SCSMI conference 2011

Two weeks ago I attended the annual SCSMI (Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image) conference, which was held in Budapest this year. There have been some requests for a report and here, belatedly, are my thoughts.

This was my second SCSMI conference, and I had almost as much fun this time as last year in Roanoke, US. The reason it was more fun last year was that we all stayed in the same hotel and Roanoke is much smaller than Budapest so the communal feeling was much stronger, more like a fieldtrip than a conference. This time we were all scattered across the city, making it less intimate and cosy. But that's just the order of things. Let's focus on the papers and presentations instead. I will not dwell on all the things I went to, in some cases I have nothing in particular to say and in some cases I feel I don't know enough to engage critically, but here are the presentations I can and will say something about, presentations all of which I enjoyed. All of these ideas presented here are things I'm interested in and will come back to in later postings, and eventually in a book.

Stanley Kramer is not a filmmaker with a high standing these days, but one of his more tolerable films are The Defiant Ones (1958), a drama about racial intolerance. It is stiff and ponderous but it has one thing going for it that almost makes it great. The use of natural sound. The sounds of rain, wind, grass, mud, birds, insects, voices (and an annoying portable radio) gives the film a life and a richness which isn't in the story, the images or most of the direction. If ever the importance of sound in cinema needed to be proved, this would be a great film to start with. But the list of films to include would be a long one. Luis Rocha Antunes, in his presentation about "The Multisensory Film Experience", didn't mentioned The Defiant Ones, but he gave a lot of sound examples from other films to underline his argument that film is more than just a visual experience. He talked of many things that heightens our experience of a film besides what we see with our eyes but I felt that sound was his main point in this particular presentation, which was a good one. As you may recall from my report from last year's conference I then also applauded the many presentations that discussed sound and the importance of it.

Johannes Riis of University of Copenhagen gave a presentation on Mad Men, and the question of his talk was why we admire and look up to Don Draper even though he is not really a nice guy with his bullying, extramarital affairs and condescending attitude. Why is it that we can admire people on the screen (or in fiction in general) which we might not like at all in real life? This is a common question, that pops up now and then, sometimes with moral undertones ("these films are bad because they make us like bad people") but more often just out of curiosity. There's a lot to be said about this.

What I suggested as an explanation to audience appreciation of "bad" characters was two things. First that there might be other characters in the film that are even worse, and that their function is to say "yes, the main character is bad, but not as bad is this guy here." and so the issue becomes relative. Like the character Waingro in Heat (1995). Compared to him Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro's character) isn't so bad. Secondly, a way of making it easier for us to like characters is to not show the consequences of their actions. In Mad Men for example, if every scene of Don Draper behaving badly was followed by a scene when the person he had cheated on, or bullied, was shown quietly sobbing, or accusing Draper for behaving badly, then that might considerably lessen the warm feelings we might have for him. And in Heat; if after the opening sequence, when the security guards are shot by McCauley and his crew, we were shown a sequence of the guards grieving widows and children, then it would be tough to like them. Instead all victims are alone and without (acknowledged) friends or relatives, except the victims of Waingro's crimes.

But we needn't necessarily explain this phenomenon by narrative conventions. We like people in real life even though they might do bad things, it is just that they are not bad to us. Everybody have friends, liars, cheaters, embezzlers, perhaps even mass murderers, and if that is a possibility in real life then of course it can happen with fictional characters as well.

The University of Copenhagen is a major player in cognitive studies of the moving image, and besides Johannes Riis, Casper Tybjerg is another scholar from that school (Luis Rocha Antunes has been there too). Tybjerg's presentation was on the moral aspects of storytelling. He criticised an evolutionary psychology approach that reduces all character behaviour to the essential hunt for food and sex. Tybjerg suggested that one reason for storytelling is that it is a way to "teach" us humans about how to behave, that this is why the good guys win and the bad guys are punished, and that this is as old as storytelling itself. He quoted from William Flesch's book "Comeuppance" (a word which always makes me think of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Orson Welles's narration of it) to substantiate his theory. I suggested though that the audience sometimes prefer the bad characters (or the "immoral" ones), i.e. "rooting for the bad guy", and that what might for one spectator be seen as good behaviour might be seen as the opposite for another spectator. But the idea that storytelling, as part of human evolution, is involved with helping us understand the world and inspire us to behave ethically, is one that I subscribe to. (Here's a review of Flesch's book.)

