On Cognitive and Semiotic Film Theory
Cognitive film theory emerged in the 1980s with a series of studies that provoked a new thinking of film analysis. This includes David Bordwell, Noel Carroll, Joseph Anderson and Edward Branigan from the American theorists, and Francesco Casetti, Roger Odin, Michel Colin, and Dominique Chateau from the European theorists. The new approach takes its powerful case from studies of psychology, cognitive science, and spectatorship. The idea was to dismiss previous attempts and start anew. By blending together all these different interdisciplinary methodologies, cognitive film theory can draw to new readings of text.
According to Carl Plantinga cognitive film theory can just as well be replaced with the term “analytical” theory, which would make it more useful when applied broadly in this sense. The nostalgic film theories of Freudism, or semiotics were useful, but have also become outdated over history. Industrial, economic, and technological changes as well as cultural and political transformations are constantly changing our present time. The readings by Sigmund Freud, or Christian Metz were useful, but are also relics of their time, and our past. We shall see if that is the case.
What is the definition of cognitive film theory? To start of there are two groups of cognitive film theorists. The American theorists reject the basic doctrines of modern film theory (refers to psychoanalysis, Marxism, or semiotics), whereas the European theorists inaugerate a revolution in modern film theory by bringing it back to its fundamental roots of its stages, that of semiotics. Interestingly the European theorists assimilate cognitive science within the semiotic structure, whereas the American theorists stay to a pure cognitive structure. To simply divide them is dicey to do, but they seem to unify in how they respond differently. Let’s think of the American group as the cognitive film theories, and the European one as the cognitive film semiotics.
Cognitivists’ reasoning critiques the linguistics and semiotics of modern film theory as a way for studying film. The question is raised whether linguistics or semiotics concepts a necessary condition of analyzing filmic narration. Quite frankly, no, Cognitivists make good critique that linguistics is not a necessary condition to analyze film narration for the reasons that it is precisely the extent, which cinema allowed to confront the problems of narration. Quite frankly, yes, Cognitivists do subsumes film under a general theory that sees cultural change as the very nature of films problematic existence. Yet, we cannot simply discard semiotics. As society grows more complex, we become more reliable upon the system of linguistics to structure, simplify, and organize our cultural experience. Our framework of understanding is, without any exceptions, structured and sustained by signs. We as humans have a mediated relationship to our environment. In the same way films mediate experience through representation of perceptual reality. Andre Bazin and Rudolph Arnheim argued this in two opposing ways. Christian Metz on the other hand combined these theories in an overview of semiotics.
So, how do you construct a semiotic film theory? That would be to construct a system, which involves first, identifying the properties, and second, how it interrelates those properties. Metz realized through his “grand syntagmatique” that the cinematic traits lie in the specific combination of a system. For him language is like thought. The “narrativization” of language allow us to give answers, for different layers of connotations to identify what something means. Icons, index, symbols allow us to make this linguistically analysis. Films specify how you think about certain objects, how you play it out and traverse in level after level, from world to world. Truth becomes a tricky issue. Semiotics, especially with Saussure, therefore constructs (not creates) a model of its objects of study. Semiotic film theorists demonstrate that the impression of unity and continuity each spectator experiences at the cinema is based upon shared, underlying system of codes that constitute the perceptibility of film. What they do show us is that film is a surface illusion of impressions of reality. Filmic meaning, for semiotics, is a result of a system of codes, and not the relation between image and referent.
Semiotic film theorists moved away from analyzing cinematic language. It is the study of textual analysis that should explain the structure of a film. The result, which leads us to cognitive (semiotic) film theory, is that it all subsumes under a general theory.
Cognitive film theory shows interest the responds and sense spectators make to films, combining the textual structures and techniques that gave birth to the response and activity invested by the spectator. These theorists tend to concentrate on the study of the human psychology using analytical philosophy. The ability to judge between correct and wrong thinking, is the basis for effective cognitive functioning. Through self-reflexivity humans test their thinking and ideas. They act accordingly, or use their thinking to react according to their own judgment. You start to rank your thoughts according to the given situation.
Let’s look at an applied example. Torban Gordal makes an interesting point about cognitive psychology. For example, children can have clear awareness, when playing a game of make-believe (ie play cowboys), but there is no such awareness of playing a game, when consuming fiction. Reading historical nonfiction, watching documentaries, one cannot see difference in the same way one reads or watches fiction. Orson Wells The War of the Worlds (1953) is an example. Wells used his radio show to broadcast a fictional alien invasion on earth using codes and conventions that were already familiar to the audience. The only problem was the audience did not know it was fiction, and could hereby not make the distinction between reality and fiction. This different reading caused a panic, as the audience did not understand the clues of fiction opposed to fact based. People ran out on the street to watch the aliens land. When looking at fiction we seem to process it the same like a child playing a game, to give an example for cognitive reading.
