Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film

Theory?
May 2011

Film Art: An Introduction

Introdu ction
Christopher Nolan:
Nolan: A
Labyrinth of Linkages
 pdf online
Pandora’s Digital Box: Films,
Files, and the Futur
Futuree of 
Movies  pdf online
Planet Hong
H ong Kong, se cond
edition  pdf online
The W ay Hollywood
Hollywood  Tells It
 pdf online
Poetics of C inema  pdf  online
Poetics   online
Chapter 3 | Three
Dimensions of Film
Narrative new pdf!
Figures
Figures T rac
raced
ed I n Light
Ozu a nd the Po etic
eticss  o f 
Cinema  pdf online
Exporting Entertainment:
Entertai nment:
Americaa in the W orld Film
Americ
Market 1907–1934
1907–193 4  pdf online

CinemaScope: The Mode rn

Miracle
Miracle You See W ithithou
ou t
Glasses
How Motion
Motion Pict
Pictures
ures Becam e Start with this question, which I think is one of the most fascinating we
the Movies
can ask: What enables us to understand films?
Co nstr
nstruct
uctive
ive e diting in
Pickpocket : A video
video essa y
 All films? Well, set aside some hard cases, like Brakhage abstractions
and transmissions of the Crab Nebula from the Hubble telescope
Shklovsky
Shklovs ky and His
 “Mo nu m en t to a Scie
Scientif
ntif ic (above). Let’s start with a prototype: a film whose moving images
Error”  new!
present more or less recognizable persons, places, and things caught up
Murder Culture: Adventures
in 1940s
194 0s Suspense in what
what we
w e intuitive
intuitively
ly call stories. In other words, an ordina
ordinary
ry movie
The View
Viewer’s
er’s Share: Mode ls shown in theatres and on video.
of Mind in Explaining Film
Com mon Sense + Film Film
Theory = Com mon-Sense Catching a code
Film Theo ry
ry??
Mad Detective: Doubling Down
The Classical Hollywood 
Cinema Twenty-Five Years
Along
Nordi
ordisk
sk and the Ta bleau
Aesthetic
William
William Ca meron Menzies:
One Forceful, Impressive
Idea
Another Shaw Production:
Anamo rphic Adventur
Adventures
es in
Hong Kong
Paolo Gioli’s Vertical Cinema
(Re)Discovering Charles
Dekeukeleire
Doing Film Histor
Historyy
in Classical
Classical Cinem a
Anatomy of the Action Picture
Hearing Voices
Preface, Croatian edition, On
the History of Film Style
Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything
Film and the Historical
Historical Return
Studying Cinema

T he Naked City.
City.

 At one time, film

film theorists were
wer e considerably
considerably interested
interest ed in the issue
issue of 
comprehension. The heyday of film semiology, roughly from the mid-
1 960s to
t o the end of the 1 970s, brought forth vigov igorous
rous conj
conjectures
ectures about
about
how we grasp images and comprehend stories. One of the boldest
proposals
proposals was the idea that understanding
understanding rests
rest s upon codes—rule-
codes—rule-
governed relatio
r elations
ns between
betw een the signifi
signifier
er (a material
mater ial thing,
thing, like
like an
image) and a signified (a concept). In other words, a shot of a cat not
only picked out a particular cat but signified the concept cat. Likewise,
 we understand a chase scene because we kno k now
w the cinematic codecode for
for
this concept. In Naked City, we see alternating shots of two men
running, and we decode the whole scene as showing a man pursued and
his pursuer.

Semiology was a promising attempt to study comprehension in a

systematic way. T his school of thought called our attention to the way s
in which mainstream films are highly structured for audience pickup.
Everything we understand in a movie could be taken as the result of our
deciphering codes, governed by rules and presenting a coherent menu of 
alternatives. 1

For some thinkers, the concept of codes promised to give substance to

the age-old “film grammar” metaphor. Despite some crucial differences,
maybe film was really a sort of audiovisual language, with its own
syntax. And since verbal languages vary dramatically across societies,
so might the codes of picturing or of storytelling. Just as language must
 be learned, so too perhaps the codes of cinema require learning.

Semiological research reminded us that what seems natural is often

 very artificial, and relative to one society rather than another. In
another culture, the code of traffic signals might employ not red, yellow,
and green lights, but any other colors. The notion of codes also suited an
emerging view of what one influential book of the time called the “social
construction of reality.” 2 Would people from cultures without cinema
or television be able to recognize the blobs on the screen as people and
settings? Do codes go all the way down to the very core of our
perception? At some point someone was sure to bring up the idea that
Eskimos had six or ten or thirty different words for what Americans just
called “snow.” 3

Today, classic semiologists are rare in film studies. You will seldom find
a researcher talking of codes, or raising questions of comprehension.
Nevertheless the idea that filmic expression is quite arbitrary , socially 
constructed, and learned remains in the ether. Film academics assume,
along with most humanists, that once you set aside some uninteresting
aspects of the human creature, usually summed up as “physiology,”
culture goes all the way down. Beyond cell division and digestion, let’s
say, everything is cultural, and to invoke any other explanations risks
rejection.

That 80s show 

In Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), I asked how we could best
explain our grasp of one aspect of cinema, the flow of story information I
called narration. I argued that since most narrative films were made in
order to be experienced by viewers, we ought to study the strategies
filmmakers used to elicit understanding. Most of those strategies, it
seemed to me, ex ploited rather general human perceptual and cognitive
capacities.