The last Dane in this report is the man who started it all in Copenhagen, professor Torben Grodal. At the conference last year he spoke about violence and terror in Se7en (1995). Perhaps to compensate for the relentless gloom he this year spoke about comedies and laughter. He was arguing that laughter is related to anger and that it comes from playing, which most mammals do (and some non-mammals as well), as a safe way of doing things similar to what we do when we are angry or genuinely aggressive, such as when hunting. It was a lot more complex than that of course, but this'll do for now. Grodal also emphasised the social aspects of laughter, and suggested that this is a reason why comedies are more popular on a local market, whereas action films and melodramas have a more global reach.

This raises some questions for me. If laughter is a social function, on what level? Social in the sense that it binds two individuals together, or a whole group, by laughing a the "other", somebody else, or another group? Or is it social in the sense that it is a way for humans, all humans, to socialise together, like when we meet strangers we might use laughter as a way of bonding, not at the expense of somebody else but for everybody's benefit? I might for example, to break the ice, make a joke about myself. I would suggest that both uses of laughter are at play, and this might help explain why, contrary to what Grodal seemed to suggest, some comedies are in fact very much popular on a global scale, such as the slapstick humour of Chaplin and Keaton, whereas some other form of humour works only on a local market. The same is true for melodramas I would argue, and possibly action films as well.

One of the bigger stars within the field of cognitive studies is Tim Smith, presently at Birkbeck, University of London (He also also blogs (infrequently) at continuityboy.blogspot.com.) His speciality is tracking eye-movements of spectators, but in his presentation he focused on memory, on what we remember after having seen a scene or a whole film, and why it is that we remember that which we remember. He suggested that we remember the logical continuity of the story and specific plot points, and that verbal details were more important to us than visuals. He highlighted our preference for words by noting the fact that we usually watch the mouth of the person speaking, even though it doesn't make it easier to understand what the person is saying, we might as well look at the eyes (or feet for that matter) since we hear the words, we don't see them, unless we're lip-readers. (I have sometimes consciously tried to look at other parts of the face when somebody is speaking but it is harder than it sounds. The speaker's eyes are fairly easy to focus on though, if you're close to them. But sooner or later the gaze turns towards the mouth again.)

One comment I made is that we often remember things that were not actually in the film, i.e. we don't remember them at all but have made them up. My own favourite example is a scene from Thunderball (1965) that I had very strong memories of, I can even "see" it in my head, still today. Only there is no such scene in the actual film. And neither is it in Ian Fleming's novel the film is based on. My surprise when I re-watched it a couple of years ago and found out that the scene wasn't there hasn't settled yet. To this Smith said that we include scenes in our memory that wasn't there in the film because these imaginary scenes help to make logical continuity. But this was not the case with my scene. It was a whole murder sequence, which didn't have anything to do with the continuity of the film. No, in my case, and most likely in others as well, there's something else going on. The scene/sequence might for example be a composite of several scenes and images, possibly from different films, that have been created by our ever so self-sufficient brains. Or I might have dreamt it, and then in my brain the memory of the dream has merged with the memory of the real.

Another star in these circles is professor James Cutting from Cornell University. His presentations are always immensely enjoyable because he is such a natural speaker and entertainer. His thing is collecting data, data consisting of things like average shot lengths, number of shots, number of sequences, changes of luminance, movement in shots, number of cuts, and so on, in Hollywood films made from 1935 and onwards. He then present this figures to others to do with it what they see fit. There are a lot of things you can do with this figures. One thing is to compare different genres, different filmmakers and different eras. Another is to track changes over time. Another is to analyse the structures of films, and see the striking similarities between wildly different films, and ponder upon how much is intentionally done and how much is unconsciously. The mere avalanche of numbers and figures can feel a bit over-whelming, but if you dig in to them there's no telling what you will find. (The reason why Cutting and his colleagues and students begin with the year 1935 is that before this there were too much inconsistency and randomness. The language of film was still evolving so much that it is difficult to get a handle on it, but from approximately 1935 things began to settle down. This makes for an interesting nuance to the widely held idea that classical storytelling was pretty much established in 1917.)

The presentation I regarded as the best from last year was by Robert Blanchet, and this year he was at it again, but now together with a colleague from Norway, Margarethe Bruun Vaage. Their presentation was about the difference in engaging with TV-series as opposed to engaging with films, more specifically the fictional characters. In short what they argued were that due to the long-time exposure to the characters in TV-series we come to regard them, in a way, as friends, and we are hence reluctant to leave them. Blanchet and Bruun Vaage were drawing from media studies, psychology and economics in a very rich and fruitful way. A concept they used, that comes from social psychology, was the "familiarity principle", which is also called the "mere exposure effect" which means that the more familiar something is, or becomes, the more likely is it that we like it. It is true for a lot of things in life, and they argued that this too is a factor in explaining audience engagement with TV-series as being different from films, at least on part of the characters. The familiarity principle works in films as well though, with actors, filmmakers, genres or film series such as the James Bond films.

