Cognitive Theory in Film Studies: Three Recent Books

Carroll, Noël. 2003. Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven: Yale University Press. $45.00 hc. 448 pp.

Smith, Greg M. 2003. Film Structure and the Emotion System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $65.00 hc. 230 pp.

Persson, Per. 2003. Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. $75.00 hc. 296 pp.

I

In 1988, Noël Carroll, then a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, dropped a "bombshell" on the discipline of film studies. Carroll had earlier earned a PhD. in film studies from New York University, but found the disciplinary conversation unsatisfying, and soon returned to graduate school, this time in philosophical aesthetics. Some years and another PhD. later, the bombshell came with the publication of Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Film Studies, a book which critiqued and ultimately dismissed the then-reigning paradigm of film theory, a meld of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and Barthesian semiotics. After systematically dismantling the tenets of this Theory, Carroll's conclusion was uncompromising. The Theory, he writes, has "impeded research and reduced film analysis to the repetition of fashionable slogans and unexamined assumptions" (234). It should be wholly discarded, he argues, and film theorists need to begin anew.

Together with his colleague, professor of film studies David Bordwell, Carroll continued his assault on the received Theory with a collection of essays entitled Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, an anthology of essays with a frontispiece featuring a publicity still from Laurel and Hardy's film, A Chump at Oxford. In the photograph Laurel and Hardy stand visibly confused before a blackboard covered with three-letter words and faulty arithmetic. The cover suggested to some Bordwell and Carroll's estimation of contemporary film theory, but one could also interpret the two comedians as stand-ins for Bordwell and Carroll as they attempt to make sense of arcane academic systems. In either interpretation, however, the book is clearly designed to mark a decisive intervention in the field.

It could be argued that "psycho-semiotic" film theory had already run its course, but Carroll's and others' critiques hastened the demise of such film theory, or at least its demotion from Official Theory to one theory among many. Film studies today enjoys a more healthy pluralism. Although bad feelings from the theory wars still linger in the discipline, the field is no longer monolithic in its methodological assumptions. Psycho-semiotics has lost its grip.

Carroll and Bordwell are not opposed to theorizing, but do reject broad-based Theory which poses as an account of everything and is accepted as doctrine rather than subjected to critical scrutiny. Carroll and Bordwell propose a cognitive approach to film theory as an alternative but emphasize that it is an approach rather than a theory, and one that is able to contain many disparate positions. Cognitive film theory has since become a significant methodology in film studies, one that can no longer be ignored in any comprehensive account of film theory.

The cognitive approach is not a unified methodology, and even Carroll's characterization of cognitive film theory is open to question. As Carroll writes in Engaging the Moving Image, cognitive film theory derives its name "from the tendency to look for alternative answers to many of the questions addressed by or raised by psychoanalytic film theories . . . in terms of cognitive and rational processes rather than unconscious or irrational ones" (384). Yet many cognitive theorists would balk at the claim that the theory confines itself to conscious processes, since much of human mental processing occurs unconsciously. Cognitive approaches tend to be interdisciplinary, some favoring the philosophical method, some an empirical psychological approach, and some a meld of the two. Carroll approaches the questions asked by cognitive theory from the standpoint of analytic philosophy, while others, such as the young scholars Greg M. Smith and Per Persson, find cognitive psychology to be more useful. Moreover, cognitive film theory can be...