Perceptual research of the 1 970s was dominated by a school of thought

derived ultimately from the great psychophysicist Helmholtz. “New 
Look” perceptual psychologists like Jerome Bruner and Richard
Gregory held that the stimuli hitting our sense organs were noisy,
incomplete, and ambiguous; we needed higher-level faculties to sort
them out. Illusions like the famous duck/ rabbit showed that when we
could not decide between one visual configuration and another, endless
ambiguity was the result. The eye, as was commonly said, was part of 
the mind. Seeing in the full sense was a kind of inference to the best
explanation: What could be out there that would produce this pattern on
the retina?

 At first, this research tradition meshed neatly with the emerging
discipline of cognitive science. In the early 1980s, cognitive scientists
 were largely focused on matters of language, reasoning, applying
categories, and making decisions about action. 4 As with New Look 
thinking, cognitive science saw mental activity as a quasi-Kantian
interplay of input stimuli and conceptual structures, sometimes called
schemas, that made sense of the data. Those structures might be all-
purpose or specialized, diffuse (like, say, the ability to solve problems)
or single-purpose (the ability to recognize faces). Again, inference was
the model, although some mental inferences, like those involved in
 vision, were held to be fast, automatic, and “informationally 
encapsulated” (i.e., ignorant of anything outside their dedicated
 domain). 5 Eventually, the inferential approach would become the
 basis of a computational approach to both perception and cognition, and
it probably remains the dominant view in psychological research.

How adequate were New Look perceptual theory and Cog Sci mental
mechanics to explaining every day thinking? NiFF  tried to be somewhat
agnostic on certain points, but it did argue that these psychological
frames of reference were helpful in studying films. Perceptually, films
are illusions, not reality; cognitively, they are not the blooming, buzzing
confusion of life but rather simplified ensembles of elements, designed to
 be understood. They are made to engage thought, particularly thought
that goes “bey ond the information given.” 6 Film narratives, like
narratives in all media, abstract and streamline their real-world
components for smooth pickup and invite us to fill in what is left
unshown and unsaid. What outline drawings are to the eye, narratives
are to the mind.

So NiFF  claimed that we could study films as ensembles of cues that

prompt inferential extrapolation at many levels—of perception, of 
comprehension, and of interpretation. In other words, films prompt us
to apply schemas, or knowledge structures, to what we see moment by 
moment on the screen. Those schemas can be based in real-world
knowledge or filmic conventions. Each type posed problems for the
concept of codes.

Real-world knowledge may not be as strictly structured as the concept

of code suggests. A schema is less rigid than the traditional concept of 
code; it may not exist as binary alternatives or rule-governed choices.
Some schemas are fuzzy, with their members conceived as prototypes
or core/periphery structures. So for us a robin is a prototy pical bird, a
penguin or ostrich is not. T he latter might be prototypes for people in
other cultures, but that doesn’t invalidate the point that some categories
are organized by “best-instance” criteria rather than hard and fast
 boundaries.

Some cinematic conventions more crisply structured: Y ou can end a

scene with a cut or a fade or a dissolve or a wipe or a swish-pan….and
that’s about it. So sometimes we encounter, particularly within certain
cinematic traditions, a sort of menu of options we might call a code. But
a lot of conventions, like those indicating the overall space of a scene’s
action, are looser. T here is no rule that requires a long-shot to be
followed by a close-up, the way a preposition in language requires an
object. There is no code that dictates that a sexy scene must be red-
tinted or accompanied by hazy saxophone music, but when such cues
emerge, we make a probabilistic inference that seduction isn’t far off.
Not all conventions, it seems, are coded. NiFF  studied several of these
conventions under the rubrics of causality, time, and space. Those three
categories, NiFF  claimed, are basic to narrative and to human cognition,
and so they ought to play roles in the process by which we understand
stories.
Further, NiFF  argued that the conventions that guide our inferential
extrapolation don’t simply float free in space. There were recurring
clusters of favored choices for presenting causality , time, and space.
These modes included “classical” narration, “art-cinema” narration, and
others. The historical layout still seems valid to me, and they seem to
have proven useful to other researchers.

Theoretically, however, NiFF  ran into problems in the role it assigned to

inference. At the time of writing NiFF , I was aware of the writings of J.
J. Gibson and his insistence that perception evolved in environments
 very different from the impoverished information that New Look 
theorists assumed triggered perception. In the three- dimensional world
in which creatures like us live, the stimuli are not ty pically partial or
degraded; they are in fact quite rich, even redundant. Moving through
space, we register an optic flow that specifies the layout of surfaces quite
precisely. 7

 NiFF  finessed this problem by saying that even if Gibson’s account of 

ordinary perception were right, films don’t present the informational
array afforded by the real world. Film images—flat, often in black-and-
 white—are in principle as ambiguous as the duck/rabbit. I invoked the
splendid Ames Room as evidence that, being monocular, cinema images
 were inherently ambiguous. 8

This now seems to me misguided. Films, as Gibson himself pointed out,

disambiguate their images to a huge extent by the sheer fact of 
movement. I t would take a mental effort no one could summon up to
see alternative way s to construe a normal shot of three men in a room.
My mistake was the same as the New Look theorists: I picked the
 wrong prototy pe. Just as illusions aren’t fair samples of perception i
 the wild, so the Ames Room is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking
artifice, not a typical one. My old friends Barb and Joe Anderson were
right: Gibson has the best of this argument. 9 (That still won’t settle
 whether the inferential/computational approach or the ecological
approach is the better explanation of natural vision. On that I retreat to
the amateur’s agnosticism.)

