revolves around three generations.
• Sociological Analysis of One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Film The teaching from the film “One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is that inclusion and consensus methods should be considered while treating patients with mental health issues.
• “The State of Play: Trophy Kids”: Main Idea and Summary of the Film “The State of Play: Trophy Kids” trails five progenies exercising in a sport on how discipline and parental guidance influence the children psychologically and physically.
• Lighting and Landscapes: The Movie “Call Me by Your Name” Throughout the movie Call Me by Your Name, both lighting and landscapes play a central role in promoting the metaphorical semantics and emotional background.
• Representations of Disability, the Example of “Forrest Gump” Film The topic of the present paper is to define the societal roles of handicapped people and to find out how they have been formed due to exclusion and stereotypes of normal people.
• Romantic Comedy in American Film Industry Romantic comedy is a part of the American film industry. A Romantic comedy film basically refers to a movie which is very humorous and it denotes romantic ideals.
• Leadership in “Erin Brockovich” Film In the “Erin Brockovich” movie, the main protagonist, Erin, is a transformational leader, he shows passion and determination until the desired outcome is achieved.
• Gender Representation in Akira Kurosawa’s Films This paper is intended to analyze one of the most controversial topics of Kurosawa’s films, specifically gender representation.
• Schizophrenia in “A Beautiful Mind” Film by Howard Directed by Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind is a chef-d’oeuvre film centered on the life and mental illness of the renowned mathematician, John Forbes Nash.
• Social Inequality in Poems, Songs, and Films Social stratification in the U.S is based on race and ethnicity and is demonstrated in films, poetry, and songs.
• “Creed” Movie vs. “The Contender” Book by Lipsyte: Similarities and Differences There are many similarities between Lipsyte’s novel the Contender and the movie Creed, one of the major themes in both of them is finding yourself.
• Lessons of “Bon Cop, Bad Cop” for English-Canadian Film “Bon Cop, Bad Cop” points to some social and political messages in the movie’s plot. The film is significant, and its newness for the Canadian filmmaking industry is essential.
• “Little Miss Sunshine” Film About Family Issues This essay highlights issues in society and the family through metaphors from Jonathan Dayton’s film Little Miss Sunshine.
• “Get Out” Movie’s Rhetorical Analysis The movie Get Out is a horror satire. Its main purpose is to illustrate an exaggerated reality of interracial interactions from the African-American person’s perspective.
• Comparison of the Books and the Movies This essay will aim to contrast both ways of representing the story and learn about the pros and cons of each by comparing their features.
• Cinematography and Visuals in the Tenet Film The purpose of this essay is to discuss the role and effect of the visual aspect in Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet.
• Review of “Frida” Movie From Historical Viewpoint The paper aims to discuss the “Frida” film from the viewpoint of its historical accuracy and entertainment value.
• Disney Movie “Beauty and The Beast” In “Beauty and The Beast” beauty is considered to be the hallmark of attractiveness, with many of the film personalities presented as beautiful having a field day in many aspects.
• “West Side Story” and “Romeo and Juliet” Movies Comparative Analysis Even a brief analysis of “West Side Story” and “Romeo + Juliet” leaves no doubt as to the fact that the apparent similarity between two cinematographic pieces is only a skin deep.
• Deciphering the Meaning of Animals in Films In looking at the use of animals in film, with the possible exception of family type, feel-good animal stories, animals are usually symbolic.
• Cannibalism and Female Desire in Horror Films The films “Raw”, “Jennifer’s Body”, and “Ginger Snaps”,have cherished the idea of many female protagonists or the main characters being portrayed as cannibals.
• Review of “Kung Fu Panda” Movie: Educational Psychology In the movie “Kung Fu Panda”, individual characters use a multimodal learning approach in taking in information.
• “The Neighbor’s Window”: Film Review The characters of the movie “The Neighbor’s Window” Alli and her husband Jacob, watching the life of their neighbors, begin to remember their youth and regret their existing life.
• Beauty and the Beast’: Movie Review The movie ‘Beauty and the Beast’ seems to be about the power of love. It does not matter how good-looking a person is, but it is important what personality he or she possesses.
• ”Doctor Strange”: Description and Interpretation The story of the movie is constrained by the need to fit within an established cinematic universe and appeal to the common viewer.
• Leadership Styles in the Forrest Gump Film Forrest managed to inspire Elvis Presley, who imitated Forrest’s dance moves. As such, he received a football scholarship and became a top running back.
• “The Last King of Scotland” Film Analysis If power is the ability to influence the results and behavior of others, then “The Last King of Scotland” helps us understand where despotism and tyranny can lead.
• Real and Escapist Life in the Film “The Slumdog Millionaire” The movie, Slumdog Millionaire attempts to contrast two themes: real-life vs escapist life. The characters are trying to escape from their miserable situations.
• Mise-En-Scène in Sofia Coppola’s Films Sofia Coppola is a director known for her feminine movies and signature style. She extensively uses camera movement, composition, color, and lighting to create a striking.
• Aging Theory Analysis in the Film “Up” The film “Up” directed by Docter (2009) shows a storyline about the 78-year-old grouch Carl Fredriksen who believes that life bypasses him.
• Gender Stereotypes in “Frozen” Animated Film The shift in gender stereotypes is presented in “Frozen.” The contrast between Elsa and Anna is a conflict between the past stereotypes and emerging perceptions.
• The Movie “The Devil Wears Prada”: Recommendations Based on what has been presented so far, it is the recommendation of this analysis that Miranda should attempt to pursue a leadership path that integrates sufficient relationship behaviour into it.
• The Movie “Back to the Future”: The Genre of Science Fiction This work presents the movie “Back to the Future” as a prominent example of the science fiction genre, which contains elements of this classification.
• Critical Success Factors: Movie Industry in Hollywood This paper will discuss importance and application of critical success factors in business based on movie industry in Hollywood, which is a home of some of the largest film producers in the world.
• Ideology in “The Matrix” Film “The Matrix” is a film that covers both the mainstream and science fiction film-making cultures. After its premiere, the movie was able to achieve mainstream success even though it was a science fiction film.
• Renton’s Addiction in the “Trainspotting” Movie This paper reviews the character of Renton in the “Trainspotting” movie and looks at ways and steps through which can be helped him to overcome his addiction.
• Cinematic Language in A Beautiful Mind Film The movie A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard, implements a wide range of cinematography techniques to help the audience develop an understanding of powerful ideas.
• The Symbolism of the Cage in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Film and Novel The cage symbol has tremendous value for creating Breakfast characters at Tiffany’s feelings; however, the peculiarities of the film and the novel revealed it differently.
• Predictive Analysis in Business: “Moneyball” Film Predictive analysis is a powerful tool for businesses and individuals; it has started to be used extensively over the past several years.
• “The Kite Runner” Film: History and Cinematography The historical background of the movie The Kite Runner started when the Soviet intelligence had evidence that Amin was attempting intercourse with Pakistan and China.
• The “Lions for Lambs” Film Analysis The main theme of Lions for Lambs is that American politicians in America defining the country’s foreign policies refuse to learn the lessons of history.
• ”Argo” Directed by Affleck: Summary and Opinion The movie “Argo” is worth attention and time as it highlights and helps to understand a historical event, namely, the conflict which involved Iran and the U.S.
• “Get Out” Horror Film by Jordan Peele Get Out is a satirical horror directed by Jordan Peele in 2017. Get Out was described as “a movie that plunges into white insecurities about black sexuality.”
• Ethical Analysis of the Awakenings Film The Awakenings movie focuses on Dr. Oliver Sacks’ work treating people with catatonia, a disorder marked by excessive stiffness and a lack of responsiveness to stimuli.
• Change in the Team in the Moneyball Film From the movie Moneyball, it can be learned that change can be a messy process in an organization, and that change takes time to yield fruits.
• Picnic Scene in “Citizen Kane” Movie by Orson Welles In the picnic scene, the producer uses mostly horizontal angles, except for the episode with the motorcade, in which the cars are shot from above.
• “The Patriot”: Historical Film Analysis “The Patriot” is an epic war film which illustrates the relationships of loved ones. The movie is half-way realistic movie and the attempt to address the war-fares.
• The Spirited Away Animated Film The animated film, Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi), by Hayao Miyazaki is of Japanese origin and was released in the year 2001.
• “Twelve Angry Men” Movie Analysis “Twelve Angry Men” is interesting to analyze from the perspective of decision models and the importance of dialogue and potential hidden traps in the decision-making process.
• Nash’s Schizophrenia in “A Beautiful Mind” Film This paper discusses John Nash’s paranoid schizophrenia as portrayed in the film “A Beautiful Mind” using different psychological perspectives.
• Investing in the Film “Escape from Rio Japuni” The paper compares 6 project proposals and finds out that investing in the movie Escape from Rio Japuni is bound to trigger a major triumph.
• The Functions of Film Music: Essay Example Music plays an important role in films. This paper will discuss how music has been used in the movie Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
• Cinematic Techniques in The Silence of the Lambs Movie The paper is devoted to analyzing the cinematic techniques applied in the classic horror movie called The Silence of the Lambs, directed by Jonathan Demme.
• Mise-en-Scene of “Blade Runner” Film by Ridley Scott Based on the opening scene of the film “Blade Runner” by Ridley Scott, the viewers can see that Los Angeles is presented as a modern and developed city.
• The Shawshank Redemption Movie Review The article provides an overview of The Shawshank Redemption, as well as the reasons why it still invariably resonates with the viewer.
• Disney Films: Projector of Our Society’s Values Disney movies have shaped the skills, behaviors, and morals of both children and adults in contemporary society, by engaging them in a continuous series of thoughtless consumption.
• “Rampant: How a City Stopped a Plague” Film Reflection This essay is going to take a look at the 2007 film “Rampant: How a City Stopped a Plague” directed by Midwinter-Pitt, and discuss the depicted Australian method of fighting HIV.
• The Great Debaters – Film Synopsis Produced by Oprah Winfrey The Great Debaters is a 2007 American biopic period film chronicling the success of the 1935 Wiley College Debate Team.
• Chapter 5 of Thompson, & Bordwell’s “Film History” In this essay, Chapter 5 of Thompson, & Bordwell’s “Film History” will be summarized in connection with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an example of German Expressionism.
• Neorealism Elements in “The Color of Paradise” Film The movie The Color of Paradise serves as a spectacular example of post-war Iranian cinema. The film discusses the injustices of contemporary Iranian society.
• Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls Film Analysis For Colored Girls is a purposeful sharpening to the problem of women’s lack of freedom. For Colored Girls is about gender relationships at its African-American version.
• Theme of Hope in “The Shawshank Redemption” Film The film “The Shawshank Redemption” emphasizes the value of hope and the implications of both possessing and losing hope.
• “Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban”: Book and Movie Comparison Both the book “Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban” and its film adaptation share the same character set. The lead character is the hero Harry Potter, a famous wizard.
• True Leadership in the Invictus Film This paper discusses the role of true leadership as depicted in the film Invictus by focusing on the two main characters – Mandela and Pienaar.
• Psychology Behind the Movie “Trading Places” by Landis
• Stereotypes in “Moonlight” Film by Barry Jenkins
• Moral Behaviours in the Movie “Inside Job”
• “Salt” by Phillip Noyce Film Analysis
• Analysis of a Scene in the Film “Vertigo”
• Silver Linings Playbook Film Studies
• Mayan Culture in “Apocalypto” Film Discussion
• “At Last” Movie Directed by Yiwei Liu
• “Walk. Ride. Rodeo.” Movie Evaluation
• The Phenomenon of PR in Film Industry
• “Erin Brockovich” by S. Soderberg: Conflict in a Film
• “The Notebook” Film by Nick Cassavetes
• Psychological Struggles of the Main Character from the “Ben X” Film
• The Movie My Family/ Mi Familia: Mise en Scene Analysis
• Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Harry Potter’ Film Analysis
• “Parasite”: Symbols Represented in the Film
• “To Live” Directed by Zhang Yimou: Movie Analysis
• The Films That Used as a Tool to Reimagine Africa and Africans
• A Conventional Japanese Family in a Film Tokyo Sonata
• Film Production: Camera, Lighting and Sound
• Motivation in the “Whiplash” Film by Damien Chazelle
• 2012′ by Roland Emmerich Film Analysis
• The Body Film by Brian Evenson
• Narrative Campaign of “The Hunger Games” Film
• “Psycho” Film by Alfred Hitchcock
• Representation of Race and Intersectionality in Films: “The 13th”
• Surrealism in the Meshes of the Afternoon Film
• Kant’s Philosophy in the Movie “Gone Baby Gone” by Ben Affleck
• Gender Display in TV Shows, Movies and News
• Indian Culture in the “Pather Panchali” Movie
• American Multi-Cinema, Inc. Analysis
• Analysis of “The Interrupters” Film
• Unhappy Marriages in the Movie ”Passing”
• Split Personality in the Frankie and Alice Film
• Iranian Revolution and Terrorism: the Rex Cinema Massacre
• Stranger Than Fiction: Critical Analysis of Film
• Ethical, Political and Social Issues in Business in “The Corporation” Movie
• The Film “Devil’s Playground” by Schepisi
• Movie Reflection – “Mi Familia”
• Beowulf: Comparing the Movie and the Book
• Gender Expectations in the Disney Film “The Little Mermaid”
• Film Studies: “I am Sam”
• The Film “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Rob Marshall
• The Main Character’s Traits in the “Precious” Film
• Kids Behind Bars: Analysis of Film
• Capitalism and Class Division in the “Parasite” Film
• Defamation in Media Law and Film Industry
• Love and Women in Cinderella and Mulan Films
• Aspects of the Narrative Construction in “Gladiator” Movie
• “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” Book and the Movie: Similarities and Differences
• “Farewell”: Interpersonal Communication in the Film
• “District 9” Movie Critical Review
• Movie Narration & Historical Accuracy: Troy
• Relationships in the “Say Anything” Film by Crowe
• The Film “Die Hard’
• Chinese cinema: Two Stage Sisters and Yellow Earth
• The “Hidden Figures” Film Analysis
• Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” Story and Hitchcock’s Film
• Substance Abuse Disorder in “The Breaking Bad” Film
• Plot, Genre and Main Idea of “The Blind Side” Film
• Comparison of “Metropolis” and “Modern Times” Movies
• Review of “The Patriot” Movie
• “The Doctor” the Film by Randa Haines
• Psychology. Memory Disorder in “Fifty First Dates” Film
• Progress Traps in the “Surviving Progress” Film
• “The Crucible” Film and Its Historical Value
• Horror Movie Analysis and Its Approaches
• “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” Film Analysis
• The Classic Musical Film Grease Analysis
• Gender Roles in the Boys Don’t Cry Movie
• Review of “Anxiety” Short Film
• The Use of Costume as a Style in the Movie ”The Matrix”
• Copyright Infringement in Music and Film Industry
• Benefits and Threats of Digital Cinema: The Matrix World
• The Feminist Ideas in ”A Doll’s House” Movie by Patrick Garland
• “Troy”: Film Analysis From the Point of View of Organizational Behavior
• Communication in the Movie “Parent Trap”: Communication Disorders
• Economic Aspect of The Wall Street Movie
• Interpersonal Communication in the “One Day” Film
• “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” the Film by Joel Coen
• Music in the Movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
• The Fifth Element: Gender and Sexuality in Cinema
• Predicting the Future of Film Narrative
• Hotel Rwanda Film Review
• The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring Film Analysis
• Watching a Movie at Home and in Theatres
• The Film “Do the Right Thing” by Spike Lee
• Family Systems Analysis of “A Family Thing” Movie
