Lessons in perception : the avant-garde filmmaker as practical psychologist

Abstract

Existing fi lm scholarship that draws from the fi eld of cognitive science has characterized commercial fi lmmakers as practical psychologists, who are experts at shaping our senses and ‘preying (usually in a good sense) on our habits of mind in order to produce experiences’ (Bordwell 2011). A skilled fi lmmaker will elicit emotional responses, draw the viewer’s attention to the appropriate part of the frame, make the audience jump, follow stories, and remember important items of information. In short, fi lmmakers are very skilled at guiding the thought processes, visual attention and reactions of their audience. While directors, screenwriters, editors and cinematographers are not normally trained psychologists, the application of folk wisdom was in effect during the earliest stages of fi lmmaking history. Pioneering fi lmmakers employing the ‘tableau’ style (in which each scene plays in a single shot with a static camera, far back from the action) guided the viewer’s eye by way of composition and staging. They drew on common-sense assumptions about pictorial emphasis and guided the viewer’s visual attention by having one actor come forward while the others turned away, or one actor might briefl y move to the centre of the frame. Recently, Tim Smith has used eye-tracking equipment to empirically illustrate how fi lmmakers use dialogue, composition, staging, lighting, cutting, face expressions and gestures in order to steer our attention quite minutely within the frame to areas of maximal information (Smith 2012).