I was on surer ground, I think, in treating narrative comprehension as a

 version of inference-making. But NiFF  pushed it in a problematic
direction. Considering narrative comprehension as inferential led me to
 bring in the Russian Formalist distinction between fabula and syuzhet .
These two terms have been used in several ways, but the most plausible
 way, it seemed to me then and seems still, is to see fabula as the
chronological-causal string of events that may be presented by the
syuzhet , the configuration of events in the narrative text as we have it.

Clearly the distinction is useful as an analytical tool, to study how a

narrative can “deform” its underlying story for aesthetic purposes. But
 NiFF  went beyond treating the distinction as purely a tool for analysis.
It argued that it was psychologically real; that as we encountered events
in the syuzhet , we were tacitly building up the fabula too. The process is
a bit like double-entry bookkeeping, with the viewer keeping track not
only of what is happening each moment on the screen but also slotting
that into the chronological pattern of fabula events. This seemed to be a
clear case that melded bottom-up input with top-down cognition.

Unfortunately, some people argued, it’s psychologically implausible.

Eventually I had to agree. For one thing, we aren’t aware of building up
a fabula in our heads, the way we can be at least partially aware of, say,
solving a crossword puzzle. For another, we can’t access it easily; try 
stopping a film on video and reciting the entire chain of events leading
up to the moment of pause. Worse, try at the end of the movie to grasp
mentally the entire fabula you’ve purportedly worked out. Chances are
 you can’t do it. Given that our memories are r econstructive rather than
photographic, creating an accurate fabula is extremely difficult. More
theoretically, Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks proposed some
reasons that the viewer’s mental representation for the most part
cannot reflect the underlying structure of the film. 10

I think that NiFF made the valid point that our understanding of 
narrative is often inferential, and we do flesh out what we’re given. But I
now think that the inference-making takes place in a very narrow 
 window of time, and it leaves few tangible traces. What is built up in our
memory as we move through a film is something more approximate,
more idiosyncratic, more distorted by strong moments, and more
subject to error than the fabula that the analyst can draw up. Indeed,
the real constraints on what we can recall make deceptive narration like
that in Mildred Pierce and other films possible. 11

Still, I think the error was a productive one. In assigning to the

spectator the task of ongoing fabula construction, NiFF  harmonized with
 one premise I consider central: a holistic sense of form. Even if we scan
the entire narrative through a narrow slit, it’s important for the analyst
and theorist to consider the overall design of the work, the more or less
coherent principles that govern the unfolding tale. I’m thinking of such
matters as smoothly cascading character goals, psychological motives
and personality change, gradual development of knowledge, shifts in
 viewpoint, repeated and varied motifs, and finer- grained patterns of 
 visual and sonic presentation. In an analysis of Jerry Maguire, for
instance, I tried to show how such features were operating at many 
scales, creating a considerable formal richness. 12

Such design features need to be accounted for, especially when they 

crop up in an otherwise innocuous popular movie. Why are many 
movies more tightly organized than they need to be, given the drastic
limits on viewer attention and memory? Clearly, goals, motifs, and the
rest aim to shape the spectator’s experience in some respect, and we
may well register many of them at some level of awareness.  NiFF 
posited a too-sapient viewer, but methodologically at least, it’s better to
point up many things that a spectator could  respond to, even if no real
spectator grasps or recalls all of them. Indeed, some narrative traditions
seem to try to pack things tightly, so that readers or viewers can return
to the book or film and notice things that escaped them on a first pass.
Here, as elsewhere, NiFF ’s desire to mix formal analysis with an account
of spectator response created some gaps in the theory , but in some
respects it’s better to have more to explain (about the architecture and
detail of the film) than less. It’s a dynamic I’m still try ing to refine many 
 years later.

For the most part, NiFF  explicitly left aside the emotional dimensions of 
narration. That was done on the assumption that comprehension as
such was relatively insulated from affective response. You can follow a
story , I claimed, without being moved by it. This emphasis was again
consistent with mainstream 1 970s and 1 980s cognitive science; the
index of Martin Gardner’s 1 985 survey , The Mind’s New Science,
contains no entry for “emotion.” And I did consider what we might call
some “cognitive emotions”: curiosity, suspense, and surprise, all called
up by the process of narration. In the decades since the book was
 written, however, the relation of emotion to cognition has become
central to cognitive science, and it has been ex plored by several film
scholars working in the cognitivist paradigm. 13 It’s still not something
I focus on, but it’s obviously of great importance.

Finally, someone might ask: Why contrast NiFF ’s cognitive approach

 with semiology, which was passing out of favor when the book was
 written? Surely the dominant approaches emerging in the 80’s were
neo-Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and the study of 
modernity and postmodernity.

Here’s my answer. These perspectives don’t play a role in  NiFF , or in

this essay, because their proponents weren’t asking about how films are
understood. These writers focused on questions of how social, cultural,
and psychodynamic processes were represented in films. Typically 
those questions were answered by interpreting individual films, reading
them for traces of the larger processes made salient by the given
theory. 14 My concern was explaining, not explicating; I wanted
functional and causal-historical accounts of why films in various
traditions displayed certain regularities in their narrational strategies.
That was, I thought, most pertinent to the semiological line of inquiry.

In the period since NiFF  was published, cognitive film studies has

moved in parallel with cognitive science generally. We have had
neurological studies of film viewing; we have seen appeals to
evolutionary psychology; we have seen studies of suprapersonal
patterns of emergence. 15 These all seem to me fruitful. In what
follows, I want to sketch out some ideas that I ’d dev elop in a new and
improved v ersion of NiFF . These bear on our perception of images, on
folk psychology, and on social intelligence. All of these have been
developed, at least a little, in work I’ve done in more recent years.

