This book provides analysis of how human biology, as well as human culture, determines the ways films are made and experienced. This new approach is called “bioculturalism.” The book shows how important formats, such as films for children, romantic films, pornography, fantasy films, horror films, and sad melodramas, appeal to an array of different emotions that have been ingrained in the human embodied brain by the evolutionary process. The book also discusses how these biological dispositions are molded by culture. It explains why certain themes and emotions fascinate viewers all over the globe at all times, and how different cultures invest their own values and tastes in the universal themes.The book further uses the breakthroughs of modern brain science to explain central features of film aesthetics and to construct a general model of aesthetic experience, the PECMA flow model, which explains how the flow of information and emotions in the embodied brain provides a series of aesthetic experiences. The combination of film theory, cognitive psychology, neurology, and evolutionary theory provides explanations for why narrative forms are appealing and how and why art films use different mental mechanisms than those that support mainstream narrative films, as well as how film evokes images of inner, spiritual life and feelings of realism.Embodied Visions provides a new synthesis in film and media studies and aesthetics that combines cultural history with the long history of the evolution of our embodied brains.
This chapter analyzes what viewers experience as real and argues that the feeling of realism is only loosely linked to what is actually real. It describes the explicit or tacit feelings that label the reality status of perceptions, cognitions, and actions, and shows that such feelings are shorthand tags for the way in which brain circuits evaluate the reality status of experiences in order to decide whether the embodied brain can act, “go,” or not. The go-signal is feelings of realism and the stop-signal is feelings of unrealness; physical or mental actions in fictions provide realism, and documentary representations may provide a lyrical and “unrealistic” feelings if they do not afford actions. The author discusses different types of realism: perceptual realism in contrast to categorical realism, which deals with what is generally and abstractly real; and discusses those types of realism that mimic direct reporting and use perceptual imperfections to warrant that this is a real, unstaged representation. Last, the chapter discusses the psychological reasons that films portraying negative experiences are traditionally more often called realistic than those that portray positive events, and why postmodern skepticism toward realism is unwarranted.
This article argues that the central dimensions of film aesthetics may be explained by a general theory of viewer psychology, the PECMA flow model. The PECMA flow model explains how the film experience is shaped by the brain‘s architecture and the operation of different cognitive systems; the model describes how the experience is based on a mental flow from perception, through emotional activation and cognitive processing, to motor action. The article uses the flow model to account for a variety of aesthetic phenomena, including the reality-status of films, the difference between narrative and lyrical-associative film forms, and the notion of ‘excess’.
Based on film examples and evolutionary psychology, this article discusses why viewers are fascinated not only with funny and pleasure-evoking films, but also with sad and disgust-evoking ones. This article argues that although the basic emotional mechanisms are made to avoid negative experiences and approach pleasant ones, a series of adaptations modify such mechanisms. Goal-setting in narratives implies that a certain amount of negative experiences are gratifying challenges, and comic mechanisms make it possible to deal with negative social emotions such as shame. Innate adaptations make negative events fascinating because of the clear survival value, as when children are fascinated by stories about loss of parental attachment. Furthermore, it seems that the interest in tragic stories ending in death is an innate adaptation to reaffirm social attachment by the shared ritual of sadness, often linked to acceptance of group living and a tribal identity.
The chapter discusses how storytelling represents an innate mental capacity to synthesize an agency’s perceptual input, its emotions, and its output in terms of action. Insight into the architecture of the embodied brain and the PECMA flow clarifies how to understand the psychological function of stories and storytelling. The chapter further describes the way that different media—language and oral storytelling, drama, written stories, film, and video games—use different aspects of the mental “storytelling” that characterizes our ordinary experience of daily life and its actions, and it describes the historical development in narrative techniques of representation in different media. It uses this narrative theory to redefine the story-discourse dichotomy, and to argue that film narratives are typically experienced as taking place in a kind of presence, and also discusses the relation between narratives and playing games vital for interactive media. Finally, it discusses the relationship between storytelling interactivity and linearity and shows that there are a number of psychological and motivational reasons that nonlinear storytelling is difficult, and that many so-called nonlinear formats consist in fact of sets of linear stories.</ABS>
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