• Negotiation Situation in “The Godfather” Movie
• Plot and Characters of the “Brokeback Mountain” Film
• The Last Night in Soho Film’s Critical Analysis
• Maurice by E.M. Forster Novel and Film Adaptation Comparative Analysis
• Rain Man: Movie Characteristic
• Analysing Films “The Great Debaters” and “Crash”
• Racism in the “Devil in a Blue Dress” Film
• Colorblind Racism in “The Help” Film
• “The Wizard of Oz”: Movie Analysis
• “The Corporation”: The Idea of the Movie and Analysis
• History of Film Noir
• Servant Leadership in the Remember the Titans Film
• Conflicts in the Film “A Clockwork Orange”
• Social Conditions Reflected in Tokyo Sonata Film
• Themes in Films by Spike Lee
• Data Visualization of Most Profitable Movie Genres
• The Movie “Liar Liar” by Tom Shadyac: Moral Issues Analysis
• The Film “Gran Torino” by Clinton Eastwood
• Peer Pressure and Decision-Making in “The Breakfast Club” Film
• Narrative Structure in “Notorious” & “The Place Beyond the Pines” Films
• “The Matrix” Movie Discussion
• Historical Depiction in the “Helen of Troy” Movie
• The Mask You Live In (2015) Movie Review
• Stereoscopic Movie Editing: 3D Signal Editing Techniques and Editing Software
• Short Movie “Darkness/Light/Darkness” by Jan Svankmajer
• Cross-Racial Relationships in “The Lunch Date” Movie and Short Stories
• God Existence Argument in the “Forrest Gump” Film
• Kantian Moral Philosophy in the Film “Sleepers” by Barry Levinson
• Analysis of Ben Affleck’s Movie “Gone Baby Gone” From Kant’s Categorical Imperative Perspective
• “Remember the Titans” Movie by B. Yakin
• The Book “A History of Narrative Film”
• Alzheimer’s Disease in the “Away From Her” Movie
• 3D Animation in “Ice Age: The Meltdown” Film
• Master of Deceit in “Othello”: Iago in the Film Adaptation
• China Films’ Influence on Cultural and Creative Industries
• The Movie “Gran Torino” by Clint Eastwood
• “The Big Short”: Analysis of Adam McKay’s Film
• Aspects of the Film “Fruitvale Station”
• “The King’s Speech” Movie and Anxiety Disorder
• Analysis of the Documentary Movie Cowspiracy
• Why the People Crave Horror Movies
• “Doll’s House”: Ibsen’s Play vs. Losey’s Movie
• Deceiver (1997) Movie Analysis
• Interpersonal Relationships in the Movie Crash
• The Film Zodiac and Ethical Concerns
• “Romeo and Juliet”: Forbidden Love in the Eponymous Movie by Baz Luhrmann
• “The Break Up” Movie: Family Conflict Theme
• “Stephen King On Why We Crave Horror Movies” Analysis
• Neoliberalism in the Film “Wall Street”
• Feminist Theory Applied to the “Passengers” Film
• Racial Discrimination in the “Selma” Film
• Films Comparison: “Psycho” by Gus Van Sant and Hitchcock
• Organizational Behavior in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” Movie
• The Film “Dead Man’s Letters” by Konstantin Lopushansky
• “Erin Brockovich” a Film by Steven Soderbergh
• Film Studies: “The Sound of Music” by Robert Wise
• Garcia’s Family in the Film “Real Women Have Curves”
• The Oedipus Complex in Pasolini’s Movie
• Popular Culture in “Inglourious Basterds” Film
• 12 Years a Slave: The Analysis of the Film
• “99 Francs” by Jan Kounen as an Immortal Film
• Visual Effects in the “1917” Movie
• The Movie ”Trainspotting” by Danny Boyle: Presenting Issues and Interventions
• Themes in the Movie “The Physician”
• American Film Comedy. Slapstick Genre
• The Importance of Being Earnest: Play Movie (2002)
• A Story of Struggle in “Farewell My Concubine” Film
• Freud’s Ideas in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” Film
• “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”: Movie of Contrasts
• The Film “Damaged Care” Analysis
• Youth and Media in “The Merchants of Cool” Movie
• Racism and Masculinity in the Film “A Soldier’s Story”
• The Morality of the Movie “Gone Baby Gone”
• Western Movies and Their Effect on Arab Youth
• The Optical Poem Film by Oskar Fischinger
• The Importance of Theological Study of Film
• The Paradise Now Movie Analysis
• Film Tourism Development and Benefits
• Hero’s Journey and Archetypes in “Django Unchained” Film
• Race in “The Long Walk Home” Film
• “Watchmen” Film in Relation to the American Dream
• Dunkirk: Analysis of Film by Nolan
• The Public Enemy and The Godfather Films Analysis
• Amélie Film Directed by J. P. Jeunet
• American Society in the 1980s in the Rocky IV Film
• Cultural Artifact in the “Legally Blonde” Film
• The Movie “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” by Lasse Hallström
• Review of “12 Years a Slave” Movie
• Animals and Plants in “What Darwin Never Knew” Film
• “A Class Divided” Film on Discrimination
• Analysis of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” Film
• The Urban Space Depiction in the Cinema
• Movie Review: Miss Evers’ Boys
• The Movie “Queen and Slim” Analysis
• The LEGO Movie Promotion Video in Accordance With the AIDA Model
• African American Males in “Boyz n The Hood” Movie
• Latin American Film: “Macario” by Roberto Gavaldón
• “American Psycho” Film and Lizardo’s “Fight Club” Article
• Films and Television: Visual Techniques
• “The Medicated Child”: Film Review
• India Partition in the “Earth” Drama Film
• Film Studies. Authorship Theory in Examples
• The “Battle Royale” Film’s Main Ideas
• “Training Day” the Film by Fuqua
• Science Fiction in Literature and Movies
• Christian Symbolism and Imagery in “The Matrix” Film
• Hollywood Film Industry’ Success Factors
• The Social Worker Role in the Film “Crash”
• “A Passage to India” Movie Review
• The Agents of Change Documentary Film Review
• Why the Titanic Film Is Overrated
• The Rubber Film by Quentin Dupieux
• The Movie “Alien” Overview and Analysis
• Vincent and Theo: Life Stories in the Film
• The Film “Dune” by Denis Villeneuve
• “The Iron Lady” Movie Review
• Romero vs. Voces Innocentes: Films Comparison
• Lessons From the Hardball Film Applied to Real Life
• Boiler Room: The Film’ Review
• The Language of the “Citizen Kane” Film
• Patrick’s Final Decision in Gone Baby Gone Film
• “Freedom Song”: Movie Review
• “Paradise Now” the Film by Abu-Assad
• “Seven Samurai” and “The Magnificent Seven” Movies
• Adult – Child Relationships in American Movies
• Ethnocentrism and Stereotypes in the Movie “Crash”
• “The Watchmen” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: Film and Comic
• African-American Stereotypes in Film Is Rooted in How American Society Perceive African-Americans
• Motion Pictures: “Film/Genre” Book by Rick Altman
• Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trilogy: The “Blue” Film
• Chicanos in “Mi Vida Loca” Film by Allison Anders
• Accidental Horror in Smith’s “The Black Tower” Film
• “A Doll’s House” the Movie by Patrick Garland
• The Film “We Bought a Zoo” and Single Parenting Issues
• Nazi Propaganda Movies and Their Effects on Viewers
• “The Shawshank Redemption” Film by Darabont
• “Solitary Nation” – Documentary Film Analysis
• The Hadza: Last of the First Film by Bill Benenson
• Character Change in Malcolm X Film by Spike Lee
• Greek Mythology in the “Inception” Film by Nolan
• Substance-Related Disorders in the “New Jack City” Movie
• “The Great Escape” Film from Project Management Perspective
• “The Death of a Salesman” Film by John Malkovich
• “I, The Worst of All” Film by María Luisa Bemberg
• Politics in “28 Days Later” Film by Danny Boyle
• Visual Effects in “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” Film
• Value of Film in Explaining History
• Polanski’s and Kurzel’s Film Adaptations of Macbeth
• “Rear Window” Movie Analysis
• The Whale Rider Film Directed by Niki Caro
• Film “Ex Machina”: An Artificial Intelligence
• Discussion of Gender and Society Themes in Films
• Analysis of “The Corporation” Movie
• Legacy of the Family. “Snow Falling on Cedars” Movie
• The Butler by Lee Daniels: Movie Review
• “District 9” by Neill Blomkamp – Movie Review
• “Avatar” the Film by J. Cameron
• MPAA Rating System: Issues Involved in Rating Movies
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Book and Film Compared
• “The Last of the Mohicans” 1992 Film by M. Mann
• Historical Evidence in the Renaissance Italy Film
• Modern-Day Berlin City in the “Run Lola Run” Film
• “Moby Dick,” a Film Adaptation of the Novel
• Sexualization of Women in Hollywood Cinema
• Cultural Films’ Studies: Perception and Analysis
• “Sleepers” a Film by Barry Levinson
• Organizational Behavior in the “Troy” Film
• The Godfather Movie: Scoring and Visual Style
• Film Studies: Watching Movies Now and in the Past
• Early Feature Films and Ethical Considerations
• The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street – Film Study
• Fireproof by Stephen Kendrick – Film Study
• The Movie “The Boy in The Striped Pajamas” by Mark Herman
• The Book and Movie Versions of “The Martian”
• Quentin Tarantino: Influence on World Cinema
• Human Experience in the “Purple Hearts” Film
• Meaning of Symbolism in the Film “Parasite”
• “It Must Be Heaven” Film Analysis
• Themes and Characters of the “Annie Hall” Movie
• The Film “My Sister’s Keeper” by Nick Cassavetes
• The Film “Concussion” by Peter Landesman
• “Metropolis”: Analysis of Issues Raised in the Film
• Walter Salles’s Film The Motorcycle Diaries Analysis
• Classic and Mythical Creatures in Books and Animated Films
• A Beautiful Mind: Analysis of Film
• “The Book of Eli” Movie Review
• “A Beautiful Mind” and “Erin Brockovich” Films
• Themes in The Corporation Documentary Film
• Movie Review “Angels and Demons”
• “Armageddon” Film: American Culture of Patriotism
• A Good Scary Movie and Key Requirements
• Being a Trans Woman in the Call Her Ganda Film
• The Movie “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” by Ang Lee
• The Movie”Smurfs”: The Problem of Gender Roles
• The Film “Citizen Kane”: Scenes Analysis
• Poetic Themes in the Selma Film Staring D. Oyelowo
• Plot of “Dope” Film by Rick Famuyiwa
• The Film “Wall Street” by Oliver Stone
• The Gangs of New York Movie Review
• The Film “The Great Debaters” by Denzel Hayes Washington
• The Film “Cabaret” by Bob Fosse
• Martha Rogers’s Theory and the Movie “The Sixth Sense” by Shyamalan
• Battleship Potemkin Movie Review
• “Autism: Insight From Inside” Movie Reflection
• Communication Types in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” Film
• Gone With the Wind’: The War and Love in the Movie
• The Intersection of Hip-Hop, Sport, and Movies
• Character Analysis in the Mean Girls Movie
• Pop Culture in Movies: How Far Can It Get?
• Katharine Hepburn: First Lady of Cinema
• Federico Fellini Films Analysis
• The Lost World Movie Review
• German Democratic Republic in “The Lives of Others” Film
• Gender and Sexuality in “The Exorcist” Film
• Recent Trends in Japanese Horror Cinema by McRoy
• Meth Epidemic as a Social Problem: Film Analysis
• Social Class Position in “The Company Men” Movie
• “Wetback” a Movie by Arturo Pérez Torres
• Western Movies and Arab Youth
• “Erin Brockovich” Film and 2014 Flint Water Crisis
• Charlotte’s Personality in the “Now, Voyager” Film
• “The Constant Gardener” a Film by Fernando Meirelles
• “Out of the Past” Noir Film by Jacques Tourneur
• Colors in “The Thief of Bagdad” Movie by A. Korda
• Film Evaluation Criteria: Approaches and Effects
• “Catch Me If You Can” a Film by Steven Spielberg
• Anti-Communist Campaign and Film Industry
• Hidden Figures by Theodore Melfi: Movie Analysis
• The Thesis of The Corporation Film
• “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” Film Adaptation
• Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Films by Quentin Tarantino
• Film Summary: “The Patriot” Directed by Dean Semler
• The Film “The Blind Side” by John Lee Hancock
• The Film “Stranger on the Third Floor”
• “The Karate Kid” Film by John Avildsen
• Manager Alvaro in the “Twisted” Movie
• “Fences”: Wilson’s Play and Washington’s Movie
• “Avengers: Endgame” as a “Zeitgeist Film”
• Japanese Animation: “My Neighbour Totoro” Film
• The Film “A Time to Kill” by Joel Schumacher
• Silent Films and Foley Artists
• Mythology in The Hunger Games and Moana Films
• The Film “Chinatown” by Roman Polansky
• Spanish Cuisine and Its Importance in Spanish Cinema
• Batman vs. Joker in “The Dark Knight” Film by Nolan
• Historical Themes in the Movie “Gladiator”
• The Photographs “Untitled Film Stills” by Sherman and “Early Colors Interiors” by Simmons
• “Crash”: Movie Significance
• A Study of Watching Movies as a Way to Practice Language Skills: Proposal
• “The Physician” Film and Narrative Tradition of “The Epic of Gilgamesh”
• The “Somm” Documentary Movie by Jason Wise
• Contemporary Literature: Beowulf, the Movie
• Billy Wilder’s Movies Overview
• Interpersonal Relationships and Conflict in “Malcolm & Marie” Film
• “The Help” Movie: Interaction of Characters
• Youth Violence in the Film “The Interrupters”
• Humor at American and British Film Comedy
• Internal Racism in the Movie Amreeka
• How Does “The Matrix” Film Connection to “The Allegory of the Cave” by Plato?
• Cinematography Techniques in Steven Spielberg’s Films
• “His Girl Friday” Film by Howard Hawks
• Family Relations in “Love Actually” Movie
• The Story of the Maasai Tribe in the Film “Man of Serengeti”
• “Erin Brockovich” Film Critique
• Meaning of Life in the Sidney Lumet’s Film “Twelve Angry Men”
• Women as Vigilantes in “Thelma & Louise” Movie
• Signs’ Movie Analytical Critique
• Amadeus: Play and Movie Review
• “Maurice” by James Ivory: Film Outline and Symbols
• “Dragonheart” by Rob Cohen Review Movie
• Political Science. Gus Van Sant’s “Good Will Hunting” Film
• Italian Neo-Realism: An Exclusive Film Genre
• Minorities Portraying in Movies
• The Troy Film Inspired by Homer’s Iliad
• “Letter From an Unknown Woman” the Movie by Max Ophüls
• Narration in the Max Ophuls’ Film “Letter From an Unknown Woman”
• “The Miracle of Bern” Sports Film
• Realism & Formalism. Singer’s Reality Transformed and La Jetée Film
• History of World Cinema. “A Tale of Two Cities” Film
• Urban Chinese Family Life in the “Shower” Film
• Settings in Bollywood Cinema: “Bobby” Movie
• American Noir Tradition in the “Oldboy” Film
• “Sense and Sensibility” and “Pride and Prejudice” Films
• Iron Man and The Avengers: Films Comparison
• Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver” Film by Scorsese
• Auteurism in Film-Making and Art Film Features
• “The Morning Guy” Film Analysis
• Ethics in “John Q” and “Dog Day Afternoon” Movies
• Masculinity in the Film “Saturday Night Fever”
• Modern Film Version of “Hamlet” by Shakespeare
• Not Easily Broken by Duke Bill Film Analysis
• Movie “Joy Luck Club” by Wayne Wang
• Costume Design in the Soylent Green Film
• ”Comfort” Movies and Films With Greatest Impact
• The American Gangster Film Analysis
• Review of “The Battle of Algiers” Film
• Cleopatra: A Historical Figure in the Movie
• The Film “Marry Me” by Kat Coiro: MacBook Placement
• The Alternative Ending for the Film “Thelma and Louise”
• Criteria for Referring a Film to the “Great Works of Cinema”
• Films “172 Hours” and “The Day After Tomorrow”
• The “Factory Girl” Film Review
• Discussion of the Movie “Alex Haley’s Queen”
• The Film “Good Will Hunting” by Gus Van Sant
• “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”: Book and Movie Comparison
• Pulp Fiction as Iconic Gangster Cinema
• Researching the Concept of the Film Genre
• Movie Review: Life as We Know It
• Chinese vs. Taiwanese Film Production
• Pray Away: Documentary Film Review
• The Film “Apollo 13” by Ron Howard
• Gender Biases in “If These Walls Could Talk 2” Film
• The Aeneid: Virgil’s Poem and Modern Film
• “Metropolis” and “Battleship Potemkin”: The Idea of the Film
• The “Blood Quantum” Film by Jeff Barnaby
• Historical Analysis of “12 Years a Slave” Film
• “Warrior Women”: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in Film
• “Aliens”: A Dark and Unique Film
• Gender and Family in “Gone With the Wind” Film
• Disney Princesses: How Movies Impact Gender Roles
• Review of “Murder On A Sunday Morning” Movie
• Oppression of African Americans in the Selma Film
• Jose Antonio Vargas’ Film Documented
• “Amélie” Film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet Review
• The King Kong Movie Poster Examination
• “Boyz n the Hood” by Steve Nicolaides: A Movie Review
• ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’: Depiction of American Culture
• Music and Movie Industry Analysis
• The Mirror (1975) Movie Review
• Does Indian Cinema Educate and Entertain?
• Why Do Many Adults Enjoy Animated Movies?
• Are Disney Movies Suitable for the Adolescent Mind?
• How Has Cinema Matured and Developed Within the Last 10 Years?
• Does the Cinema Reflect or Impose Moral Standards?
• Should Sex and Violence on Television or in the Movies Be Restricted?
• How Have Movies Changed Today’s Society?
• Are Television, Movies, and Music Responsible for Teen Violence?
• How Do Cinema Directors Develop Humanism Theories?
• What Factors Affect Student Cinema Attendance?
• How Did the Cinema Affect the Lives of Women and Children in the 1930s?
• Does Film Technology Impacted Cinema’s Evolution?
• Should Adults Criticize Movies Meant for Children?
• How Has the Experience of Cinema-Going Changed Over the Past Century?
• Do Disney Movies Alter a Child’s Perception?
• Why Was Cinema Going So Popular in the First Half of the Century?
• How Did Indian Cinema Evolve Over the Years?
• What Is the Contribution of Edison and Lumiere to Cinema?
• How Was the Cold War Represented in Cinema?
• Do Walt Disney Movies Negatively Affect Attitudes and Behaviors of the American Child?
• How Is the Heart Rate Affected by Suspenseful Movies?
• What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Horror Movies?
• Should People Who Download Movies and Music Illegally Be Punished?
• Why Are Horror Movies So Appealing to the Human Mind?
• How Were Muslims Influenced by American Movies?