 Dog!

 We speak of “reading” an image, but do certain kinds of images—those

that common sense declares “realistic”—demand anything like the
deciphering that printed language does? How much does grasping an
image depend on learned conventions of representation?

In NiFF  I waffled on the question too much. Although I accepting that

some aspects of image perception rode on skills acquired in commerce
 with the world, I granted some role to learning and familiarity with a
“carpentered world.” More subtle is Paul Messaris’s admirable Visual 
 Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality (1994). Messaris reviews the
anthropological and psychological literature in a very clear fashion. He
points out that some conventions for representing depth in still images
may not be widely understandable; the classic example is the drawing
above, which was interpreted by viewers in some African cultures as a
hunter pointing his spear at a very tiny elephant. 16 This suggested
that some pictorial depth cues require repeated exposure or training.
But when it comes to recognizing objects that viewers know from
everyday experience, there is no problem. The African viewers
recognized the tiny elephant as an elephant.

 When it comes to moving pictures, the issue is even clearer. Messaris

finds no evidence that people previously unacquainted with movies fail
to grasp the persons, places, and things shown on the screen. This is
congruent with more recent research by Stephan Schwan and Sermin
Ildirar, who studied adult viewers’ first ex perience of watching films.
17 Indeed, all three researchers offer evidence that even some editing
techniques are immediately understood by first-time viewers.

On the “film as language” question Messaris’s conclusions are clear:

 What distinguishes images (including motion

pictures) from language and from other modes of 
communication is the fact that images reproduce
many of the informational cues that people make
us of in their perception of physical and social
reality. Our ability to infer what is represented in
an image is based largely on this property, rather
than on familiarity with arbitrary conventions
(whereas the lat ter play a primary role in the
interpretation of language, mathematics, and so
on). 18

Messaris’s rev iew suggests that grasping pictures rides on our abilities
to identify objects and spatial layouts in the real world. Some intriguing
research on infants reinforces the point.

In a famous experiment, Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks kept their

son away from pictures during his first eighteen months. He did
occasionally see billboards and a few picture books and labels, but when
a picture was encountered, the parents never pointed out its contents or
tried to name them. At nineteen months, when the boy was starting to
spontaneously call out names of things he spotted in accidental images,
“It was evident that some form of parental response to such
identification would soon become unavoidable.” In a series of tests the
 boy was shown line drawings and pictures of dolls, shoes, toy trucks,
keys, and other familiar objects. He named them to a high degree of 
accuracy. Hochberg and Brooks concluded:

It seems clear from the results that at least one

human child is capable of recognizing pictorial
representations of solid objects (including bare
outline drawings) without specific training or
instruction. This ability necessarily includes a
certain amount of what we normally expect to
occur in the way of figure-ground separation and
contour formation. At the very least, we must
infer that there is an unlearned propensity to
 respond to certain formal features of lines-on-
paper in the same way as one has learned to
respond to the same features when displayed by 
the edges of surfaces….

The complete absence of instruction in the

present case…points to some irreducible
minimum of native ability for pictorial
recognition. If it is true also that there are
cultures in which this ability is absent, such
deficiency will require special explanation; we
cannot assert that it is simply a matter of having
not yet learned the “language of pictures.” 19

Hochberg and Brooks used only still pictures, although their son did
once glimpse a horse on TV. (He cried, “Dog!”) What about moving
images?

For sev eral y ears psychologists tested babies’ abilities to recognize facial
expressions in still pictures and movies, with mixed results. 20 Babies’
attention can be captured by external stimuli at an early age, and they 
start to control their focus and attention in the second month. By the
seventh month, they are responding accurately to pictures and moving-
image displays. Y et it’s possible that recognition starts much earlier. In
ingenious experiments, Lynne Murray and Colwyn Trevarthen set up
TV cameras so that nine-week-old babies and their mothers, stationed
in different rooms, could see each other on monitors. The experimenters
 wanted to record the interactions between them, as well as to vary the
timing of responses through pauses and replays. 21

Murray and Trevarthen’s conclusions about the babies’ ability to

synchronize their responses with the mothers’ expressions has touched
off considerable debate and further experimentation. 22 That’s not
 what matters for us as students of cinema. What’s relevant for us is that
the babies evidently did, in both real time and in tape delay, recognize
the moving images of their mothers.

 What was methodology for Murray and Trevarthen is substantive

evidence for us. Very young babies could grasp the v ideo image, at least
to some ex tent, as a representation of the most familiar person in their
lives. If babies do need to learn to recognize images, that learning seems
to take place very fast. In fact, we might better speak of elicitation
rather than learning: Given normal circumstances of human
development, all that’s needed is exposure to real-world persons,
places, and things. Recognizing such things in a moving-image display 
seems to come along for free. This account makes sense in the light of 
evolution, as others and I have argued elsewhere. 23

Folk psychology: Success stories

The Big Clock.

There is a lot more to be said and studied about grasping moving images
as representations of real-world items, most saliently people, but let me
turn now to some matters of narrative that I’ve rethought since  NiFF 
 was published.

Recognizing the contents of realistic images, I’ve suggested, depends

heavily upon our every day perceptual abilities. Similarly, filmic
storytelling relies upon cognitive dispositions and habits we’ve
developed in a real-world context. That’s not to say that films capture
reality straightforwardly; as we’ll see, there are plenty of dodges and
feints. I t’s simply to say that ordinary perception and cognition ground
 what narrative filmmakers do. On that foundation quite v arious, even
fantastic, edifices can be built.

