Cognitivism, phenomenology and cinema after film

From the 1980s, a new generation of theorists challenged psychoanalytic and ideological theory. Cognitive film theorists turned to psychology and philosophy of mind to explain how viewers actually perceive, follow and feel films. Phenomenologists emphasized the embodied, sensory experience of watching. At the same time, digital technology, streaming platforms and algorithms transformed what a film is and how it reaches viewers, raising the classical questions of Lesson 1 again. This lesson covers these new approaches and the theoretical problems of cinema after film.

The fabula and syuzhet distinction from Lesson 2 and the critique of Grand Theory from Lesson 1 return here. Lesson 8's psychoanalytic theory is the main target of the cognitivists' criticism.

The cognitive turn

Cognitive film theory starts from a simple claim: watching a film is an active mental process that can be studied with the tools of psychology. In Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), David Bordwell argued that viewers construct the story by forming hypotheses. Using the syuzhet, the information the film presents, they build the fabula, the story in chronological order. They rely on schemata: mental structures learned from life and from other films, such as knowledge of how people behave, how stories are structured and what genre conventions mean. Viewers make inferences, test them against new information, and revise them.

This model treats the spectator as a problem-solver rather than a subject positioned by the unconscious. It explains suspense as uncertainty about outcomes, surprise as a failed hypothesis and mystery as a gap in the fabula that the syuzhet withholds. It also explains differences between styles: classical Hollywood narration is redundant and clear, helping viewers form strong hypotheses, while art cinema narration leaves more gaps and ambiguities, encouraging viewers to interpret.

Noël Carroll added a theory of erotetic narration, from the Greek for question: most popular films proceed by raising questions and answering them, scene by scene, which explains why mainstream narrative is so absorbing and easy to follow. He and Bordwell edited Post-Theory (1996), a collection arguing for evidence-based, middle-level research against psychoanalytic and ideological Grand Theory.

Character engagement and emotion

Cognitive theorists also rethought identification. Murray Smith, in Engaging Characters (1995), argued that identification is too vague a term and replaced it with a structure of sympathy with three levels. Recognition is perceiving a character as a distinct individual. Alignment is the access the film gives us to a character's actions, knowledge and feelings, through what Smith calls spatial attachment and subjective access. Allegiance is our moral evaluation of the character, which leads to sympathy or antipathy. These levels can come apart: a film can align us closely with a character we do not approve of.

Other cognitive scholars, such as Ed Tan, Carl Plantinga and Torben Grodal, developed theories of film emotion, arguing that films elicit emotions much as real situations do, guided by structures such as suspense, empathy and the expectations set by genre. Empirical researchers now test such theories with eye tracking, which shows that viewers' gaze converges strongly on the same points during fast-cut mainstream sequences, and with brain imaging studies that show how films synchronize viewers' responses.

Phenomenology and the embodied viewer

Phenomenology, a philosophical tradition from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, studies experience as it is lived. Vivian Sobchack's The Address of the Eye (1992) argued that film is not just an object we watch but an expression of perception: the film sees, moves and attends, and we perceive its perceiving with our whole bodies. In later essays, she described viewers as cinesthetic subjects whose senses blend, so that we may feel textures, temperatures and movements on screen in our own bodies.

Laura U. Marks, in The Skin of the Film (2000), proposed haptic visuality: a way of seeing that works like touch, attending to surfaces, textures and grain rather than to distant objects. She found it especially in intercultural and diasporic films that evoke memories carried by the senses. Steven Shaviro's The Cinematic Body (1993) argued that film works directly on the nervous system through affect, intensities of feeling that come before meaning. These approaches value the sensory power of cinema that semiotic and cognitive theories tend to neglect.

Deleuze and the time-image

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, in two books on cinema (1983 and 1985), offered a different kind of theory, a philosophy of images rather than of spectators. He distinguished the movement-image, typical of classical cinema, in which time is subordinated to action and situations lead to responses, from the time-image, which emerged after the Second World War in neorealism and modernist cinema, where characters become observers of situations they cannot act on and time itself becomes visible. Deleuze's concepts are demanding but influential, especially for writing about slow cinema, memory and modernist films.