Cite this post

• Chicago (N-B)
• Chicago (A-D)

StudyCorgi. (2021, September 9). 609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/cinema-essay-topics/

"609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema." StudyCorgi , 9 Sept. 2021, studycorgi.com/ideas/cinema-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . (2021) '609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema'. 9 September.

1. StudyCorgi . "609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/cinema-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/cinema-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2021. "609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/cinema-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Cinema were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on January 5, 2024 .

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Childhood Studies
• Chinese Studies

Cinema and Media Studies

• Communication
• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law
• International Relations
• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Linguistics
• Literary and Critical Theory
• Medieval Studies
• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

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

Introduction, anthologies.

• Bibliographies
• Spectator Engagement
• Personal Documentary
• 1940s Watershed Years
• Chris Marker
• Alain Resnais
• Jean-Luc Godard
• Harun Farocki
• Latin American Cinema
• Installation and Exhibition

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• Documentary Film
• Dziga Vertov
• Trinh T. Minh-ha

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Jacques Tati
• Media Materiality
• The Golden Girls
• Find more forthcoming articles...
• Export Citations
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

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.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About Cinema and Media Studies »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Accounting, Motion Picture
• Action Cinema
• Advertising and Promotion
• African American Cinema
• African American Stars
• African Cinema
• AIDS in Film and Television
• Akerman, Chantal
• Allen, Woody
• Almodóvar, Pedro
• Altman, Robert
• American Cinema, 1895-1915
• American Cinema, 1939-1975
• American Cinema, 1976 to Present
• American Independent Cinema
• American Independent Cinema, Producers
• American Public Broadcasting
• Anderson, Wes
• Animals in Film and Media
• Animation and the Animated Film
• Arbuckle, Roscoe
• Architecture and Cinema
• Argentine Cinema
• Aronofsky, Darren
• Arzner, Dorothy
• Asian American Cinema
• Asian Television
• Astaire, Fred and Rogers, Ginger
• Audiences and Moviegoing Cultures
• Australian Cinema
• Authorship, Television
• Avant-Garde and Experimental Film
• Bachchan, Amitabh
• Battle of Algiers, The
• Battleship Potemkin, The
• Bazin, André
• Bergman, Ingmar
• Bernstein, Elmer
• Bertolucci, Bernardo
• Bigelow, Kathryn
• Birth of a Nation, The
• Blade Runner
• Blockbusters
• Bong, Joon Ho
• Brakhage, Stan
• Brando, Marlon
• Brazilian Cinema
• Breaking Bad
• Bresson, Robert
• British Cinema
• Broadcasting, Australian
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Burnett, Charles
• Buñuel, Luis
• Cameron, James
• Campion, Jane
• Canadian Cinema
• Capra, Frank
• Carpenter, John
• Cassavetes, John
• Cavell, Stanley
• Chahine, Youssef
• Chan, Jackie
• Chaplin, Charles
• Children in Film
• Chinese Cinema
• Cinecittà Studios
• Cinema and Media Industries, Creative Labor in
• Cinema and the Visual Arts
• Cinematography and Cinematographers
• Citizen Kane
• City in Film, The
• Cocteau, Jean
• Coen Brothers, The
• Colonial Educational Film
• Comedy, Film
• Comedy, Television
• Comics, Film, and Media
• Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI)
• Copland, Aaron
• Coppola, Francis Ford
• Copyright and Piracy
• Corman, Roger
• Costume and Fashion
• Cronenberg, David
• Cuban Cinema
• Cult Cinema
• Dance and Film
• de Oliveira, Manoel
• Dean, James
• Deleuze, Gilles
• Denis, Claire
• Deren, Maya
• Design, Art, Set, and Production
• Detective Films
• Dietrich, Marlene
• Digital Media and Convergence Culture
• Disney, Walt
• Downton Abbey
• Dr. Strangelove
• Dreyer, Carl Theodor
• Eastern European Television
• Eastwood, Clint
• Eisenstein, Sergei
• Elfman, Danny
• Ethnographic Film
• European Television
• Exhibition and Distribution
• Exploitation Film
• Fairbanks, Douglas
• Fan Studies
• Fellini, Federico
• Film Aesthetics
• Film and Literature
• Film Guilds and Unions
• Film, Historical
• Film Preservation and Restoration
• Film Theory and Criticism, Science Fiction
• Film Theory Before 1945
• Film Theory, Psychoanalytic
• Finance Film, The
• French Cinema
• Game of Thrones
• Gance, Abel
• Gangster Films
• Garbo, Greta
• Garland, Judy
• German Cinema
• Gilliam, Terry
• Global Television Industry
• Godard, Jean-Luc
• Godfather Trilogy, The
• Greek Cinema
• Griffith, D.W.
• Hammett, Dashiell
• Haneke, Michael
• Hawks, Howard
• Haynes, Todd
• Hepburn, Katharine
• Herrmann, Bernard
• Herzog, Werner
• Hindi Cinema, Popular
• Hitchcock, Alfred
• Hollywood Studios
• Holocaust Cinema
• Hong Kong Cinema
• Horror-Comedy
• Hsiao-Hsien, Hou
• Hungarian Cinema
• Icelandic Cinema
• Immigration and Cinema
• Indigenous Media
• Industrial, Educational, and Instructional Television and ...
• Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• Iranian Cinema
• Irish Cinema
• Israeli Cinema
• It Happened One Night
• Italian Americans in Cinema and Media
• Italian Cinema
• Japanese Cinema
• Jazz Singer, The
• Jews in American Cinema and Media
• Keaton, Buster
• Kitano, Takeshi
• Korean Cinema
• Kracauer, Siegfried
• Kubrick, Stanley
• Lang, Fritz
• Latina/o Americans in Film and Television
• Lee, Chang-dong
• Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Cin...
• Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The
• Los Angeles and Cinema
• Lubitsch, Ernst
• Lumet, Sidney
• Lupino, Ida
• Lynch, David
• Marker, Chris
• Martel, Lucrecia
• Masculinity in Film
• Media, Community
• Media Ecology
• Memory and the Flashback in Cinema
• Metz, Christian
• Mexican Film
• Micheaux, Oscar
• Ming-liang, Tsai
• Minnelli, Vincente
• Miyazaki, Hayao
• Méliès, Georges
• Modernism and Film
• Monroe, Marilyn
• Mészáros, Márta
• Music and Cinema, Classical Hollywood
• Music and Cinema, Global Practices
• Music, Television
• Music Video
• Musicals on Television
• Native Americans
• New Media Art
• New Media Policy
• New Media Theory
• New York City and Cinema
• New Zealand Cinema
• Opera and Film
• Ophuls, Max
• Orphan Films
• Oshima, Nagisa
• Ozu, Yasujiro
• Panh, Rithy
• Pasolini, Pier Paolo
• Passion of Joan of Arc, The
• Peckinpah, Sam
• Philosophy and Film
• Photography and Cinema
• Pickford, Mary
• Planet of the Apes
• Poems, Novels, and Plays About Film
• Poitier, Sidney
• Polanski, Roman
• Polish Cinema
• Politics, Hollywood and
• Pop, Blues, and Jazz in Film
• Pornography
• Postcolonial Theory in Film
• Potter, Sally
• Prime Time Drama
• Queer Television
• Queer Theory
• Race and Cinema
• Radio and Sound Studies
• Ray, Nicholas
• Ray, Satyajit
• Reality Television
• Reenactment in Cinema and Media
• Regulation, Television
• Religion and Film
• Remakes, Sequels and Prequels
• Renoir, Jean
• Resnais, Alain
• Romanian Cinema
• Romantic Comedy, American
• Rossellini, Roberto
• Russian Cinema
• Saturday Night Live
• Scandinavian Cinema
• Scorsese, Martin
• Scott, Ridley
• Searchers, The
• Sennett, Mack
• Sesame Street
• Shakespeare on Film
• Silent Film
• Simpsons, The
• Singin' in the Rain
• Sirk, Douglas
• Soap Operas
• Social Class
• Social Media
• Social Problem Films
• Soderbergh, Steven
• Sound Design, Film
• Sound, Film
• Spanish Cinema
• Spanish-Language Television
• Spielberg, Steven
• Sports and Media
• Sports in Film
• Stand-Up Comedians
• Stop-Motion Animation
• Streaming Television
• Sturges, Preston
• Surrealism and Film
• Taiwanese Cinema
• Tarantino, Quentin
• Tarkovsky, Andrei
• Television Audiences
• Television Celebrity
• Television, History of
• Television Industry, American
• Theater and Film
• Theory, Cognitive Film
• Theory, Critical Media
• Theory, Feminist Film
• Theory, Film
• Theory, Trauma
• Touch of Evil
• Transnational and Diasporic Cinema
• Trinh, T. Minh-ha
• Truffaut, François
• Turkish Cinema
• Twilight Zone, The
• Varda, Agnès
• Vertov, Dziga
• Video and Computer Games
• Video Installation
• Violence and Cinema
• Virtual Reality
• Visconti, Luchino
• Von Sternberg, Josef
• Von Stroheim, Erich
• von Trier, Lars
• Warhol, The Films of Andy
• Waters, John
• Wayne, John
• Weerasethakul, Apichatpong
• Weir, Peter
• Welles, Orson
• Whedon, Joss
• Wilder, Billy
• Williams, John
• Wiseman, Frederick
• Wizard of Oz, The
• Women and Film
• Women and the Silent Screen
• Wong, Anna May
• Wong, Kar-wai
• Wood, Natalie
• Yang, Edward
• Yimou, Zhang
• Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema
• Zinnemann, Fred
• Zombies in Cinema and Media
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|195.216.135.184]
• 195.216.135.184