Central to narrative psychology, I’ve come to suspect, is that elusive

thing called folk psychology. Folk psychology calls on “common sense”—
our every day habits of attributing qualities, beliefs, desires, intentions,
and the like to ourselves and to people around us. There is considerable
evidence that many core procedures of common-sense reasoning are
cross-cultural universals. 24

Consider “person perception.” We tend to arrive at quick impressions

about those around us. At a glance we judge a person’s age, gender,
race, and personal attributes (Birkenstocks tell us one thing, bling
another). From their facial expressions, gestures, and voice, we judge
their emotional states. Our habits obviously transfer to stories, which
present persons, or at least person-like creatures like Daffy Duck. To
follow the story we have to assign the characters certain qualities. When
introducing a character to us, a film narrative simply hijacks our
day ities to build up a quick impression, even (or especiall )
if that relies on stereotypes. That impression may be confirmed, tested,
or repudiated as the story develops, but our quick and dirty habits of 
person perception provide a point of departure.

 We also indulge in mind-reading. We attribute beliefs, desires, and

intentions to ourselves and to others. You want a burger; you stop at a
 burger joint to get one. You act on your desire based on beliefs about the
 world, most notably the belief that you can get a burger at that joint.
Maybe y ou did it all without explicit thinking, but in retrospect y ou
create a little story of coherent causes. We interpret others’ actions the
same way. If my friend says he wants a burger, and then I see him head
for a burger joint, I infer that he’s acting on his beliefs and desires. Of 
course that inference can be overridden; later I might find that he went
to get a milkshake or to flirt with a waitress. But even revising the
inference requires the same schema. ( Aha, he really wanted a shake, or
a date for tonight .)

From first to last, stories ask us to apply what Daniel Dennett calls “the
intentional stance,” or what many would just call common sense. 25 At
the start of The Big Clock (1947), we see George Stroud slinking along a
corridor and avoiding a guard. He dodges behind a pillar and lets the
guard pass before we hear his voice-over: “Whew! That was close.”
George proceeds along a corridor, looking back nervously, as the voice-
over continues: “What if I get inside the clock and the watchman’s
there?”

From George’s disheveled appearance and furtive movements, as well

as the stream-of-consciousness commentary, we have no trouble
inferring his beliefs (he’s being hunted) and his desire (to take refuge).
 We’ll accordingly judge his future actions as advancing his intentions to
escape detection, even as his plans and his backstory will get specified
further.

The centrality of characters’ goals in classical filmmaking, of which

Kristin and I have made much on this site and in our research, fits our
folk-psychological tendency to pick out actions that fulfill desires in the
light of characters’ beliefs. The web of intentions can get very 
complicated—think of all the beliefs and desires at play in The
Godfather—but we’re very good at tracking them because we expect
that social situations exhibit what people are planning to achieve. To
 bring babies back in, it seems that they too can do mind-reading. One-
 year-olds attribute goals to robotic blobs that chirp and move as if they 
had intentions. 26

There are enormous philosophical debates around the belief-desire

component of folk psychology. 27 Is it truly explanatory, or just
 vacuous? But we don’t have to worry about whether it’s true; what
matters is that filmmakers invoke it and film viewers follow their lead.
Storytellers are practical psychologists, prey ing (usually in a good sense)
on our habits of mind in order to produce experiences.
Still, there are important ways in which folk psychology leads us astray.
Film exploits those too.

Folk psychology: The downside

 Daisy Kenyon.

In Everything Is Obvious* (*Once Y ou Know the Answer), Duncan J.

 Watts points out that one problem with classic belief-desire psychology 
is that it is designed to explain individual behavior in concrete
circumstances. It doesn’t scale up well to explain large-scale trends. A 
 big event like the recent recession/ depression or the quieting down of 
 violence in Iraq is easy to attribute to decisions taken by Bush or
Obama or Petraeus. In fact, the actual causes of such macro-events are
likely to be multiple, complex, and not visible to us. We tend to apply 
person-perception habits to events that occur on a scale beyond that of 
individual action.

 Watts’ book is a contribution to “Wrongology,” the study of our

tendencies to overestimate our abilities, make simple logical errors, and
act inconsistently. T he research area has its roots in the studies of 
heuristics and biases conducted by Daniel Kahneman and Amos
Tversky. 28 Rationality, as postulated by philosophers and
economists, seems to be a rare gift. To take a now-classic example:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very 

 bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student,
she was deeply concerned with issues of 
discrimination and social justice, and also
participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Now, which is more likely?

 Linda is a bank clerk.
Linda is a bank clerk and a feminist.

Most people say the latter is more probable, although it can’t be. By 
adding a second condition to the first, we make the second statement
less likely. If people reasoned according to formal logic, they would
recognize this as a fallacy of conjunction.

Likewise, the rational agent beloved of economists turns out to be

motivated by more than gain, as shown in the so-called Ultimatum
Game. Veronica has $100, while Betty has no money. According to the
rules, Veronica must offer Betty some of the money, and if Betty refuses
the split, neither play er gets anything. Now if Veronica is a rational
agent, she ought to offer Betty as little as possible, maximizing her own
gain. And Betty , who starts off with zero dollars, should take ev en a
measly $1, since that leaves her better off than before. But in
experiments conducted around the world, the players in Veronica’s
position tend to offer a fifty-fifty split. More surprisingly, players in
Betty ’s position tend to reject offers of less than $30, leaving both
players with nothing.

