Moving Pictures: a new theory of film genres, feelings and cognition

Lam Tran

Author Information• Torben Grodal• Professor of Film and Media Studies at University of

Copenhagen• Noted film scholar and writer of many essays on film analysis

Simplified Logical Outline

• Premise: People emotions and thoughts influence their opinions of films.• Proposition: Film genres bring together emotions and

sensations as mental structures that impact viewers’ minds.• Reasoning: Different types of genres bring out different

emotions and thoughts from their unique audiences. • Evidence: Recent neuroscience and cognitive science studies

with film-viewers have shown specific parts of their brains activate while watching different genres.

Horstkotte’s Usage of Article• “While the viewer of a movie…is able to imagine the filmic

diegesis as an addition…of the real, the foregrounding of different drawing styles…and endless variety of ways in which panels can speak to each other requires a new comics literacy that engages much more closely with individual choices…” (33)• -Cf. Grodal 1997: 29• Horstkotte references Grodal’s line of reasoning to argue that

although comics do derive some of their elements from films, the two subjects are fundamentally different in the way they should be analyzed.

Referenced Page in Grodal’s Work

• The referenced page is mainly focused on this diagram: “the construction of reality as a sequence of cognitive procedures”

Behavior with full intent; objects with full modality-definition

Interior sources of consciousness: memory, imagination

Play, acting, communicative acts, phenomena with limited modality-definition: mirror, backdrop, film, image

Future oriented plans, hypotheses, visions

Sensation-cognition problems such as hallucinations and erroneous top down hypotheses

Central processing of possible source and status of present content of consciousness, representing the status in consciousness by different feelings and possibly by status-propositions

“Film…is also a ‘laying bare’ of the devices by which the brain constructs experiences out of different perceptual sources”

Correctness of Horstkotte’s Citation

• Horstkotte’s reference is generally correct: on this page, and even throughout his book, Grodal argues that film and other arts are a “construction” on top of reality.• Although the major gist is correct, the reference is somewhat

simplified, lumping together Grodal’s arguments (different genres, sequence of cognitive procedures in the mind) so that it is usable in just one sentence of the entire essay.

Discussion Questions• What’s so unique about graphic novels that Horstkotte argues

they should have new hermeneutics when other modern media, such as film, might not?

• Is Horstkotte’s proposed multi-leveled hermeneutics for graphic novels applicable to some films? If so, what kinds?