Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of Moving-Image Media and the Spectator by Roger F. Cook (review)

Roger F. Cook's Postcinematic Vision: The Coevolution of Moving-Image Media and the Spectator seeks to reorient film studies toward neuroscience. The three-part organization of the book reflects Cook's multifold interventions. He creates a substantive foundation with a tour de force through theoretical paradigms of film studies, New Media studies, cognitive studies, cybernetics, and neurocinematics. Two case studies illustrate his claims: one on the effects of cinema on Franz Kafka's writing, and another that analyzes twenty-first-century films, such as The Matrix (1999), to foreground the interdependence among film, new media technology, and cognition.

The book theorizes the relation between cinema and neuroscience. In chapter 1, Cook builds on and critically engages with the foundational work of scholars of New Media studies, such as Marshall McLuhan and Lev Manovich. Cook questions the role of the filmic image in the relation between humans and visual technologies. He points out that Manovich assumed that the film image continues to dominate visual representation in the digital age. Cook criticizes film studies for its singular attention to film as representation resulting from an ocularcentric understanding of spectatorship. Instead, he invokes cybernetics, which provides an analogy between human and machine. Historically, the flow of images produced spatial cognition. Conversely, films evoked somatosensory and affective reactions. For example, movement in films activated sensorimotor impulses. Subsequently, in the new field of neurocinematics, cognitive scientists investigate the way that cinema influences mental processes, e.g., film narratives simulate the way humans generate and store memories. Complex temporal narratives that move between past, present, and future enhance the brain's ability to create episodic memories.

In chapter 2 on early cinema and Kafka's writing, Cook argues that filmic conventions, e.g., the close-up, mimic how the mind processes information. Such an understanding of cinema moves away from classic film theory's emphasis on the indexical relationship of the image to the real object. Instead, this approach emphasizes cognitive and sensory mechanisms—for instance, the participation of the spectator in movement that a film represents. This chapter studies Kafka's comments about film viewing and analyzes select examples of his writing. In a reading of Kafka's work, Cook demonstrates how the new medium of film influenced the old medium of literature. Kafka described events in a filmic mode, e.g., using devices akin to a cut or the frantic action evocative of early chase films. This kind of remediation that appropriated the new medium for the old, according to Cook, prevented cinema from undermining the importance of writing.

Cook concludes his book with chapter 3 on films that indicate that digital technology has changed the film image. Film did not die, he argues, but converged in a way that reflects an ongoing exchange between cinema and digital media. Consequently, films like The Matrix or Dark City (1998) confuse audiences about the status of their diegetic world. Spectators are unable to determine whether the story proposes a moment to be real or to be simulated. In turn, such new viewing experiences demonstrate that classic cinema's temporality relied on fixed conceptions of time and space.

The fact that Cook focuses his case studies on two specific moments—1900 and 2000—implies that his approach includes a historical dimension. This contrasts with New Media studies and cognitive research, which have typically been presentist or future oriented. Thus, subsequent scholarship will have to carve out a means of integrating history with cognitive and neurocinematic studies beyond these two particular historical moments.

Cook challenges film studies regarding methodologies, disciplinary traditions, knowledge bases, and objects of study. While the main contribution of neurocinematic studies concerns the cognitive processes of spectators, Cook focuses on textual traces. But does one need insight into cognitive neural processes to observe cinematic writing in Kafka's prose? And conversely, does such an analysis prove that cognitive processes have changed? The Matrix...