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• History of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• History of Art
• Theory of Art
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• History by Period
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Linguistics
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• History of Religion
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cultural Studies
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Criminal Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business History
• Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Browse content in Economics
• Economic History
• Financial Institutions and Services
• History of Economic Thought
• Browse content in Education
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Environment
• Browse content in Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Sociology
• Political Theory
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Politics and Law
• Public Administration
• Public Policy
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Regional and Area Studies
• Browse content in Sociology
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Reviews and Awards
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

9 Observation in the cinema

• Published: March 2019
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

In this chapter the author notes that for some people ‘observation’ connotes an attitude of surveillance towards the subject. Despite this, the term is a useful summation of the original documentary idea, which was to show viewers as accurately as possible what the filmmaker had seen. ‘Observational cinema’ emerged as one of several closely related documentary approaches of the 1960s, with close ties to anthropology. Unlike other forms, it placed the filmmaker at the centre of the film as an investigator of on-going events, a position shared with the viewer. This approach was encouraged by the introduction of new, light-weight cameras and sound recorders and was inspired partly by Italian Neorealism and partly by live television. While often perceived as aspiring to detachment and scientific objectivity, it was in fact a highly authored form involving a close relationship between filmmaker and subject and representing the limited point of view of the individual observer. The author argues that while the long camera take is often regarded as the primary characteristic of observational cinema, its true marker is a commitment to the sustained witnessing of specific events. A further consequence of observational filmmaking is that it has stimulated reflection on what it means to observe.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

• GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]
• Google Scholar Indexing

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

• Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

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

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• School Education /

Essay on Movies: Advantages and Disadvantages 

• Updated on  
• Dec 19, 2023

Essay on Movies:   Movies create a huge impact on human life. It can be positive as well as negative. People learn and implement new and innovative things from movies in real life. For example, learning new languages, getting inspiration, self-motivation, and gaining more insight and understanding are examples of the brighter side of movies. 

On the contrary, movies with a provoking message that disturbs peace and harmony, inappropriate content, and gender discrimination contribute to desensitization and normalizing harmful behaviors. 

Essay on Movies: Impact of Movies on Society

The motive for watching movies can differ from person to person. For some, it can just be a pastime, but for others, it can present a real-life context for learning. Therefore, it plays a vital role in shaping societal norms and influencing the culture.

Also, movies have the power to evoke emotions in the audience. Besides, it has the potential to raise awareness and promote social change by addressing important issues. Further, movies also serve as a form of entertainment and cultivate a sense of shared experience among the audience. 

Now, let us analyze the advantages and disadvantages of movies to evaluate their impact on society:

Advantages of Movies :

1. Source of Entertainment: Movies are the best mode of enjoyable and immersive entertainment. When one gets bored with the same routine work and needs relaxation, the cinematic experience, with its special effects, music, and storytelling techniques, helps provide a unique way of escaping reality. 

2. Form of Storytelling: Stories take us to a world where we can explore different stories, characters, and themes. Film directors, with the help of visuals and narrative methods, help convey a message and evoke emotions in the audience while developing a connection with the story being told.

3. Means of Social Bonding: Sitting in front of the television and watching a movie with family is fun on another level. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a night out at the cinema or a movie night at home; the experience of bonding among friends and family cannot be explained in words.

Also Read: Film Direction, Drama, and Theatre Archives 

Disadvantages of Movies:

Now, let us understand what adverse effects movies can have on the audience: 

• Negative Influence: Movies with harmful content such as misogyny, celebration of communal violence, racism, and glorification of patriarchy create an adverse impact on the impressionable audience. Therefore, as viewers, it is important to understand the message conveyed very carefully and its potential consequences. 
• Time-Consuming: Also, watching movies for long hours can interfere with work, studies, and other activities. It is, therefore, required to create a balance between leisure and responsibilities. However, this does not apply to present-day and future generations of filmmakers, actors, scriptwriters, cinematographers, camera operators, etc. 
• Expensive: Watching movies is a costly undertaking. Whether tickets, streaming subscriptions, or home entertainment comes with a heavy expense. If one is a regular moviegoer, watching movies can lead to a potential drawback. 

Thus, it is essential to carefully analyze the messaging of movies. It is our responsibility to watch movies as a source of entertainment and not indulge in wrongdoings. Also, cinema is a beautiful art form and a great source of learning for technicians, writers, and filmmakers.

Also Read: Film Making Courses

Ans. Time consumption, social isolation, and distorted realities are the negative impacts of movies on society. 

Ans. Career opportunities, technological advancements, and emotional impacts are some of the positive impacts of movies on society. 

Ans. The movies aim to serve content suitability, so movies are served with different ratings. 

Ans. Movies serve as a source of entertainment, a means of relaxation, and a platform for imparting moral values.

Ans. Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere are credited for inventing movies. 

Related Articles:

Hope this essay on movies is helpful to you. For more information on such interesting and informative topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Deepika Joshi

Deepika Joshi is an experienced content writer with expertise in creating educational and informative content. She has a year of experience writing content for speeches, essays, NCERT, study abroad and EdTech SaaS. Her strengths lie in conducting thorough research and ananlysis to provide accurate and up-to-date information to readers. She enjoys staying updated on new skills and knowledge, particulary in education domain. In her free time, she loves to read articles, and blogs with related to her field to further expand her expertise. In personal life, she loves creative writing and aspire to connect with innovative people who have fresh ideas to offer.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Connect With Us

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today.

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• My Account Login
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Open access
• 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

167k Accesses

28 Citations

67 Altmetric

Metrics details

• 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.

Similar content being viewed by others

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.

Interested readers should regularly consult the society’s scholarly journal Projections .

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

Anderson JD (1996) The reality of illusion. Southern Indiana University Press, Carbondale

Anderson J, Fisher B (1978) The myth of persistence of vision. J Univ Film Assoc 30(4):3–8

Google Scholar  

Anderson J, Anderson B (1993) The myth of persistence of vision revisited. J Film Video 45(1):3–12

Arnheim R (1932) Film als Kunst. Rohwolt, Berlin. English edition: Arnheim R (1957) Film and reality. In: Arnheim R (1957) Film as art (trans: Sieveking LM, Morrow IFD). Faber and Faber, London, pp 17–37. Original work published 1933 as Film

Arnheim R (1974) Art and visual perception. University of California Press, Berkeley

Bálint K, Tan ES (2015) It feels like there are hooks inside my chest: the construction of narrative absorption experiences using image schemata. Projections 9:63–88

Article   Google Scholar  

Bálint K, Hakemulder F, Kuijpers MM, Doicaru MM, Tan ES (2016) Reconceptualizing foregrounding: identifying response strategies to deviation in absorbing narratives. Sci Study Lit 6(2):176–207

Baranowski A, Hecht H (2017) One hundred years of photoplay: Hugo Münsterberg’s lasting contribution to cognitive movie psychology. Projections 11(2):1–21

Berliner T (2017) Hollywood aesthetic. Oxford University Press, New York, NY

Book   Google Scholar  

Bezdek MA, Foy JE, Gerrig RJ (2013) Run for it!: viewers’ participatory responses to film narratives. Psychol Aesthet, Creat, Arts 7(4):409–416

Bezdek MA, Gerrig RJ, Wenzel WG, Shin J, Revill KP, Schumacher EH (2015) Neural evidence that suspense narrows attentional focus. Neuroscience 303:338–345

Article   PubMed   CAS   Google Scholar  

Bezdek MA, Gerrig RJ (2017) When narrative transportation narrows attention: changes in attentional focus during suspenseful film viewing. Media Psychol 20(1):60–89

Bilandzic H, Bussele R (2011) Enjoyment of films as a function of narrative experience, perceived realism and transportability. Communications 36:29–50

Bordwell D (1985) Narration in the fiction film. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison

Bordwell D (2006) The way hollywood tells it: story and style in modern movies. University of California Press, Berkeley

Bordwell D (2008) Poetics of cinema. Routledge, New York, NY

Bordwell D, Thompson K (1997) Film Art: An Introduction, 5th edition. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, (First ed. 1979)

Brooks V, Hochberg J (1976) Control of active looking by motion picture cutting rate. Proceedings of the Eastern Psychological Association, 1976, 49 (Abstract). American Psychological Association, Washington

Brunick KL, Cutting JE, DeLong JE (2013) Low-level features of film: what they are and why we would be lost without them. In: Shimamura AP (ed) Psychocinematics. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp 133–148

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Buitinck L, van Amerongen J, Tan E, de Rijke M (2015) Multi-emotion detection in user-generated reviews. In: Hanbury A, Kazai G, Rauber A, Fuhr N (eds.) Advances in information retrieval. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland, pp 43–48

Busselle R, Bilandzic H (2008) Fictionality and perceived realism in experiencing stories: a model of narrative comprehension and engagement. Commun Theory 18:255–280

Busselle R, Bilandzic H (2009) Measuring narrative engagement. Media Psychol 12:321–347

Canini L, Gilroy S, Cavazza M, Leonardi R, Benini S (2010) Users’ response to affective film content: a narrative perspective. In: Content-based multimedia indexing (CBMI). 2010 International Workshop on IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5529892/ (Accessed May 28 2018)

Cavanagh P (1992) Attention-based motion perception. Science 257(5076):1563–1565

Article   PubMed   ADS   CAS   Google Scholar  

Casetti F (2015) The Lumière galaxy: seven key words for the cinema to come. Columbia University Press, New York, NY

Cohen J (2001) Defining identification: a theoretical look at the identification of audiences with media characters. Mass Commun Soc 4(3):245–264

Article   MathSciNet   Google Scholar  

Coplan A (2006) Catching characters’ emotions: Emotional contagion responses to narrative fiction film. Film Stud 8(1):26–38

Csikszentmihalyi M (1997) Finding flow. Basic Books, New York, NY

Currie G (1995) Image and mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Currie G, Ravenscroft I (2002) Recreative minds. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Cutting JE (1981) Six tenets for event perception. Cognition 10(1):71–78

Cutting JE (1986) The shape and psychophysics of cinematics space. Behav Res Methods Instrum Comput 18:551–558

Cutting JE (1987) Rigidity in cinema seen from the front row, side aisle. J Exp Psychol Human Percept Perform 13(3):323–334

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Cutting JE (2002) Representing motion in a static image: constraints and parallels in art, science, and popular culture. Perception 31(10):1165–1193

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Cutting JE (2005) Perceiving scenes in film and in the world. In: Anderson J, Fisher Anderson B (eds) Moving image theory: ecological considerations. University of South Carolina Press, Carbondale, pp 9–27

Cutting JE (2016) Narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies. Psychon Bull Rev 23(6):1713–1743

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Cutting JE, Candan A (2015) Shot durations, shot classes, and the increased pace of popular movies. Projections 9:40–62

Cutting JE, DeLong JE, Brunick KL (2011) Visual activity in hollywood film: 1935 to 2005 and beyond. Psychol Aesthet Creat Arts 5(2):115–125

Cutting JE, Vishton PM (1995) Perceiving layout and knowing distances: the interaction, relative potency, and contextual use of different information about depth. In: Epstein W, Rogers S (eds) Perception of space and motion. Academic Press, San Diego, pp 69–117

Detenber BH, Lang A (2011) The influence of form and presentation attributes of media on emotion. In: Döveling K, Von Scheve C, Konijn EA (eds) The Routledge handbook of emotions and mass media. Routledge, Milton Park, pp 275–293

Dill KE (ed) (2013) The Oxford handbook of media psychology. Oxford University Press, New York

Doicaru MM (2016) Gripped by movies: from story-world to artifact absorption, Ch 4. Doctoral dissertation Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam

Duncker K (1929) Über induzierte bewegung. Psychol Forsch 12(1):180–259

Frijda NH (1986) The emotions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Frijda NH (1989) Aesthetic emotions and reality. Am Psychol 44(12):1546–1547

