Joerg Fingerhut and Katrin Heimann

One prevalent thought in Cognitive Film Theory is that the formal features of film have been adjusted to our perceptual habits in order to more fully immerse the viewer in the action on screen. Especially Hollywood Film thus progresses in concealing the differences between film perception and the perceptual routines we apply in the extra-filmic world (Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson, 1985). It has therefore been suggested that filmic narrative devices, such as montage and specific camera have evolved “to match our cognitive and perceptual proclivities” by, making use of the natural dynamics of attention and other structural features of human perception (Cutting & Candan, 2013). Yet cinema does not simply and smoothly approximating our given biological apparatus. The converse might also be true: we have adapted to the technological and filmic means of the medium that differs from everyday perception in substantial ways and provides perceptual interactions that are outside our behavioral bodily repertoire. By habituating ourselves to the medium of edited film, we also have transformed some of our ways of experiencing the world⎯in ways that are scarcely understood. Through this process we develop a »filmic body« that has incorporated regularities that pertain the optic flow presented by film and that becomes activated during film watching and, possibly, also off screen. The aim of the proposed paper is to provide insights from psychology and neuroscience into what this filmic body might consist of. Such questions will be addressed by applying an embodied perspective on the mind to our understanding of film.

Joerg Fingerhut (DPhil) did his PhD in philosophy at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2007-2011) in the »Kolleg-Forschergruppe Bildakt und Verkörperung,« headed by the art historian Horst Bredekamp and the Philosopher John M. Krois and was a member of the interdisciplinary research group »Functions of Consciousness« at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2009-2010). He then »Art & Neuroscience Postdoctoral Fellow« at Columbia University (2012), and worked as an assistant professor at the University of Stuttgart (2012-2015). He currently is a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Katrin Heimann (PhD) has been trained both in Philosophy (M.A.) and Neuroscience (PhD) and is currently a PostDoc at the Interacting Minds Centre in Aarhus. She is generally interested in cognition arising from subject-subject and subject-artifact interaction with a special focus on the cultural artifact of film. In particular, she is using quantitative as well as qualitative studies to investigate how movies in their making are shaped by our perceptual and cognitive abilities as well as vice versa, that is, how movies shape our minds.