All this Orson Wells made comes from the trouble that we make to distinguish between truth and fiction. In the natural science sense imagining, playing, acting, pretending, and simulating are given behaviors, given cognitive processes, or given arrangements of the exterior world i.e. a child re-enacting a fight scenes with puppets, or people believing in the landing of aliens. Fiction becomes therefore an alternative unreal activity, with the ability to construct reality. Through fiction i.e. a child can act out its behaviors and imagine alternative equivalents. In terms of semiotics it stands as a symbol acting as our coping procedure. We can construct story-like schematas and make a mental model of the world. Christian Metz (and Sigmund Freud) adopted this view of life as a symbolic phenomenon as illusions more then simple copying. A mirror image, or film, might be quite indistinguishable from the real thing. We cannot always be sure if that what we see is an act, or the real thing. Filmmakers work from case that we make a mistake with those judgments. The audience is made to believe in the mirror image. War of the Worlds is a great example for this.
Cognitive film theory makes the connection between the basic structures of visual fiction and in-which the brain processes information. As explained in the beginning, these two approaches are based on the perception and theoretical process of reception. In this case understanding the cognitive film theorists, we have to understand the connection between emotions and motivations. Watching a film is therefore an internal process. What happens in a fiction film may not be the same process as viewing the film. We have to look at what happens to the viewer in this process. The description of the internal processing’s is important to find answers of feelings, emotions, and aesthetics. How do we come to an inter-subjective agreement with our self with what we see on the screen, if such visual representations are in front of our eyes? When we construct the story in our mind; feelings, and emotions become property of the actions by the protagonist we see share with on the screen. As Bordwell puts it, the story, is received passively, but which is at the same constructed by cognitive acts.
The genre itself guides the spectator. This may lead into a total consumption by the viewer, or into the structure building of the material by the viewer. The film is not independent from how it is produced. The viewers reading changes over time, while marketing the film as a genre tries to predict a public viewing expectation. A viewer’s familiarity with the genre has a meaning given the set of elements the viewer has been exposed to. Some, who have seen a lot Science Fiction films feel familiar with its iconography and its narrative formulae. Familiarity is thereby a “reception-psychology” phenomenon. A genre can thereby only be studied by its constituted experiences of a specific audience. The War of the Worlds audience was quite familiar with the programs constituted experience and thereby could buy into the unreal phenomenon.
Cognitive film semiotics works to understand how the film is understood. Since cognitive science specializes on language, vision, and problem solving we can come to a cognitive position that film does not produce its own meaning, but the spectators posses the required knowledge to constitute it. Gilbert Ryle argues that two types of knowledge is involved: the “knowing that” and “knowing how”. What cognitive semiotic allows is to identify, what kind of knowledge is needed and how that knowledge is processed by the spectator. It is to find out what the spectator knows and understands, when watching a film. So we can say that linguistics offers means for theorists to adopt. Yet, Cognitivists and semiotics tend to ignore each other, and thereby created an unbalanced general theory of cinema. We need such cultural controls of language and other semiotics. Only the cognitive film semiotics accomplishes a vague balance, between cultural semiotics and broader constraints of cognitive film theory. They award Metz’ film semiotics and the cognitive rational autonomy upon the film spectator. What makes cognitive film semiotics characteristic is that it targets to form the mental activities of intuitive knowledge. It therefore studies the involvement of the filmic texts, instead of simply studying the text on its own. The derived meanings are, for Bordwell’s neo-formalist approach, the refential, explicit and implicit meanings.
Why should there be reasons for cognitive claims about semiotics? Ironically the answer is to increase the influence of film semiotics on film theory and at the same to make it more adequate instead of being a mere observational ample. Metz’s “Grand Syntagmatique” stresses the cognitive “unreality” of his theory that spectatorial competence does not develop the same way. The precise analysis of the “Grand Syntagmatique” it underlines the spectator’s competence and hereby confers on the Grand Syntagmatique as a cognitive reality. Simply speaking the filmic structures explained by Metz and other semiotics are cognitive representations.
What are the arguments against? Cognitive psychology denies that it plays any role in language processing. Some linguistic facts are not in psychological in nature, and some psychological facts are non-linguistically. This is based on the idea that our mind consists of separate devices to process information. The theory against is that, because of the richness of the language, only one part of our mind processes all information. We absorb this then in a form of a cognitive apparatus. This would deny that semiotics plays a role in processing language, since according through semiotics we can only process the information through language. It is also asserted that cognitive film semiotics is not consciousness in film viewing and that they only compose a break with experience of a model; the model, which satisfies only to an extent to which it has cognitive implications. The result would be that we might confuse perception with generalization about film structure. Film interaction with different behavioral system should instead be the formal analysis of film, through which then it can become psychologically significant.
At the end we can say that film semiotics together with cognitive science to combine the spectators knowledge about filmic meaning. We first asserted that those two theories are oppositional to one another. The linguistically system replaced the traditional thought that we only through language, and the sign system, have indirect access to our thoughts. The spectator has different options to understand what he sees on the screen, and may therefore comprehend and react differently, then someone else. What cognitive film theory also foregrounds is “piecemeal”. Carl Planinga makes the core critique, that theories such as the cognitive film theory, only pin-point to one small, but significant aspect of film analysis. Piecemeal analysis does not allow to see the entire picture. To simplify a theory to its own core essential points deemed to be important, means to neglect the others. Yet, we have to return to the neglected, and see how essential they are to the overall theory. Theorizing to search for the next best solution to explain film meaning may lead us to another myth of a grand theory.
Maximilian Schmige (c2007)