Garsoffky B, Schwan S, Huff M (2009) Canonical views of dynamic scenes. J Exp Psychol Human Percept Perform 35(1):17–27

Gepshtein S, Kubovy M (2007) The lawful perception of apparent motion. J Vis 7(8):9–15

Gerrig RJ (1993) Experiencing narrative worlds. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT

Gibson JJ (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin, Boston

Green MC, Brock TC (2000) The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. J Pers Soc Psychol 79(5):701–721

Griffiths PE, Scarantino A, Robbins P, Ayded M (2009) Emotions in the wild: the situated perspective on emotion. Cambridge handbook of situated cognition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 437–453

Grodal T (1997) Moving pictures. Oxford University Press, New York, NY

Grodal T (2009) Embodied visions. Oxford University Press, New York, NY

Hakemulder F (2007) Tracing foregrounding in responses to film. Lang Lit 16:125–139

Hasson U, Nir Y, Levy I, Fuhrmann G, Malach R (2003) Intersubject synchronization of cortical vision during natural vision. Science 303:1634–1640

Article   ADS   CAS   Google Scholar  

Hayhne MM (2004) Integration of visual information across saccades. In: Peterson MA, Gillam B, Sedgwick HA (eds) In the mind’s eye: Julian Hochberg’s contributions to our understanding of the perception of pictures, film, and the world. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp 448–453

Hinde SJ (2017) Attention while watching movies. University of Bristol, Bristol (UK), Doctoral dissertation

Hinde SJ, Smith TJ, Gilchrist ID (2017) search of oculomotor capture during film viewing: implications for the balance of top-down and bottom-up control in the saccadic system. Vision Res 134:7–17

Hochberg J Brooks V (1978). Film cutting and visual momentum. In: Senders JW Fisher DF Monty RA (eds) Eye movements and the higher psychological functions. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp 293-317

Hochberg J (1986) Representation of motion and space in video and cinematic displays. In: Boff KR, Kaufman L, Thomas JP (eds) Handbook of perception and human performance, Vol I. Wiley, New York, NY, pp 22-1–22-64

Hochberg J (1998) Gestalt theory and its legacy. In: Hochberg J (ed) Perception and cognition at century’s end. Academic Press, San Diego, pp 253–306

Hochberg J (2007) Looking ahead (One glance at a time). In: Peterson MA, Gillam B, Sedgwick HA (eds) In the mind’s eye: Julian Hochberg’s contributions to our understanding of the perception of pictures, film, and the world. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp 397–414

Hochberg J, Brooks V (1978a) The perception of motion pictures. In: Carterette EC, Friedman MP (eds) Handbook of perception, Vol X. Academic Press, New York, NY, pp 259–304

Hochberg J, Brooks V (1996a) Movies in the mind’s eye. In: Bordwell D, Carroll N (eds) Post-theory. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, pp 368–386

Hochberg J, Brooks V (1996b) The perception of motion pictures. In: Friedman MP, Carterette EC (eds) Cognitive ecology. Academic Press, New York, NY, pp 205–292

Hubel DH, Wiesel TN (1959) Receptive fields of single neurones in the cat’s striate cortex. J Physiol 148:574–591

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   CAS   Google Scholar  

Itti L, Koch C (2001) Computational modelling of visual attention. Nat Rev Neurosci 2:194–203

Kolers PA (1972) Aspects of motion perception. Pergamon Press, Oxford

Konijn EA (2013) The role of emotion in media use and effects. In: KE Dill (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 186-211

Kraft RN (1991) Light and mind: understanding the structure of film. In: Hofman RR, Palermo DS (eds.) Cognition and the symbolic processes. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, pp 351–370

Levin DT, Hymel AM, Baker L (2013) Belief, desire, action, and other stuff: theory of mind in movies. In: Shimamura AP (ed) Psychocinematics. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp 244–266

Livingstone MS, Hubel DH (1987) Psychophysical evidence for separate channels for the perception of form, color, movement, and depth. J Neurosci 7(11):3416–3468

Loschky LC, Larson AM, Magliano JP, Smith TJ (2015) What would jaws do? The tyranny of film and the relationship between gaze and higher-level narrative comprehension. PLOS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journalpone0142474.

Magliano JP, Miller J, Zwaan RA (2001) Indexing space and time in film understanding. Appl Cogn Psychol 15(5):533–545

Menninghaus W, Wagner V, Hanich J, Wassiliwizky E, Jacobsen T, Koelsch S (2017) The distancing–embracing model of the enjoyment of negative emotions in art reception. Behav Brain Sci e347:1–58. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17000309

Michotte A (1946) La Perception de la Causalité. Editions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, Louvain

Magliano JP, Zacks JM (2011) The impact of continuity editing in narrative film on event segmentation. Cogn Sci 35(8):1489–1517

Münsterberg H (1916) The photoplay. Appleton, New York, NY

Nell V (1988) Lost in a book. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT

Oatley K (1999) Why fiction may be twice as true as fact: fiction as cognitive and emotional simulation. Rev General Psychol 3(2):101–117

Oatley K (2012) The passionate muse. Exploring emotion in stories. Oxford University press, New York, NY

Oatley K (2013) How cues on the screen prompt emotions in the mind. In: Shimamura AP (ed) Psychocinematics: exploring cognition at the movies. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp 269–284

Oatley K, Johnson-Laird P (2013) Cognitive approaches to emotions. Trends Cogn Sci 18(3):34–40

O’Keefe LP, Movshon JA (1998) Processing of first-and second-order motion signals by neurons in area MT of the macaque monkey. Vis Neurosci 15(2):305–317

PubMed   Google Scholar  

Oliver MB, Bartsch A (2013) Appreciation as audience response: exploring entertainment gratifications beyond hedonism. Hum Commun Res 36(1):53–81

Oliver MB, Hartmann T (2010) Exploring the role of meaningful experiences in users’ appreciation of “good movies”. Projections 4(2):128–150

Plantinga C (2009) Moving viewers: American film and the spectator’s experience. University of California Press, Berkeley

Raz G, Jacob Y, Gonen T, Winetraub Y, Flash T, Soreq E, Hendler T (2013) Cry for her or cry with her: context-dependent dissociation of two modes of cinematic empathy reflected in network cohesion dynamics. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 9(1):30–38

Rooney B, Bálint KE (2018) Watching more closely: shot scale affects film viewers’ theory of mind tendency but not ability. Front Psychol 8:2349

Salt B (2009) Film style and technology: history and analysis. Starwood, London

Schubert T, Friedmann F, Regenbrecht H (2001) The experience of presence: factor analytic insights. Presence Teleoperator Virtual Environ 10(No 3):266–281

Schubert TW, Zickfeld JH, Seibt B, Fiske AP (2018) Moment-to-moment changes in feeling moved match changes in closeness, tears, goosebumps, and warmth: time series analyses. Cogn Emot 32(1):174–184

Schwan S (2013) The art of simplifying events. In: Shimamura AP (ed) Psychocinematics. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp 214–226

Silvia PJ (2006). Exploring the psychology of interest. Oxford University Press, New York.

Smith M (1995) Engaging characters: fiction, emotion, and the cinema. Clarendon Press, Oxford

Smith TJ (2012) The attentional theory of cinematic continuity. Projections 6(1):1–27

Smith TJ, Levin D, Cutting JE (2012) A window on reality: perceiving edited moving images. Curr Dir Psychol Sci 21(2):107–113

Sobchack V (1992) The address of the eye: a phenomenology of film experience. Princeton University Press,Princeton

Tal-Or N, Cohen J (2010) Understanding audience involvement: conceptualizing and manipulating identification and transportation. Poetics 38(4):402–418

Tan ES (1995) Film-induced affect as a witness emotion Poetics 23:7–32

Tan ES (1996) Emotion and the structure of narrative film. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ

Tan ES, Frijda NH (1997) Sentiment in film viewing. In: Plantinga C, Smith G (eds) Passionate views: film, cognition, and emotion. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, pp 46–64

Tan ES (2007) On the cognitive ecology of the cinema. In: Peterson MA, Gillam B, Sedgwick HA (eds) In the mind’s eye: Julian Hochberg’s contributions to our understanding of the perception of pictures, film, and the world. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp 562–571

Tan ES (2008) Entertainment is emotion. Media Psychol 11(1):28–51

Tan ES (2009) Being moved. In: Sander D, Scherer KR (eds) The oxford companion to emotion and the affective sciences. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p 74

Tan ES (2013a) The empathic animal and the inquisitive animal meet in the cinema. Notes on a psychocinematics of mindreading. In: Shimamura AP (ed) Psychocinematics. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp 337–368

Tan ES (2013b) Engaged and detached film viewing: exploring film viewers’ emotional action readiness. In: Nannicelli T, Taberham P (eds.) Cognitive Media Theory. Routledge, New York, NY, pp 106–123

Tan ES, Doicaru MM, Bálint K, Kuipers MM (2017) Does absorption in a movie’s story world pose a paradox? In: Tan ES, Doicaru MM, Hakemulder F, Bálint K (eds.) Narrative absorption. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 98–118

Thompson K (1999) Storytelling in the new hollywood. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA

Van Moerkerken E (1978) To phi or not to phi. First chapter of unfinished PhD dissertation Amsterdam. Retrieved from Library of the University of Amsterdam. Bijzondere Collecties, Amsterdam

van der Waals HG, Roelofs CO (1930) Optische scheinbewegung. Zeit für Psychol und Physiol der Sinnesorganen 114:241–288

van Zuylen E (1978) In for treatment (Opname). Theatrical film. NL

Visch VT, Tan ES (2009) Categorizing moving objects into film genres: The effect of animacy attribution, emotional response, and the deviation from non-fiction. Cognition 110(2):265–272

Visch VT, Tan ES (2017) Genre scripts and appreciation of negative emotion in the reception of film.Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40

Vorderer P, Klimmt C, Ritterfeld U (2004) Enjoyment: at the heart of media entertainment. Commun Theory 14(4):388–408

Walton KL (1990) Mimesis as make-believe: on the foundations of the representational arts. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

Wassiliwizky E, Jacobsen Heinrich T, Schneiderbauer M, Menninghaus W (2017) Tears falling on goosebumps: Co-occurrence of emotional lacrimation and emotional piloerection indicates a psychophysiological climax in emotional arousal. Front Psychol 8:41. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00041

Wertheimer M (1912) Experimentelle studien iiber das Sehen von Bewegung. Z für Psychol 61:161–265

Wirth W, Hartmann T, Böcking S, Vorderer P, Klimmt Ch, Schramm H et al. (2007) A process model of the formation of spatial presence experiences. Media Psychol 9:493–525

Zacks JM (2004) Using movement and intentions to understand simple events. Cogn Sci 28(6):979–1008

Zacks JM (2013) Constructing event representations during film comprehension. In: Shimamura AP (ed) Psychocinematics. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp 227–243

Zacks JM (2014) Flicker: your brain on movies. Oxford University Press, New York, NY

Zillmann D (1991) Empathy: affect from bearing witness to the emotion of others. In: Bryant J, Zillmann D (eds) Responding to the screen. Erlbaum, Hillsdale NJ, pp 135–167

Zillmann D (2000) Basal morality in drama appreciation. In: Bondebjerg I (ed) Moving images, culture, and the mind. University of Luton Press, Luton, pp 53–63

Zillmann D (2003) Theory of affective dynamics: Emotions and moods. In: Zillmann D, Bryant J, Roskos-Ewoldsen D, Cantor J (eds) Communication and emotion: essays in honor of Dolf Zillmann. Erlbaum, Mahwah NJ, p 533–567

Zillmann D (2006) Affective reactivity to others’ emotional experiences. In: Bryant J, Vorderer P (eds.) Psychology of entertainment. Erlbaum, Mahwah NJ, pp 151–181

Download references

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'.

Data availability

Data sharing not applicable to this paper as no datasets were generated or analysed.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Honorary professor Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ed S. Tan .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The author declares no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

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

Download citation

Received : 10 October 2017

Accepted : 12 April 2018

Published : 03 July 2018

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

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Essay on Cinema

Cinema is a major source of recreation in most countries of the world especially in India where the majority of people live below the poverty line. It provides us with entertainment and sometimes educates us too. Depending on the quality of films produced by the directors, one could label cinema as a curse or a boon.

Bombay is the main centre of film city. Films are mainly produced in Mumbai. There are hundreds of them produced every year. India is known to be the highest producer of movies in the world. Indian cinema provides us with a good view of the glamour and glitter of the affluent Indian society and also the poverty and misery in the slums of this country.

Hence it, more or less, with a few exceptions, presents a fairly authentic picture of the lives of Indians. It educates the public with the help of stories that depict conflicts between the good and the evil in our society.

There is some sort of a moral lesson behind these stories and the society is often greatly influenced by these values. Some of the stars acting in films become role models for the youth who are usually quite impressionable at their age. Hence a great responsibility lies with the makers of cinema.

They have to form their ideas after careful research and thinking and the public too has to be able to sift out the best from the film, if at all they want to be influenced. But the cinema can become a curse when the movies are full of mindless sex and violence. This could colour the mind of the young boys and girls who watch these movies with great interest.

Cinema can become an addiction and these films could sometimes distract the youth so much that they might lose interest in their studies and other work that requires serious concentration.

Cinema has such an attraction that one often finds young boys and girls getting so attracted to it that they begin to harbour a craze about joining the film industry themselves.

Very few talented people make a name for themselves in the tinsel world and quite a few unfortunate ones waste many a precious year trying to make it big in that world of money and glamour.

The cinema can remain a boon for us as long as those who view it keep a balance between what they believe in and what the cinema may be thrusting down their throats. Cinema should be enjoyed and used as a means of pure entertainment and education.

Related Posts:

• Random Compound Word Generator
• Random Idiom Generator
• Lady Of Shalott Poem By Alfred Lord Tennyson Summary, Notes And Line By Line Analysis In English
• Michael Poem by William Wordsworth Summary, Notes and Line by Line Explanation in English
• Random Disney Movie Generator
• Goblin Market Poem by Christina Rossetti Summary, Notes and Line by Line Explanation in English

Search form

You are here

• Archive Blog

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.