Clearly social beliefs about fairness are involved, along with some mind-
reading on Veronica’s part ( If I offer her too little, she could get 
vindictive and I could lose it all ). Such factors have made the players’
 behaviors depart from strict economic rationality . Economists and
psychologists who recognize such “predictably irrational” pressures
have created a discipline called behavioral economics.

So folk psychology has its own biases. Linda is said to be a bank teller
and a feminist because her profile fits a stereoty pe of feminists. T his is
sometimes called the availability heuristic, the tendency to apply the
handiest schema to a situation. There is as well confirmation bias, the
habit of looking only for evidence that supports the idea you’re leaning
toward. Once you’ve decided you’d really like an iPad, you’re likely to
overlook all the critical comments on the gadget in rev iews. If y ou
 believe in astrology, you’ll tend to remember the times that y our
horoscope seemed to predict what happened to y ou and forget the more
numerous times when it failed to do so. Watts points out the
reconstructive nature of memory as another biasing effect. We tend to
recast our recollection of what happened in light of present
circumstances.

One of my favorite biases is the  primacy effect , already discussed in a

 blog entry . Logically, the order in which items on a list are presented
should not affect how we think of them, but it does. Take Hong Kong
supermogul Leonard Ho’s three daughters. Which of their names
doesn’t belong with the other two?

Maisy, Daisy, and Pansy 

Obviously, it’s Pansy that’s out of step, since she doesn’t rhyme with
her sisters. But present them in reverse order:

Pansy, Daisy, and Maisy 

…and the outlier is Maisy, who isn’t named after a flower. T he first item
in a series tends to serve as a benchmark against which we measure the
ones that follow. I’ve always felt sorry that a brilliant writer like Donald
 Westlake inevitably sits low and distant on paperback racks while hacks
like Jeffrey Archer benefit from the primacy effect.

 Again and again, narratives manipulate our psy chological biases. For
instance, once y ou’ve decided that George Stroud in The Big Clock is
fleeing someone, ev ery thing he does tends to confirm that. T he
filmmakers exploit confirmation bias. Likewise, the syuzhet  layout relies
on the primacy effect. The film starts at a point of crisis, with George
fleeing his boss’s goons. The narration then flashes back to the beginning
of the action, when George tried to escape from Janoth’s overweening
control by taking a long-promised vacation with his family. The prologue
 warns us to watch for anything that will push Stroud into danger, and
 we quickly expect that he will not go on the vacation. Had the film begun
 with the more prosaic events t hat come earliest in the fabula, we would
not have been on the alert for Stroud’s plunge into a critical situation.
The prologue also signals the importance of the clock as a sinister force
and time as a motif through the film.

 Alternatively, narratives can upset our biases, as when we’re forced to

reev aluate a character about whom we formed firm initial impressions.
 We’re obliged to do this with Danny Ciello in the closing moments of 
 Prince of the City. Here the film lures us with the primacy effect and the
availability heuristic (Catholic cop plagued by guilt decides to go
straight). Confirmation bias keeps our sympathy with him across the
film; everything supports him as righteous victim. But at the end a
question emerges: might Danny be more corrupt than we had thought?
Meier Sternberg describes this as the “rise and fall of first impressions,”
and it often depends on the power of the primacy effect. 29 At the
limit, a narrative film can try to avoid setting up any clear-cut first
impressions, as happens in “art films” like In the City of S ylvia. 30

Sometimes one aspect of folk psychology can rescue another. For

instance, Watts points out that the Ultimatum Game doesn’t work the
same way in all societies. In experiments with the Machiguenga tribe of 
Peru, the moneyed partner tended to offer only about a quarter of the
total, and nearly all offers were accepted. Both parties were being more
“rational” by the economists’ standards. But now belief-desire
psychology kicks in. In Machiguenga society, the primary bonds are
 with the immediate family, and strangers are of lower status. So the
moneyed partner felt little obligation to make a fair split, and the
recipient was happy with whatever was offered. Once we know this, the
Machiguenga strategy makes sense. 31 A similar sort of thing happens
in fantasy and science-fiction films. Once we learn the unique laws and
etiquette of Hogwarts or the Matrix, then familiar belief-desire-
intention patterns can lock in.

Folk psychology takes us beyond the purely perceptual level I started

 with; it carries us into the realm of social intelligence. Mind-reading
requires us to detect, sometimes on very faint cues, what people are
expressing or signaling through their behavior. Elsewhere I’ve talked
about this in cases involving eye behavior— blinking and eyebrows, in
particular. But there’s much more to be done with the way s in which
cinema mobilizes our social intelligence in order to track a narrative.
Sometimes the narrative eases our task by making things redundant
and clear; sometimes the film throws up problems, making it hard to
understand characters’ intentions or reactions, as in the enigmatic
 veteran played by Henry Fonda in Daisy Kenyon.

I found the concept of social intelligence especially useful in explaining a

form of cinematic storytelling that has become prominent since the
1990s, what I called the network narrative. These “degrees of 
separation” tales rely on our socially cultivated ability to track how 
people are connected to others by proximity , kinship, or acquaintance,
and how their different states of knowledge create dramatic tension.
32 We might as well call it the soap-opera effect. Again, howev er, such
films are likely to streamline the vast complexity of real-world social
networks: the networks in movies like Love, Actually and Sunshine
 State tend to be simple and redundantly stated. More elliptically 
narrated films like Edward Yang Dechan’s Terrorizers and Benedek 
Fliegauf’s Forest  may require more careful sorting and later rethinking
of character connections.

