Gibson at the Movies

Leonardo, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 287-290, 1982 Printed in Great Britain’ 0024-094X/82/040287-04%03.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd. GIBSON AT THE MOVIES EpiWiese” Anyone privileged to have known J. J. Gibson, even slightly, will recall the excitement of being with him. Perhaps it came from his delight in odd views you might present to him; or from his zest for discovery; or from his freedom, on reaching new conclusions, to abandon his older ones. All theseengagingtraits have intellectual equivalents in his theory of perception and receive a final summation in his last book. TheEcologicalApproach to VisualPerception (1979) [13opens with an outline of his trajectory from The Perception of the Visual World (1950) [2]-‘my explanation of vision was then based on the retinal image’[1, p. I]-through his formulation of the ecological approach ‘based on what I call the ambient optic array’ [1, p. 13 in The Senses Consideredas Perceptual Systems (1966) [3], to its refinement here. The ecological approach presents a world inhabited by observers. It is ordered, hierarchical: a set of.‘nestings’, but the units are determined by the needs and interests of the observer, not, as in physical science, objectively established. The life of the observer, his moving and exploring, goes on in a medium that ‘affords’ this activity, not on a rigid grid of space-time coordinates. The time element is fundamental to this environment and must never be ignored, if we would understand it. ‘Actually [he claims], it is a new approach to the whole field of psychology, for it involves rejecting the stimulus-response formula ...What psychology needs is the kind of thinking that is beginningto be attempted in what is loosely called systems theory’ [I, p. 21. The import of his formulation is vast. It challenges behaviorism and the more sophisticated arguments of cognitive psychology and parallels recent explorations in the philosophy of mind, for instance, in the work of Hilary Putnam. (Gibson asks: ‘Why must we seek explanation in either Body or Mind?It is a false,dichotomy’ [1, p. xiii].) In the last section of his book Gibson considers forms of vision uniquely human: how we see pictures. They are not made to help us move around in the real world. A picture isa record: it ‘preserves what its creator has noticed and considers worth noticing’ [I, p. 2741. It offers a two-fold apprehension: the perception of a real object (the actual picture surface) and the apprehension of a virtual object (whatever is represented). Motion pictures do this too, but they also come close to natural vision, for they suggest a moving observer-the moving camera. This affinity triggers Gibson’s excitement with film as a medium, exceptional among psychologists. ‘Filmmakers understand me much better than most people’, he would say; and, indeed, those psychologists who have studied film in recent years have been mostly psychoanalysts. Gibson’s is an enthusiasm for the sheer visual kinesthesis produced by movies -‘the progressive picture’, he calls them, protestingagainst any pat view of film as a sequence of retinal snapshots. In the terms of ecological optics, ‘The progressive picture displays transformations and magnifications and nullifications and substitutions of structure along with deletions and accretions and slippage of texture. These are the “motions” of the motion picture’ [4]. *Art historian, 11 Story Street, Apt. 3, Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. (Received 8 July 1981.) In contrast to the psychoanalyst’s involvement with cinema as fantasy, as dream, Gibson’s focus on the psychophysical processes engaged by film-their likeness to natural visual exploration of the environment-is as sharp as the linguist’s attention to the rhyming sounds of verse. It is as relevant to the art of film as the latter’s is to the art of poetry. Like poetry, though, film is more than the delicate structure of itsperceptual materials. When Gibson takes filmmakers to task for failing to follow through on their perceptual logic, as he does in his last chapter, he is ruling out normal metaphorical leaps that spectators have easily made from the beginning of cinema. To understand Gibson’s technical misapprehensions allows us to conceive better where the real strength...