<  Back to Archival Spaces blog

To report problems, broken links, or comment on the website, please contact support

Copyright © 2024 UCLA Film & Television Archive. All Rights Reserved

Essay on Cinema as an Art Form

Students are often asked to write an essay on Cinema as an Art Form in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Cinema as an Art Form

Introduction.

Cinema, often known as movies, is a powerful art form that blends storytelling, visuals, and sound. It has a unique ability to convey emotions, ideas, and narratives in a way that no other medium can.

The Magic of Storytelling

Cinema uses the magic of storytelling to take us on incredible journeys. Through films, we can explore different cultures, historical periods, and even imaginary worlds.

Visual and Sound

Cinema combines visuals and sound to create a complete sensory experience. The use of color, light, and sound design can evoke specific emotions and enhance the narrative.

The Impact of Cinema

Cinema has a profound impact on society. It can inspire, educate, and entertain, making it a vital part of our cultural landscape.

250 Words Essay on Cinema as an Art Form

The essence of cinema as art.

Cinema, a unique blend of storytelling, visual aesthetics, and auditory elements, stands as a remarkable art form. Unlike traditional arts like painting or sculpture, cinema is a dynamic medium, offering an immersive experience that appeals to our senses and emotions simultaneously.

The Visual Language of Cinema

Cinema communicates through a visual language, a complex system of symbols, metaphors, and motifs. This language transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries, making cinema a universally accessible art form. The mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing techniques all contribute to the creation of a unique visual narrative.

Cinema and Emotional Engagement

Cinema’s power lies in its ability to evoke emotions. Through compelling narratives and relatable characters, cinema can elicit a wide range of feelings, from joy and laughter to fear and sadness. This emotional engagement distinguishes cinema from other art forms, creating a deep connection between the audience and the cinematic world.

Reflection of Society

Cinema also serves as a mirror to society, reflecting its triumphs, struggles, and aspirations. It can be a powerful tool for social commentary, highlighting issues of importance and provoking thought and discussion.

The Evolution of Cinema

Like any art form, cinema is ever-evolving. The advent of digital technology has revolutionized the way films are made and viewed, opening up new possibilities for artistic expression. This constant evolution ensures that cinema remains a vibrant and relevant art form.

In conclusion, cinema, with its unique blend of storytelling, visual aesthetics, and emotional engagement, stands out as a profound art form, continually evolving to reflect and shape our understanding of the world.

500 Words Essay on Cinema as an Art Form

Introduction to cinema as an art form.

Cinema, since its inception, has evolved into a complex form of expression, embodying a myriad of artistic elements. It is a compelling medium that transcends the boundaries of language and culture, providing a universal platform for storytelling.

Visual Storytelling: The Essence of Cinema

Cinema, at its core, is an art of visual storytelling. It brings together a multitude of artistic disciplines, such as literature, drama, painting, sculpture, music, and dance, to create a cohesive narrative. The director, akin to a painter, uses a camera instead of a brush, the screen as a canvas, and actors as living sculptures to create a moving portrait of life.

The Artistry of Cinematography

Cinematography is the backbone of cinema. It is through the lens of the camera that the director’s vision comes to life. The use of lighting, color, composition, and camera movement can significantly impact the mood and tone of a film. The cinematographer, much like a visual artist, manipulates these elements to create a specific emotional response from the audience.

The Role of Sound and Music

Sound and music contribute significantly to the artistry of cinema. They enhance the visual narrative by adding depth to the story, building tension, and evoking emotions. The strategic use of silence can also be a powerful tool in storytelling. The sound designer and composer play a crucial role in shaping the film’s auditory landscape, much like a musician composing a symphony.

Editing: The Invisible Art

Editing is often referred to as the ‘invisible art’ of cinema. It is through the process of editing that the film’s rhythm and pace are established. A skilled editor can manipulate time and space within the film, guiding the audience’s attention and shaping their perception of the narrative.

Conclusion: The Impact of Cinema

In conclusion, cinema is not merely a form of entertainment but a powerful art form that influences society. It has the ability to challenge perceptions, provoke thought, and evoke a spectrum of emotions. The art of cinema is a collaborative effort, bringing together the skills and talents of numerous artists to create a single, cohesive piece of work. Its universal appeal and ability to transcend cultural barriers make it one of the most influential art forms of the modern era.

This essay has explored the various artistic elements that contribute to cinema as an art form. It is clear that each element, from cinematography to sound design, plays a crucial role in shaping the final cinematic experience. As we continue to explore and push the boundaries of this art form, cinema will undoubtedly continue to evolve, reflecting and influencing society in profound ways.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Cinema
• Essay on Chair
• Essay on Camel

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Site Content

Essays on the essay film.

Edited by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan

Columbia University Press

Pub Date: March 2017

ISBN: 9780231172677

Format: Paperback

List Price: $37.00 £30.00

Shipping Options

Purchasing options are not available in this country.

ISBN: 9780231172660

Format: Hardcover

List Price: $120.00 £100.00

ISBN: 9780231543996

Format: E-book

List Price: $36.99 £30.00

• EPUB via the Columbia UP App
• PDF via the Columbia UP App

Creatively and capaciously, this rich volume gets at the essay film not only by including key critics and practitioners of the form but, importantly, by going beyond the genre itself to broader contributions to essay theorization from philosophy and belles lettres. An exciting, inventive volume with great delights at every turn. Dana Polan, New York University

Alter and Corrigan's masterful new volume on the essay film is rigorous, comprehensive, and refreshingly surprising. Their invaluable collection probes theoretical reflections on the essay as a mode of expression and a way of thinking in light of the creative and political investments of filmmakers around the globe; it also chronicles the essay film's changing countenances, from its prehistory and early signs of life to novel permutations in the present. Featuring a very distinguished cast of players, this collection is a production of the highest order. Eric Rentschler, Harvard University

Nora Alter and Tim Corrigan bring their seasoned literary experience to herd but never tame the unruly essay film. Its prestige soaring, this mode is tethered to a long history of experimental writing that will keep it from disappearing into the bog of blogs and YouTube mashups whose best examples it is already inspiring. The proof is in the Table of Contents: a brilliant litany of sensitive, reliable writers, who dare to take on the most daring forms of image-thought the cinema has produced. Dudley Andrew, Yale University

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in interest in the history, concept and diverse manifestations of the essay film. In this essential collection, Nora Alter and Timothy Corrigan have brought together a superb selection of foundational texts with a range of key recent writings by leading scholars and essay filmmakers. The result is an enormously rich resource for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of this most vital of audiovisual forms. Michael Witt, University of Roehampton

About the Author

• Film and Media Studies
• Film History, Theory, and Criticism
• Photography
• Film and Culture Series

Essay on Impact of Cinema in Life for in English Children and Students

Table of Contents

Essay on Impact of Cinema in Life: Cinema is an extremely popular source of entertainment worldwide. Numerous movies are produced each year and people watch these in large numbers. Cinema impacts our life both positively and negatively. Just as everything else in this world, cinema also has positive as well as negative impact on our life. While some movies can change our thinking for good others can invoke a feeling or pain or fear. Despite having a regulatory mechanism, movies these days display a good amount of violence and other illegal and immoral activities. While these activities don’t have much effect on matured adults, it could however adversely affect children or teenagers. Kids in their tender age are unable to make right decisions and are easily influenced by what is shown in the cinema.

Fill Out the Form for Expert Academic Guidance!

Please indicate your interest Live Classes Books Test Series Self Learning

Verify OTP Code (required)

I agree to the terms and conditions and privacy policy .

Fill complete details

Target Exam ---

It exposes us to different types of art and helps us learn about how people from various backgrounds live. In a sense, it brings us together and makes us more open to diverse art forms and cultures. Movies also provide valuable lessons for real life.

Long and Short Essay on Impact of Cinema in Our Life in English

Here are long and short essay on impact of cinema in life in English, of varying lengths to help you with the topic in your exam or other activities.

You can choose any Impact of Cinema in Life Essay as per your need and interest during your school/college essay writing competition or in a debate, discussion with your class mate on topics relevant to the subject.

So, go through this page and select the one essay which is best for you:

Essay on Impact of Cinema in Our Life 200 words

Since the beginning of the human existence, man has been searching for different ways for recreation. He has been looking for something that gives a little break from his exhausting schedule of day to day life. Cinema has come forward as a great way of recreation since around a century. It has been one of the most loved pastimes since its inception.

Initially theatres were the only way to get access to the cinema but with the popularity of television and cable TV, watching movies became easier. With the advent of internet and mobile phones, we now get access to the cinema on our mobile screens and can watch them just about anywhere and anytime.

Everyone today is more or less connected to the cinema. When we see certain incidences shown in movies that we can relate to we naturally let them influence our mind-set and thought process. We even idealize certain characters and scenarios from the movies. We want our personality and life to be just like the life of the movie character we idealize. Some people get so hooked on to these characters that they become an integral part of their life.

Thus, we can conclude that cinema has a great influence on the lives of the people and society. It is rightly said that we are more or less carved out from the type of movies we see, songs we hear and the books we read.

Essay on Impact of Cinema on Students Life 300 words

Exploring the world of cinema has been a craze for the young generation ever since the initiation of the movies. They follow it like a passion and thus the young generation mostly the teenagers are the ones largely impacted by cinema. This is mainly because it is an age wherein they are about to step into the real world with dozens of notions and at times unreasonable optimism, and the films play a prime role in catering to them.

Positive Impact of Cinema on Students

• All kinds of movies are made to cater to the interest of different types of audience. There are movies that include educative content. Watching such movies widens the knowledge of the students and has a positive impact on them.
• Students need to juggle between their studies, extra-curricular activities and competitions. Amid such mad rush and rising competition, they need something for relaxation and movies are a good way to relax.
• Students can also bond well with their family and extended family as they plan to go out with them to watch cinema.

Negative Impact of Cinema on Students

• While cinema may be educative, watching too much of it can prove to be a waste of time for the students. Many students get addicted to the movies and spend their precious time in watching movies rather than studying.
• Certain movies contain inappropriate content such as violence and other A-rated scenes that have a negative impact on the students.
• Watching too much cinema and other video content can weaken the students’ eye sight and also hamper their power to concentrate.

Whatever a movie maybe about, one should not forget that a movie is a portrayal of writer’s imagination unless it’s a biopic. One should not madly follow them. Students must to realize that it isn’t necessary for their lives and situations to have resemblance with the movie. They should understand and know the difference between the reel life and real life and try to inculcate only the positive aspects of cinema.

Essay on Impact of Cinema on Society 400 words

Cinema has been a major source of entertainment for the people of every age group around the world. Different genres of movies are produced and these influence the public in different ways. Since movies are explored by all, they influence the society immensely. This impact can be both negative and positive.

Positive Impact of Cinema on the Society

Here is a look at the positive impact of cinema on the society:

• Cinema has a major influence on the society. So it can be used as a major tool for creating public awareness. Bollywood films like Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, Taare Zameen Par and Swades have helped in bringing about positive changes in the society.
• Certain good movies and biopics can genuinely influence the viewer’s mind positively and can motivate him or her to work hard in life.
• Movies and songs can give rise to the feeling of patriotism in the viewers.
• A movie is always a good sort of entertainment. It lets you forget all your problems and can take you to an all new world of imagination, which can be beneficiary at times.
• Films at times can also widen your scope of knowledge according to their genre. A historic film can improve your knowledge in history; a sci-fi movie can touch you with some knowledge of science and so on.
• Good comedy movies have the power to make you laugh and can thus enhance your mood.
• Adventure movies can arise in you a spirit of adventure and motivation.

Negative Impact of Cinema on the Society

Here is a look at the negative impact of cinema on the society:

• Most of the movies nowadays show violence which can affect the public in a negative way. It can indirectly contribute to violent thoughts in one’s mind especially in the youth.
• Certain content shown in the movies is not appropriate for some people. It can actually mess up with their mind.
• People at times fail to differentiate between the movie and reality. They get so engrossed in it that they somehow start to believe that the reality is the same as portrayed in the movie which can have undesirable side effects.

It is a world in which everyone has their own different perspective which may not be right from the view of the others. Certain movies can thus hurt the feelings of certain audience. Some movies have hurt the religious sentiments of people and even resulted in riots.

Thus, we can conclude that movies can have a great impact on the viewer’s mind. It becomes the moral duty of the team to prepare the content that is appropriate and has a positive impact on the society.

Essay on Influence of Cinema on Youth 500 words

It is a well-known fact that one can learn and remember things easily if it has got both audio and visual aids instead of just audio. Keeping this thing in mind, many study sessions are taken where students are taught with the help of videos. Cinema has been popular since its inception. People came to realize that students can remember more through videos than just from verbal sessions as they observed kids remembering dialogue of the movie they watched a week ago but nothing from the lecture they attended in the morning.

Young Minds are influenced by what they see

Humans have this tendency of adopting the way of talking, walking and behaving of the person they are with for a long time. A person always leaves a mark in other person’s head according to his behaviour.

This notion is more popular among the people belonging to the teenage and also among the kids of age less than 13 years as they have massive grasping power. They want to mimic and copy everything they see in the cinemas, hairstyles, fashion, actions, body language, way of talking, everything. They think that by doing all this they can become popular and cool which seems to be important for today’s youth.

Cinema has a Major Impact on the Youth

Cinema is basically considered as the best among all means of entertainment. Young people watch cinema to get relax and entertained though along with this they learn a number of new things. The normal human tendency is to apply these things in their lives too. That is why it is very important that they grab only the positive points from the cinemas.

As youth is the future of any nation so it is essential that they build a positive mindset. It is thus essential for them to watch good quality of cinema that helps them grow mentally and makes them more knowledgeable and mature. Not only the actions and body language but their level of command on the language is also influenced by the cinema.

Moreover, many movies don’t just entertain, but also provide lots of information regarding different aspects of life. It also helps the young to develop an open-minded mentality which can be very helpful for their progress in lives.