 Another aspect of folk psychology, crucial to narrative but neglected in

 NiFF , merits more study: emotional response. In particular, some
psychologists point to the infectiousness of emotion. Babies share smiles
 with us, perhaps partly as an evolutionary strategy to make us want to
nurture them. (Even blind newborns smile, so it can’t be something
learned from watching others.) Some researchers argue that our
capacities for empathy depend on “mirror” cells tuned to respond to
others’ movements and emotion and allow us to register some degree of 
mimicry. 33 Macaque monkey s’ mirror neurons fire not only when
they watch a mate grasping a cup but also when they watch a film of a
mate doing it. (More evidence that film images require no special code-
learning.) V. S. Ramachandran suggests that mirror neurons could
explain the fact that a mother sticking out her tongue provokes her
newborn baby to do the same, a presumably innate response. 34 If 
assumptions about mirror neurons in humans turn out to be well-
founded, we may find that cinema, with its ability to capture gesture
and the flickers of facial expressions, is an ideal medium for triggering
involuntary reactions (kinesthetic, emotional), which can in turn can be
recruited for narrative purposes.

Uncommon sources of common sense

Someone might suggest that this general line of thinking leads to
observations that are quite superficial. What viewer doesn’t see that
George Stroud in The Big Clock is trying to avoid the guards? I’d reply 
that once we move beyond the moment to look at strategies of 
patterning at different scales, we find things aren’t so obvious; that was
the primary task of NiFF . But I grant that our point of departure will
seem v ery commonsensical. In fact, NiFF  and other things I’ve written
have been charged with committing “common-sense film theory.”

In one way that’s true. The humanities have in general suffered from
straining for the most far- fetched accounts of how art, literature, and
music work. In the literary humanities in particular, ingenious
interpretations—often relying on free-association, wordplay, and talking
points lifted from favored penseurs—get more notice than plausible
explanations do. In various places I’ve argued for naturalistic and
empirical explanations as the best option we have in answering middle-
range questions, and even bigger ones like “How do we comprehend
movies?” Sometimes our answers will not be counterintuitive. To say 
that looking at images recruits our skills of looking at the world will not
surprise many people; but it is likely to be true. What’s likely to be
counterintuitive are the discoveries of mechanisms that undergird
perception. Would common sense predict that an object’s form, color,
movement, and spatial location are analyzed along distinct pathways in
the visual system? Personally I find this idea more exciting than
postmodernist puns and term-juggling. 35

More important, we can embrace common sense at a meta-level.

Recognizing that it is in play in narrative comprehension makes it
something we need to analyze. We can understand filmic understanding
 better if we recognize what’s intuitively obvious, and then go on to ask 
 what in the film, and in our psychological and social make-up, makes
something obvious. And those factors may not be obvious in themselves.
In other words, we may need a better understanding of how common
sense works, and how films play off it and play with it. That
understanding may in turn oblige us to accept empirical experiment,
evolutionary thinking, and neurological research—all of which most
literary humanists find worrisome.

So worrisome, in fact, that many don’t recognize naturalistic

explanations as being theoretical at all. For them, the only theories that
exist are Big Theories, and so efforts like the one I just mentioned are
condemned as expressing a disdain for or suspicion of theorizing tout 
court . But that objection, feeble to start with, was blocked back in 1996
 by the opening sentences Noël Carroll and I wrote in our Post-T heory:
 Reconstructing Film Studies:

Our title risks misleading you. Is this book about

the end of film theory? No. It’s about the end of 
Theory, and what can and should come after. 36

That introduction and many of the pieces included in the volume float
arguments for theorizing as an activity that asks researchable questions
and comes up with more or less plausible answers—some
commonsensical, some not, and some probing what counts as common
sense.

Ironically, just as filmic interpretation is amenable to task analysis from

a cognitive standpoint, a surprising amount of Grand Theory seems to
me to rely on the sort of folk-psychological schemas and shortcuts that
 we find in ordinary life. But that’s a whole other essay.

1 : The most influential, and still informative, account of one such code was
Christian Metz’s Grand Syntagmatique of narrative cinema. See Metz,
 “Problems of Denotat ion in the Fiction Film,” in Film Language: A Semiotics
of t he Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press,
1974), 108–146. Metz’s more general consideration of cinematic codes is to
be found in his Language and Cinema , trans. Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok
(The Hague: Mouton, 1974).
2 : Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construct ion of 
Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge  (New York: Anchor,
1967).
3 : On this Golden Oldie of humanities lore, see Geoffrey Pullum, The Great 
Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of 
Language  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 159–175.

4 : See Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the
Cognitive Revolution  (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

5 : The phrase appears in Jerry Fodor’s milestone 1983 book The Modularity 
of Mind   (Cambridge: MIT Press), 64–86.

6 : The phrase became something of a slogan for the New Look school. See
Jerome S. Bruner, Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology 
of Knowing, ed. Jeremy M. Anglin (New York: Norton, 1973).

7 : J. J. Gibson, Perception of the Visual World  (West port, CT: Greenwood,

1974 [orig. 1950]; J. J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual 
Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).

8 : On the Ames Room, see William H. Ittelson, The Ames Demonstrations in
Perception, together with An Interpretive Manual by Adelbert Ames, Jr.
(NewYork: Hafner, 1968). Go here for many videos employing the principles
of the Ames Room. Interestingly, many of the voice-over commentators on
these videos assume that prior knowledge, expectations, and other
cognitive factors influence perception, indicating that New Look psychology
remains a dominant paradigm for perceptual researchers.
9 : Gibson made his arguments about movies in The Ecological Approach to
Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 292–302. See Joseph D.
Anderson, The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film
Theory   (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1996) and the
articles collected in Moving Image Theory: Ecological Coniderations , ed.
Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson (Carbondale: University of 
Southern Illinois Press, 2005). Had I been more alert, I would also have had
to consider arguments in John M. Kennedy’s  A Psyc hology of Picture
Perception (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1974).

