Embodied Visions Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film

by Grodal, Torben

• ISBN13: 9780195371314
• ISBN10: 0195371313
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-17
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Embodied Visions presents a groundbreaking analysis of film through the lens of bioculturalism, revealing how human biology as well as human culture determine how films are made and experienced. Throughout his study, Torben Grodal uses the breakthroughs of modern brain science to explaincentral features of film aesthetics and to construct a general model of aesthetic experience--what he terms the PECMA flow model--that demonstrates the movement of information and emotions in the brain when viewing film. Examining a wide array of genres--animation, romance, pornography, fantasy,horror--from evolutionary and psychological frameworks, Grodal expands his scope to reflect on social issues at the intersection of film theory and neuropsychology, including moral problems in film viewing, how we experience realism and character identification, and the value of the subjective formsthat cinema elaborates. Embodied Visions broadens the theoretical framework of cognitive approaches to cinema while contributing toward a growing body of work on the relation between biology and culture.

Author Biography

Torben Grodal is Professor of Film and Media at the University of Copenhagen. He is author of Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition, and he has published books and articles on cultural history, film theory and film analysis, aesthetic theory, and video games combining humanistic methods with brain science.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Evolution, Biology, Culture and Film

Film, Culture, and Evolution

Universalism, Cultural Variation, and Children's Film

Love and Desire in the Cinema

Screaming Lambs and Lusty Wolves: Moral and Evolution

Undead Ghosts and Living Prey: Fantasy and Horror

Sadness, Melodrama and Rituals of Loss and Death

Narrative, Visual Aesthetics, Brain, and the PECMA flowIntroduction to Part Two: the PECMA flow

Stories for Eyes, Ears, and Muscles--Story as Embodied Simulation

Character Simulation and Emotion

Art Film, the Transient Body and the Permanent Soul

Subjective Aesthetics in Film

Realism and Reality

Conclusion

Appendix: Frozen PECMA Flows in Trier's Oeuvre

References

Index

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