The Reality of Illusion

An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory

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by Joseph D. Anderson

Type: Studies
Subject: Theory
Keywords: theory, ecology
Publishing date: 1998
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
1st publishing: 1996
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 216 pages
5 ½ x 8 ½ inches (14 x 21.5 cm)

ISBN-10 ISBN-13

0-8093-2196-3
978-0-8093-2196-4

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Book Presentation:
Applying research findings from studies in visual perception, neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and anthropology, Joseph D. Anderson defines the complex interaction of motion pictures with the human mind and organizes the relationship between film and cognitive science.

Anderson’s primary argument is that motion picture viewers mentally process the projected images and sounds of a movie according to the same perceptual rules used in response to visual and aural stimuli in the world outside the theater. To process everyday events in the world, the human mind is equipped with capacities developed through millions of years of evolution. In this context, Anderson builds a metatheory influenced by the writings of J. J. and Eleanor Gibson and employs it to explore motion picture comprehension as a subset of general human comprehension and perception, focusing his ecological approach to film on the analysis of cinema’s true substance: illusion.

Anderson investigates how viewers, with their mental capacities designed for survival, respond to particular aspects of filmic structure—continuity, diegesis, character development, and narrative—and examines the ways in which rules of visual and aural processing are recognized and exploited by filmmakers. He uses Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane to disassemble and redefine the contemporary concept of character identification; he addresses continuity in a shot-by-shot analysis of images from Casablanca; and he uses a wide range of research studies, such as Harry F. Harlow’s work with infant rhesus monkeys, to describe how motion pictures become a substitute or surrogate reality for an audience. By examining the human capacity for play and the inherent potential for illusion, Anderson considers the reasons viewers find movies so enthralling, so emotionally powerful, and so remarkably real.

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

Press Reviews:
Anderson joins a small group of theorists who are sounding a call to increase the emphasis on experimental method as the primary and most important tool for research on film viewing. The author regards cognitive theory, which treats the mind as an information processor and a computer as an inspiration, as the research paradigm of choice for film theorists. The film viewer is ‘a standard biological audio/video processor.’ Thus, Anderson has organized this book according to areas of film theory that can be fruitfully studied from a cognitive perspective—human perception, perception of images and sounds in the film medium, problems of continuity and narrativity, character recognition and attribution, etc. This book will stimulate discussion among those seriously interested in film study."—Choice

"[T]his book bucks the tide ... [and] may participate in shifting the direction of film studies as a whole as well as the particular direction of film psychology. . . . The Reality of Illusion deals with the problems—psychology and spectatorship—that are absolutely central to the field of cinema studies. It comes at them from an unorthodox angle. However, that is why the book is so potentially important." —Noel Carroll, author of Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory

See the publisher website: Southern Illinois University Press

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