10 : Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks, “Movies in the Mind’s Eye,” in In
the Mind’s Eye: Julian Hochberg on the Perception of Pictures, Films, and 
the World , ed. Mary A. Peterson, Barbara Gillam, and H. A. Sedgwick, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 387–395.
11 : See my “Cognition and Comprehension: Viewing and Forgetting in
Mildred Pierce ,” Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 135–150.
The chart in the essay was printed inaccurately; an accurate one is at
http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/poetics.php.
12 : See The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 63–71.
13 : Major examples include Ed Tan, Emotion and the Structure of 
Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine  (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996);
Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Genres, Feelings, and 
Cognition  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Carl Plantinga and Greg
M. Smith, eds., Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion  (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Greg M. Smith, Film Structure and 
the Emot ion System  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), and
Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s
Experience  (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

14 : In another book, I tried to show how theory-driven interpretations, like

interpretations that weren’t theory-driven, were amenable to cognitive and
rhetorical analysis. See Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the
Interpretat ion of Cinema  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

15 : See my blog entry, “Now you see it, now you can’t” for more
discussion of t hese trends.
16 : See William Hudson, “Pictorial Depth perception in Subcultural Groups in
Africa,” Journal of Social Psychology  52 (1960), 183–208, and “The Study of 
the Problem of Pictorial Perception among Unacculturated Groups,” 
International Journal of Psychology  2 (1967), 89–107.

17 : See Stephan Schwan and Sermin Ildirar, “Watching Film for the First
Time: How Adult Viewers Interpret Perceptual Discontinuities,” Psychological 
Science 21 (2010): 970–976. Online access is at
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/21/7/970.abstract.
18 : Paul Messaris, Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality  (Boulder:
Westview, 1994), 165.
19 : Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks, “Pictorial Recognition as an
Unlearned Activity: A Study of One Child’s Performance,” in In the Mind’s
Eye , 64.

20 : For a review of early experiments, see Charles A. Nelson, “The

Perception and Recognition of Facial Expressions in Infancy,” in Social 
Perception in Infants , ed. Tiffany M. Field and Nathan A. Fox (Norwood, NJ:
Ablex, 1985), 101–125. Later experiments in infant cognition are considered
in the light of “folk” theories of mind, physics, and the like, in Steven Pinker,
How the Mind Works  (New York: Norton, 1997), Chapter 5.

21 : Lynne Murray and Colwyn Trevarthen, “Emotional Regulation of 

Interactions between Two-month-olds and Their Mothers,” in Social 
Perception in Infants , ed. Field and Fox, 177–197. Ellen Dissayanake has
proposed a fascinating theory of the origins of art based in mother-child
interactions; see  Art and Intimac y: How the Arts Began (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2000).
22 : See, for example, Phillipe Rochat, Ulric Neisser, and Viorica Marlan, “Are
Young Infants Sensitive to Interpersonal Contingency?” Infant Behavior and 
Development  21, 2 (1998): 355–366.

23 : See Anderson, Reality of Illusion, Chapters 3–5; see my “Convention,

Construction, and Cinematic Vision,” in Poetics of Cinema, 57–82.
24 : See for a summary Donald E. Brown, Human Universals  (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1991), 130–140.
 25 : Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance  (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1987).
26 : Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us
about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2009), 98.
27 : To get the flavor of some of the debates, see Barry Loewer and
Georges Rey, ed., Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics (Cambridge:
Blackwell, 1991), especially Daniel C. Dennett, “Granny’s Campaign for Safe
Science,” 87–94 and Fodor’s reply: “The enormous practical success of 
belief/desire psychology makes a prima facie case for its approximate truth” 
(277). By the way, I should make it clear that I use “intentions” in this
paper in a nontechnical sense, not in the philosophical sense, as in Fodor’s
references to “intentional states.” 
28 : See Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, eds.,  Judgment 
under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases  (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982).
29 Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 99–102. More generally, a
great deal of Narration in the Fiction Film , including its focus on curiosity,
suspense, and surprise, is indebted to Sternberg’s book, a trailblazing work
of modern narratology.
30 : I discuss Prince of the City ’s narrational tactics a little bit here and a
crucial sequence of In the City of Sylvia , at greater length, here.
31 : Duncan J. Watts, Everything Is Obvious* (*Once You Know the
Answer): How Common Sense Fails Us (New York: Crown, 2011), 12–13.
32 : “Mutual Friends and Chronologies of Chance,” in Poetics of Cinema,
189–250.
33 : See Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain—
How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions , trans. Frances Anderson (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People:
The New Science of How We Connect with Others  (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2008)
34 : V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for 
What Makes Us Human (New York: Norton, 2011), 121–128.

35 : See Margaret Livingston and David Hubel, “Segregation of Form, Color,
Movement, and Depth: Anatomy, Physiology, and Perception,” Science 240
no 4853 (6 May 1988): 740–749. Available at
http://www.sc iencemag.org/content/240/4853/740.abstract .
36 : “Introduction,” Post-T heory: Reconstr uct ing F ilm Studies, ed. David
Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996),
xiii. More generally, much of what I’ve said in this online essay was said
more pointedly in Carroll’s pioneering 1985 article, “The Power of Movies.” 
See Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image  (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 78–93.

comments about the state of this website go to Meg Hamel.