Negative Impact of Cinema on Youth

Cinema has both negative and positive impact on the youth. In the form of action, showing various ways of killing people is a common sight in the movies these days. These things affect the people watching it at a psychological level. They create a mentality among the youth that to show power you need to fight with few, kill few or dominate few. This is a very wrong notion.

Not just this, even the adult scenes, including sex are misguiding for the youth who have not even been provided sex education to understand what is wrong and what is right. Showing excess of nudity and lust can make them do things that they are not supposed to at their age. Moreover, too much time and money is also wasted on viewing cinema.

Hence, cinema impacts the youth in various ways. However, it depends on their maturity and understanding on what they adopt the most.

Essay on Advantages and Disadvantages of Cinema 600 words

Cinema is a source of entertainment for millions of people around the globe. It serves as a tool against boredom and an escape from the monotonous life. A good movie offers a relaxing and entertaining experience. It takes you to a new world of imagination, away from all the troubles. It has the power to refresh and rejuvenate your mind. However, it also has certain set of disadvantages attached to it. Here is a look at the advantages as well as disadvantages of cinema:

Advantages of Cinema

Here is a look at the advantages offered by the cinema:

• Social Advantages

Among the teens the trend of watching movies is followed as a passion. Looking at the type of movies a person prefers to watch one can judge his preference and personality. Movies help in socialising as they offer a common ground of discussion. You can always discuss about the content you have watched while sitting in a group or at parties. It offers as a good conversation starter. It is an interesting topic unlike politics and sports that many people find boring.

• Inspires Imagination

Movies at times show the weirdest imagination of the writer. It shows the world that is unseen and unexplored with advanced graphic technology which can help us enhance our imagination too.

• Reflection of Art and Culture of Different Parts of the World

Different movies have varied plots that are set around varied cultures and people belonging to different places across the globe. This helps one broaden his or her knowledge about people living in different parts of the world and their way of living.

• Improvises Thinking Capacity

Success stories and biographies can inspire people to not give up in life. There are certain scenes in the movies wherein cases of emergency such as fire, bomb blast, robbery, etc are shown. We may not know what to do in such moments in real life if we ever come across them. Movies can help improvise our thinking capacity and help us understand how to act in such situations.

Disadvantages of Cinema

• Creates False Notion

Movies contribute greatly towards forming false notion in people especially kids. Situations and societies in every part of the world are different. People are different on screen and in reality. However, many individuals fail at realize the gap between the movie world and reality which causes problems.

• Waste of Money and Time

Movie is a mere representation of the writer’s thoughts and imagination and they are not always worth our time and money. What’s the point in investing into something if it isn’t worth our time and we feel disappointed at the end of it?

• Violent and Adult Content

To make a movie fetch more profit unnecessary scenes of violence, action, nudity and vulgarity are added to it, making it inappropriate for the kids and young adults. It can have a negative impact their mind.

Movies have at times proved to be over addictive for certain people. Not every movie is worth watching. There are so many other productive and interesting things to do in life other than unnecessarily wasting hours on useless movies. The involvement in movies up to certain extent is alright but undue craze for cinema and wasting money for overhyped movies is not preferable.

There are always two aspects of a thing – a positive one and a negative one. One must watch movies and let them impact oneself to a limit to avoid all the negative aspects of it. As it is rightly said, everything done in limit is beneficiary. Similarly, investing time into movies that are worth watching is fine but getting addicted to them should be avoided, as it would not only waste our time but we’ll also miss out other things that are actually worth our time.

Essay on Impact of Cinema in Life FAQs

What is the impact of cinema on youth.

Cinema can influence youth by shaping their beliefs, values, and behaviors through the stories and characters they see on screen.

What is the impact of cinema in India?

In India, cinema is a powerful cultural and entertainment medium that reflects the diversity, traditions, and societal issues of the country.

What are the benefits of cinema?

The benefits of cinema include entertainment, education, cultural representation, and a platform for storytelling.

What is the impact of cinema in our life?

Cinema impacts our lives by providing a source of entertainment, inspiration, and a means to connect with diverse perspectives.

In India, cinema is a significant part of the cultural fabric, influencing society, and addressing important issues.

What was the impact of cinema as a means of mass communication to the society?

Cinema, as a means of mass communication, has the power to inform, entertain, and shape public opinions on various topics.

Why is cinema important in our daily life?

Cinema is important in daily life as it offers relaxation, escape from reality, and a window to different worlds and experiences.

In India, cinema has a profound impact on culture, society, and the way people perceive and connect with their surroundings.

Related content

Talk to our academic expert!

Language --- English Hindi Marathi Tamil Telugu Malayalam

Get access to free Mock Test and Master Class

Register to Get Free Mock Test and Study Material

Offer Ends in 5:00

• Festival Reports
• Book Reviews
• Great Directors
• Great Actors
• Special Dossiers
• Past Issues
• Support us on Patreon

Subscribe to Senses of Cinema to receive news of our latest cinema journal. Enter your email address below:

• Thank you to our Patrons
• Style Guide
• Advertisers
• Call for Contributions

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 ↩

How Can I Write an Essay About a Movie?

By Film Threat Staff | May 23, 2023

Watching movies for a long time has been a major past-time for most individuals. The people expect to sit in front of their screens and get thrilled into a world of adventure, mystery, and wonder.

But how can you gauge your appreciation and understanding of filmmaking? Writing an essay about a movie is one way of showing your grasp of the content.

Movie analysis is a common assignment for most college students. It is an intricate task where every detail matters while tied together to form a part of the story.

A part of the assignment involves watching a particular movie and writing an essay about your overall impression of the movie.

Essay writing services such as WriteMyEssay show that more than rewatching a movie several times is needed to make up for a solid movie analysis essay. Here is a step-by-step guide on how to write your movie analysis:

What Is a Movie Essay?

The world of literature is multifaceted while testing different attributes of students. A movie analysis essay, at its core, seeks to uncover the hidden layers of meaning within the cinema world.

A movie analysis essay is much more than a movie review that seeks to delve into the artistry behind filmmaking. Thus, it seeks to test a student’s prowess in understanding various elements that come together to form a meaningful cinematic experience.

The main purpose of movie analysis essays is to dissect different components employed by a film in making a unique and impactful storyline.

Students can appreciate the filmmaking process’s complexities by analyzing these different elements. Also, students can develop a keen eye for the nuances that elevate a movie from entertainment to a work of art.

Here are top tips by experts when writing an essay about a particular movie during your assignments:

1. Watch the Movie

The first obvious standpoint for writing an essay about any movie is watching the film. Watching the movie builds an important foundation for the writing exercise. Composing an insightful, compelling, and well-thought movie essay requires you to experience it.

Therefore, select an appropriate environment to watch the movie free from distractions. Moreover, immerse yourself in the full movie experience to absorb all the intricate details. Some critical elements to note down include:

• Characterization
• Cinematography

We recommend watching the movie several times in case the time element allows. Rewatching the film deepens your understanding of the movie while uncovering unnoticed details on the first take.

2. Write an Introduction

The introductory paragraph to your movie essay should contain essential details of the movie, such as:

• Release date
• Name of the director
• Main actors

Moreover, start with a captivating hook to entice readers to keep reading. You can start with a memorable quote from one of the characters.

For example, released in 1976 and Directed by Martin Scorsese, ‘The Taxi Driver’ starring Robert De Niro as the eccentric taxi driver.’

After writing an enticing introduction, it is time to summarize what you watched. A summary provides readers with a clear understanding of the movie’s plot and main events. Hence, your readers can have a foundation for the rest of your movie essay.

Writing a summary need to be concise. The entire movie essay should be brief and straight to the point. Ensure to capture the main arguments within the movie’s plot. However, avoid going into too many details. Just focus on giving concise information about the movie.

4. Start Writing

The next vital part is forming the analysis part. This is where the analysis delves deeply into the movie’s themes, cinematography, characters, and other related elements.

First, start by organizing your analysis clearly and logically. Each section or paragraph should concentrate on a particular aspect of the film. Ensure to incorporate important elements such as cinematography, character development, and symbolism.

In addition, analyze different techniques employed by filmmakers. Take note of stylistic choices, including editing, sound, cinematography, imagery, and allegory. This helps contribute to the overall impact and meaning.

Lastly, connect your analysis to the thesis statement. Ensure all arguments captured in your analysis tie together to the main argument. It should maintain a straight focus throughout your essay.

Remember to re-state your thesis while summarizing previously mentioned arguments innovatively and creatively when finishing up your movie essay. Lastly, you can recommend your reader to watch the movie.

Final Takeaway

The writing process should be a fun, demanding, and engaging assignment. Try these tips from experts in structuring and logically organizing your essay.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Murder Mystery 2

NOW ON NETFLIX! The road of excess leads to the palace of popcorn butter in director Jeremy Garelick's sumptuous sequel Murder Mystery 2. The screenplay...

A Story of Survival in Rural Thailand

 Thailand’s national sport, Muay Thai (Thai Boxing), is among the most popular sports in the country and is an integral part of modern MMA fighting....

Netflix Series: Hurts Like Hell

If you're looking for a unique blend of drama inspired by true events and a documentary-style series about sports, Netflix’s "Hurts Like Hell" is...

Line of Fire

Anti-heroes come in all different forms, but my favorite has to be The Punisher, best represented on screen thus far by the Netflix series starring Jon...

NOW ON NETFLIX! You People stars Eddie Murphy, Jonah Hill, Nia Long, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, with Hill serving as producer. He also wrote the screenplay...

Nollywood: The World’s Fastest-Growing Film Industry

With over $6.4 billion in revenue and more than 2,500 movies per year, Nigeria’s film industry is taking the world by storm. Nollywood, the Nigerian film...

Join our Film Threat Newsletter

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Introduction to Drive in Cinema: Essays on Film, Theory and Politics

Includes chapters on the work of Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, William Klein, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vera Chytilova, Vaclav Vorlicek, Olivier Assayas, Hal Hartley, Oliver Ressler, Vincent Gallo, Harmony Korine and Jim Jarmusch. Includes a Foreword and an interview with Bradley Tuck.

Related Papers

in: Transfers • Volume 5 Issue 2 • Summer 2015 (Review about Borden, Iain, Drive, Journeys through film, cities and landscapes, London : Reaktionbooks, 2013, 280 pp.)

Fabian Kröger

Kornelia Boczkowska

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in automobility as a vital area of research, there are no accounts on how it links to the road movie and its derivatives in avant-garde and experimental filmmaking. To fill this gap, the article extends Archer's use of film and genre studies in automobilities research to discuss how Highway (Hilary Harris, 1958), Dozer (Anna Geyer, 1999) and Driving Dinosaurs (Emma Piper-Burket, 2019), which span over sixty years of experimental filmmaking, revision the road movie's automotive mobility through articulating a phenomenological and affective experience of highway driving. Echoing the new mobilities paradigm and recent phenomenological turn in film studies, the works illustrate how the cinematic representation of automobiles and the Interstate Highway System varies in tone from elegiac and celebratory to ironic and ambivalent, signaling the shift from the postwar frenzy of automobility to the modern system of mobilities after the car. While all films reproduce the ideology of American exceptionalism and reflect on the nation's mid-20th century love affair with the car, each of them offers a different take on the practices of automobility, ranging from their high-modernist moment in the 1950s to the postmodern disillusionment in the regime and impossibility of automobility.

Miklos Kiss

This article sets forth that Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011) exhibits a ‘complex transformation’ of an American film genre by foregrounding features associated with art cinema and, more specifically, European and auteur film-making. We argue that the film’s appeal derives precisely from an intelligent and cine-literate deployment of the tensions in this dichotomy of European/American film-making. As such, Drive is a film that foregrounds or reveals its own construction in a number of ways, but its appeal lies in the fact that it does not prevent intense emotional engagement on the part of the viewer. It is neither a cold exercise in mere style nor a simple copy of an earlier formula, but rather a film that manages to marry a number of narrative and stylistic features in such a way that the film itself, arguably, is not easy to categorize.

Sofia Sampaio

Review of the book 'Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes', by Iain Borden. Reaktion Books, 2012. 230 pages. Paperback.

Screen education

Gabrielle O'Brien

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011) is a film that revels in surfaces and reflections, and seduces the spectator with its irresistibly polished veneer. Yet this emphasis on surface offers paradoxical viewing pleasures. The film&#39;s ultra-cool neon artificiality codes the film as self-reflexive, while also drawing attention to the conflicting narrative blueprints that underpin it. For like the sleek 1973 Chevrolet so thrillingly piloted by Driver (Ryan Gosling), Drive&#39;s narrative framework is always on the move. The film self-consciously draws on both fairytale and film noir tropes and archetypes, and these often-contradictory reference points produce a highly kinetic aesthetic that is not easy to pin down.

Film Matters

Katerina Korola

Cinémas: Revue d'études cinématographiques

Thomas Lamarre

This essay uses The Fifth Element as a case study for an analysis of how cinema experiments with automobiles, while working through different theoretical approaches to the automobile, those of Marcuse, Baudrillard and Virilio, which pose crucial questions about production, consumption, representation, simulation and perception. Ultimately, however, rather than treat cinema as representation or simulation, this essay provides a close reading of the film in terms of a composition of forces that sets up material orientations. Building on Isabelle Stengers, it shows how the car is not a thing or a sign for cinema, but a force of the outside, a proposition that remains autonomous yet answerable within the field of cinematic composition of forces. Transformations in cinema make this shift in emphasis necessary : assessing the politics of cinema must begin to take into account that the technical non-humans have increasingly come to function as cosmopolitical propositions for cinema.