Digital cinema and the index

Digital technology raised the classical question of the medium again. Bazin's realism (Lesson 3) rested on the photograph as an index of reality. Digital images, captured as data and freely manipulable, or generated entirely by software, need have no physical connection to any object. Lev Manovich argued in The Language of New Media (2001) that digital cinema becomes a branch of painting and animation, in which live-action footage is just one raw material among others. Others, such as Stephen Prince, argued that digital effects aim for perceptual realism: images that match how we perceive the world even when they show impossible things.

Generative artificial intelligence sharpens these questions. Video generated from text prompts may look photographic without any camera or subject. For criticism, the issue is not only technical but ethical and interpretive: what viewers believe they are seeing, how documentaries maintain trust, and how authorship is shared with software. PHOT-420 Lesson 11 covers provenance and content credentials; here the point is that the old debate between formalists and realists continues in new forms.

Intensified continuity and measuring style

Bordwell also used quantitative evidence to describe changes in Hollywood style. He argued in 2002 that from the 1960s mainstream films adopted intensified continuity: faster cutting, more extreme lens lengths, more close shots in dialogue and a constantly moving camera, while still preserving the basic rules of continuity editing. Barry Salt's measurements and Cinemetrics data support the overall trend toward shorter average shot lengths, although individual films vary widely.

decades = [1930, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010]
asl = [9.5, 9.0, 9.5, 7.5, 6.5, 5.5, 4.5, 3.5, 3.2]
n = len(decades)
mx, my = sum(decades) / n, sum(asl) / n
slope = sum((x - mx) * (y - my) for x, y in zip(decades, asl)) / sum((x - mx) ** 2 for x in decades)
print(f"Average change per decade: {slope * 10:+.2f} seconds")
print(f"Ratio of 1930s to 2010s ASL: {asl[0] / asl[-1]:.1f} to 1")

Average change per decade: -0.90 seconds
Ratio of 1930s to 2010s ASL: 3.0 to 1

The illustrative trend shows average shots shortening by roughly a second per decade, but measurement cannot say why. Explanations include television's influence, the training of directors in commercials and music video, digital editing, and changing audience expectations. Each explanation is a theoretical claim that requires further evidence.

Post-cinema, streaming and algorithmic culture

Theorists use the term post-cinema to describe moving images after the dominance of the projected film in a theatre: images watched on phones, laptops and televisions, made with digital cameras, distributed by platforms and mixed with games and social media. Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect (2010) argued that these media produce new kinds of feeling suited to networked, financialized capitalism.

Streaming services raise questions that echo earlier theory. Recommendation algorithms shape what viewers discover, creating feedback loops in which past choices determine future offerings. Platforms use viewing data to commission content, and critics have debated whether this favours familiar formulas, as the culture industry argument of Lesson 6 would predict, or allows niche work to find audiences, as Altman's pragmatic genre theory might suggest. Viewing habits such as watching on small screens, pausing, skipping and second-screening alter the conditions that apparatus theory and phenomenology assumed.

In Canada, these questions are also policy questions. The Online Streaming Act of 2023 brought streaming services under the Broadcasting Act, and the CRTC has required large services to contribute to Canadian and Indigenous content, raising debates about how discoverability and algorithms should be regulated.

Combining approaches

The approaches in this lesson are often presented as rivals to psychoanalytic and ideological theory, but critics frequently combine them. A cognitive account can explain how a film guides attention and builds suspense, while an ideological reading explains what values that suspense serves. A phenomenological account can describe the bodily intensity of a scene, while a feminist reading asks whose bodies are made to suffer or to be looked at. Quantitative measurement can test whether a pattern a critic claims is really present across a whole film.

When combining approaches, be clear about which claims rest on which evidence. Statements about what viewers infer or feel should be supported by the film's cues and, where possible, by research on audiences. Statements about ideology should be supported by patterns in the film and its context. Statements about style should be supported by precise description or measurement. Keeping these kinds of claims distinct makes an essay more rigorous and easier to evaluate.

Finally, remember that new technologies do not make older theories obsolete. Debates about artificial intelligence, streaming and immersive media keep returning to questions first asked by Münsterberg, Arnheim, Bazin and Kracauer: what the moving image is, what it shows and what it does to those who watch it.