Projections

If people generally do a poor job of recognizing liars, it is interesting that so many movies employ deceptive characters. Duplicity and prevarication are common plot devices whereby scheming characters maneuver to get their way. Such movies often rely on viewers’ abilities to recognize the deception at hand. Does this represent a disconnect between movies and life, with viewers tasked in one arena with a skill set that doesn’t seem to function well in the other?

People are bad at recognizing liars. Data culled from several psychological experiments demonstrates that even the most well trained individuals – government agents, police officers, and so on – can barely succeed at a 50 percent rate. Lying and deception, however, are fundamental narrative elements in several film genres – particularly the detective film and the female gothic, genres that peaked in popularity in 1940s Hollywood. Considering their real-life lack of proficiency, how do viewers successfully spot deception in such films? Drawing on findings from a handful of experiments, this article brings cognitive psychological concepts to bear on two 1940s films: Out of the Past (1947) and Secret Beyond the Door (1948). The article claims that filmmakers, particularly actors, exaggerate, simplify, and emphasize deception cues to selectively achieve narrative clarification or revelation. This process reveals not only how viewers recognize deception, but how actors stylize real-life behavior in service of narrative and aesthetic priorities.

Aki Kaurismäki's feature-length fictional films are often discussed as a stylistically homogenous group. Because critics have looked for similarities, they have neglected differences among the films. This article tests prevailing arguments about the cinematographic style of Kaurismäki's films in a quantitative analysis of shot lengths, camera movements, reverse angles, point of view shots, and shot scales. The analysis indicates significant similarities and changes among the films and differentiates between notable stylistic trends. The results of the study complicate existing claims about Kaurismäki's style. Mismatches between impression and fact are explained by analyzing the parts of Kaurismäki's style that “stand out” and the reasons why they do so.

This article investigates historical trends of mean shot durations in 9,400 English-language and 1,550 non-English-language movies released between 1912 and 2013. For the sound-era movies of both sets there is little evidence indicating anything other than a linear decline plotted on a logarithmic scale, with the English-language set providing stronger results. In a subsample of 24 English-language movies from 1940 to 2010 the decline in shot duration is uniform across 15 shot classes, a result that supports a broad “evolutionary” account of film change. The article also explores the proportions of these shot classes across years and genres, with the results showing that 25 percent of the decline in shot duration is due to a shift away from shot classes with longer-than-average shot durations towards those with shorter-than-average durations, and 8 percent of the decline is due to the increased use of shot scales in which characters appear larger.

Narrative absorption is a spontaneous temporary change in the state of consciousness due to an exceptionally intense awareness of a fictional narrative. This article investigates the experiential level of narrative absorption, namely what it is like to be absorbed in a cinematic or printed narrative. Following a cognitive linguistic approach the article assumes that in order to establish understanding of the experiential level of narrative absorption it is necessary to examine how people express their experience. The article proposes that the concept of image schema is a fruitful way to represent the content of viewers' and readers' consciousness so as to identify relevant mental schemata of absorbed narrative experiences. To generate rich descriptions of narrative absorption an interview study was conducted. The interviews qualitatively employing the image schemas as the system of the thematic analysis were examined for this research. The Centre-Periphery, Container, and the Source-Path-Goal schemas provide deeper insight into the nature and structure of recurring embodied patterns of absorption with fictional narratives.

Davide Caputo, Polanski and Perception: The Psychology of Seeing and the Cinema of Roman Polanski

Parastoo Alaeddini

Patrick Keating, ed., Cinematography

Philip Cowan

Linda Williams, On “The Wire”

Agustín Zarzosa