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Pedram Dibazar

This article aims to uncover the cinematic effects that Kiarostami creates through automobility. It is concerned with analysing the intertwined spatial and aesthetic regime that builds on the car’s mobility in Kiarostmia’s films. Almost all of Kiarostami’s feature length films produced since 1990 – with the exception of the experimental Shirin (2008) – include significant scenes shot in and of cars. Cars are especially prominent in Life and Nothing More (1992), Taste of Cherry (1997) and Ten (2002) – the latter film being shot entirely in a car. Saturating the screen and filmic time, cars in these films suggest a world of inhabitation in mobility, and produce a visually distinct cinematic language. They provide conditions for interacting with the everyday and generating meaningful associations with space. Cars are also crucial for the specific regime of looks that Kiarostami creates. This article claims that Kiarostami’s cinema of mobility builds an embodied mode of cinematic practice and sense experience that engages with the everyday and acquires its rhythms. In this way, the article argues, Kiarostami’s cinema of everyday mobility poses critique on socially and culturally constructed regimes of spatial signification, visual communication and cinematic production.

Conn Holohan

Despite its association with social criticism, the road movie genre frequently privi- leges a western, male subjectivity and presents unquestioningly his right to travel into the other’s space. The films of Tony Gatlif frequently depict westerners travelling into North Africa and eastern Europe; however, the romanticism inherent in this movement is undercut by the films’ insistent marking of these journeys as error. Deprived of the privileged relationship to space enjoyed by the classic road movie protagonist, Gatlif’s characters are instead enveloped by the spaces through which they journey in a manner that recasts the oppositions such as inside/outside and centre/periphery through which western spatial privilege is maintained. This article focuses in particular on Gatlif’s 2004 film Exils and its depiction of the exile’s return to his homeland.

Ger Zielinski

In this paper I reconsider Gregg Araki‘s The Living End (1992) in terms of genre pas- tiche and intertextual elements to show how the film itself works to trouble and redraw the boundaries of the road movie in the early 1990s, but also how this in-turn opens up Los Angeles and its seemingly infinite freeways and pronounced automobile-based culture to the genre. Part of my larger aim here is to rethink the road movie‘s relationship to the city, albeit an anomalous city, through the case study of Araki‘s film.

RELATED PAPERS

marcelo izaguirre

Kenneth Kraemer

Akshay Kumar

Andreas Pfisterer

Imagofagia. Revista de la Asociación Argentina de Cine y Audiovisual

Lucila Hinojosa-Córdova

African Journal of …

Hugo Olguin

Priya Ranjan

Fundamentals of Computation Theory

Aris Pagourtzis

Stoyan Mishev

Neuropsychology Review

Piyadasa Kodituwakku

Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology

Farhad Shahram

Organic Letters

Tropical Journal of Natural Product Research

Abdullahi Y Abbas

Journal of Historical Geography

Kent Mathewson

Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science

Markus Holzer

Sarah Elaine Eaton

Revista chilena de obstetricia y ginecología

Ana Karen Baez Rivera

O Direito na Contemporaneidade: aporias, desafios e perspectivas interdisciplinares e interculturais

Wálber Araujo Carneiro

cesar augusto

Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña

Ivan Carlos Maglio

Marcelo Carnelossi

Forum Philosophicum

Michal Chabada

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Ruzica Nikolic

Environmental Science and Pollution Research

Maryam Malik

Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta

Janet Hergt

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Jump to navigation

Literature/Film Association 2024: Recognition and Empathy

LFA 2024: RECOGNITION AND EMPATHY

LITERATURE / FILM ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE 

YORK COLLEGE OF PENNSYLVANIA, YORK, PA

SEPTEMBER 26-28, 2024 

Film screening and Conversation: Dina Amer, director of You Resemble Me (2021)

Keynote: Elsie Walker, Salisbury University, author of Life 24x A Second: Cinema, Selfhood, and Society (Oxford UP, 2023)

In many ways, our current social and political moment has been marked by the challenges of recognizing and empathizing with others: an increasingly polarized US electorate is set to (re)litigate a divisive election that never really left the news; the rapid advances in generative AI have everyone scrutinizing the differences between human and non-human intelligences; and numerous political and climate crises challenge our conceptual divisions between recognition and responsibility, action and empathy, “us” and “them.” 

Adaptations, in addition to being based in the comparative act of recognizing and reconciling one text with another time, place, or medium, may also promote empathy with unfamiliar characters and contexts. How can adaptations act as a bridge between nations, subcultures, and generations? How does the act of adapting theorize the act of (mis)recognition and the practice of empathy? Are adaptations, in other words, empathetic media?

While we welcome papers on any aspect of film and media studies, we are especially interested in papers exploring one or more of the following topics concerning otherness, recognitions, and adaptation: 

Depictions of otherness across verbal, visual, and interactive modes of art

Politically-motivated reimaginings of cultural touchstones

Uncanny resemblances and (mis)recognitions in adaptation

Reception of texts with transgenerational and/or international appeal

Adaptations of non-fiction works or legal documents

Nostalgia and empathy in film and media

Recognition of and identification with characters

Encounters with AI and nonhuman intelligences

Affect studies and adaptation

The failures of or potential for adaptations as empathetic media 

We also have significant interest in general studies of American and international cinema, film and technology, television, new media, and other cultural or political issues connected to the moving image. In addition to academic papers and pre-constituted panels, presentation proposals about pedagogy or from creative writers, artists, video essayists, and filmmakers are also welcome.

Please submit your proposal, which will consist of a title, 250-word abstract, and keywords, via this Google Form by May 15, 2024. You will receive a confirmation email within 48 hours. If you have any questions or concerns, contact Amanda Konkle at [email protected] . Accepted presenters will be notified by June 5, and a draft conference program will be available by July 15 to enable travel planning.

The conference registration fee is $200 ($150 for students and retirees) before September 1, 2024 and $225 ($175 for students and retirees) thereafter. All conference attendees must also be current members of the Literature/Film Association. Annual dues are $20. 

Presenters will be invited to submit their work to the Literature/Film Quarterly for potential publication. For details on the journal’s submission requirements, visit their website here . 

To register for the conference and pay dues following acceptance of your proposal, select your registration and click on the PayPal “Buy Now” button below that will take you to where you can sign in to your PayPal account and complete the transaction. If you aren’t registering for the conference but want to join or renew as a member, you may just pay membership dues ($20).

According to Stephen King, This Is Why We Crave Horror Movies

The horror king breaks down our obsession with the macabre.

Stephen King and horror are synonymous. Are you really able to call yourself a fan of horror if one of his novels or film adaptations isn't among your top favorites? The Maine-born writer is hands down the most successful horror writer and one of the most beloved and prolific writers ever whose legacy spans generations. Without King, we might not be as terrified of clowns and or think twice about bullying the shy girl in school. One could say that King has earned the moniker, "the King of Horror." In addition to all he's written, King has also had over 60 adaptations of his work for television and the big screen and has written, produced, and starred in films and shows as well. He has fully immersed himself in the genre of horror from all sides, and it's unlikely that we will ever have anyone else like Stephen King. But did you know that King wrote an essay that was published in Playboy magazine about horror movies?

In 1981, King's essay titled " Why We Crave Horror Movies " was published in Playboy magazine as a variation of the chapter " The Horror Movie As Junk Food" in Danse Macabre . Danse Macabre was published in 1981 and is one of the non-fiction books in which that wrote about horror in media and how our fears and anxieties have been influencing the horror genre. The full article that was published is no longer online, but there is a shortened four-page version of it that can be found.

RELATED: The Iconic Horror Movie You Won't Believe Premiered at Cannes

Stephen King Believes We Are All Mentally Ill

The essay starts out guns blazing, the first line reading "I think that we're all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little bit better." From here, he describes the general behaviors of people we know and how mannerisms and irrational fears are not different between the public and those in asylums. He points out that we pay money to sit in a theater and be scared to prove a point that we can and to show that we do not shy away from fear. Some of us, he states, even go watch horror movies for fun, which closes the gap between normalcy and insanity. A patron can go to the movies, and watch someone get mutilated and killed, and it's considered normal, everyday behavior. This, as a horror lover, feels very targeted. I absolutely watch horror movies for fun and I will do so with my bucket of heart-attack-buttered popcorn and sip on my Coke Zero. The most insane thing about all of that? The massive debt accumulated from one simple movie date.

Watching Horror Movies Allows Us to Release Our Insanity

King states that we use horror movies as a catharsis to act out our nightmares and the worst parts of us. Getting to watch the insanity and depravity on the movie screen allows us to release our inner insanity, which in turn, keeps us sane. He writes that watching horror movies allows us to let our emotions have little to no rein at all, and that is something that we don't always get to do in everyday life. Society has a set of parameters that we must follow with regard to expressing ourselves to maintain the air of normalcy and not be seen as a weirdo. When watching horror movies, we see incredibly visceral reactions in the most extreme of situations. This can cause the viewer to reflect on how they would react or respond to being in the same type of situation. Do we identify more with the victim or the villain? This poses an interesting thought for horror lovers because sometimes the villain is justified. Are we wrong for empathizing with them instead?

Let's take a look at one of the more popular horror movies of recent years. Mandy is about a woman who is murdered by a crazed cult because she is the object of the leader's obsession. This causes Red ( Nicolas Cage ) to ride off seeking revenge for the love of his life being murdered. There are also movies like I Spit On Your Grave and The Last House On The Left where the protagonist becomes the murderer in these instances because of the trauma they experienced from sexual assault. Their revenge makes audiences a little more willing to side with the murderer because they took back their power and those they killed got what was deserved. This is where that Lucille Bluth meme that says "good for her" is used. I'll die on the hill that those characters were justified and if that makes me mentally ill then King might be right!

What Does Stephen King Mean When He Tells Us to "Keep the Gators" Fed?

At the end of the essay, King mentions he likes to watch the most extreme horror movies because it releases a trap door where he can feed the alligators. The alligators he is referring to are a metaphor for the worst in all humans and the morbid fantasies that lie within each of us. The essay concludes with "It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed." From this, we can deduce that King feels we all have the ability to be institutionalized, but those of us that watch horror movies are less likely because the sick fantasies can be released from our brains.

With that release, we can walk down the street normally without the bat of an eye from walkers-by. Perhaps this is why the premise for movies like The Purge came to fruition. A movie where for 24 hours all crime, including murder, is decriminalized couldn't have been made by someone who doesn't get road rage or scream into the void. It was absolutely made by someone who waited at the DMV for too long or has had experience working in retail around Black Friday. With what King is saying, The Purge is a direct reflection of that catharsis. Not only are you getting to watch a crazy horror movie where everyone is shooting everyone and everything is on fire, but it's likely something you've had a thought or two about. You can consider those gators fed for sure.

Do Horror Movies Offer Us True Catharsis or Persuasive Perspective?

Catharsis as a concept was coined by the philosopher Aristotle . He explained that the performing arts are a way to purge negative types of emotions from our subconscious, so we don't have to hold onto them anymore. This viewpoint further perpetuates what King is trying to explain. With that cathartic relief, the urgency to act on negative emotion is less likely to happen because there is no build-up of negativity circling the drain from our subconscious to our reality. However, some who read the essay felt like King was just being persuasive and using fancy imagery rather than identifying an actual reason why horror is popular. Some claim the shock and awe factor of his words and his influence on horror would cause some readers to believe they are mentally ill deep down. I have to say, as a millennial who rummages through the ends of social media multiple times a day, everyone on the internet thinks they're mentally ill, and we all have the memes to prove it. It is exciting and fascinating to watch a horror movie after working a 9-5 job where the excitement is low. Watching Ghostface stalk Sidney Prescott ( Neve Campbell ) in Scream isn't everyone's idea of winding down, but for the last 20-something years, it has been my comfort movie when I'm feeling sad or down. The nostalgia of Scream is what makes it feel cathartic to me and that's free therapy!

What is the Science Behind Loving Horror Movies?

Psychology studies will tell us that individuals who crave and love horror are interested in it because they have a higher sensation-seeking trait . This means they have a higher penchant for wanting to experience thrilling and exciting situations. Those with a lower level of empathy are also more likely to enjoy horror movies as they will have a less innate response to a traumatic scene on screen. According to the DSM-V , a severe lack of empathy could potentially be a sign of a more serious psychological issue, however, the degree of severity will vary. I do love rollercoasters, but I also cry when I see a dog that is just too cute, so horror lovers aren't necessarily the unsympathetic robots that studies want us to be. Watching horror films can also trigger a fight-or-flight sensation , which will boost adrenaline and release endorphins and dopamine in the brain. Those chemicals being released make the viewers feel accomplished and positive, relating back to the idea that watching horror movies is cathartic for viewers.

Anyone who reads and studies research knows that correlation does not imply causation, but whether King's perspective is influenced by his position in the horror genre or not, psychology and science can back up the real reasons why audiences love horror movies. As a longtime horror lover and a pretty above-average horror trivia nerd, I have to wonder if saying we are mentally ill is an overstatement and could maybe be identified more as horror lovers seeking extreme stimulus. Granted, this essay was written over 40 years ago, so back then liking horror wasn't as widely accepted as it is today. It's possible that King felt more out of place for his horror love back then and the alienation of a fringe niche made him feel mentally ill. Is King onto something by assuming that everyone has mental illness deep down, or is this a gross overestimation of the human psyche? The answer likely falls somewhere in between, but those that love horror will continue to release that catharsis through the terrifying and the unknown because it's a scream, baby!

Doree - Season 1 - Episode 167

Mansi discovers a lead.

27 Apr 2024

Rukmini cunningly forges Ganga Prasad's signature on the property papers. Elsewhere, while searching for Doree, Mansi stumbles upon Doree's locket on the road. Will Mansi be able to reach Doree with this lead? Show more

Cast: Mahi Bhanushali

S1E167 ∙ Drama ∙ Hindi

Rukmini-anand's cruel act, s1e166 ∙ drama ∙ hindi, ganga saves kailashi devi, s1e165 ∙ drama ∙ hindi, rukmini plans to kill doree, s1e164 ∙ drama ∙ hindi, neelu fabricates doree's death, s1e163 ∙ drama ∙ hindi, mansi reveals the truth, s1e162 ∙ drama ∙ hindi, rukmini steals the evidence, s1e161 ∙ drama ∙ hindi, doree gathers proof, s1e160 ∙ drama ∙ hindi, doree gathers evidence, s1e159 ∙ drama ∙ hindi, mahendra threatens rukmini, s1e158 ∙ drama ∙ hindi.