I can only vouch for the friendship aspect myself. After I had seen the last episode of The West Wing (1999-2006) I felt abandoned and sadden, the sense of loss was palpable after having spent several years with this characters, in a way akin to a feeling of saying goodbye to friends or colleagues. But the familiarity principle is more problematic. It doesn't help explain how we engage with the first episodes of the first season, it only helps to explains why we continue to watch in the fifth season even though we might not think it is as good as it once was. Also, it would seem to suggest that we would like any TV-series were we exposed to it long enough but I'm not so sure about that.

One presentation I was particularly tickled by was professor John Bateman's, especially when he talked about the need for new approaches to genre studies. As I find most of traditional genre studies deeply flawed this is something I will be coming back to in later postings, but what Bateman and his colleagues want to argue is that we need to acknowledge that discourses and genres are much more fluent and dynamic than we give them credit for. (The focus of the presentation though was on the beginnings of films, in particular so called "puzzle films".)

And that concludes my summary. As I said I went to more presentations, for example professor Carl Plantinga's on folk psychology and Monika Suckfüll's on audience participation, but although I enjoyed them I don't have anything in particular to add. I do have a lot to add though to the presentation given by professor Murray Smith of University of Kent, but so much that I will have to save it for another blog post.

My own presentation was about storytelling and prejudices (prejudices scholars and critics have when approaching films). I will eventually explaining my theories and ideas on storytelling in writing but that too will have to wait. The prejudice part might be summed up in this quote from V.F. Perkins: "Our viewpoint is not given solely by the image because what we see is so much a question of what we're looking for." (From "Film as Film").

I'll keep you dangling until August because I'm giving myself a blog vacation now. In July you'll have to settle for some clips and quotes.

On endings

One of the things I like with the Bourne-series is that it has a wholeness to it, it's a round circle, visually. It begins, in the first film The Bourne Identity (2002), with the body of Jason Bourne floating in water and it ends, in the third film The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), with the body of Jason Bourne floating in water. The first time it signals his appearance, the last time it signals his disappearance. (And the fact that it ends thus makes the idea whether or not to make a fourth film so wrong, at least artistically. But it seems now that neither Matt Damon nor Paul Greengrass want to continue.)

This is one way of ending a film, buy repeating the beginning, albeit with a difference. This is by the way often how Hasse Ekman ends his films.

The reason I'm writing about endings is that David Bordwell brought it up as a topic at the already mentioned SCSMI conference in Roanoke. The question was how do we know that a film is ending? He told about a young girl he was watching Snow White (1937) with, and in the last scene she shouted "More!", even before it was actually over and the words "The End" were seen. Bordwell's question was "How did she know the film was over?".

I'm not going to go deep in the cognitive science part of the question, but it's interesting to note that there are different ways to end a film, and I think that it would be possible to list a set number of endings, let's say 10, and that almost all films will have an ending that is related to one of these 10. And in order to answer the question, we need to look at these different types of endings and see if they all signal clearly that this is indeed "the end", as does Snow White. It would also be interesting to interpret the various types of endings and see what they tell us about the films and/or the filmmakers philosophical and ideological outlook.

I haven't done enough research on this so I'm not in a position to list all possible endings, but I can give some examples. We've established two ending patterns already in this blog post, the, let's call it, "circular ending", which links the first and the last scene, and the, let's call it the "classical ending" from Snow White. (If you haven't seen the following films and don't want to know how they end, then read carefully...)

A third pattern are the more "modernist" ending, where the films often doesn't really have an ending, but just fades out in a critical moment, or, as in the end of Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962), shows a series of shots of empty streets and buildings. The endings of many films by Howard Hawks also have these "modernist" endings. The Big Sleep (1946), arguably Hawks's most narratively daring film, ends with Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge (Bogart and Bacall) waiting together in a darkened room for the police to arrive, and neither they nor we know what's going to happen when the police does arrive.

A fourth ending is the sudden and abrupt one, which even when we've seen it might leave us dangling. "What? That's it?" Like The Candidate (1972), the brilliant political drama with Robert Redford as a candidate for the senate. He runs, not to win, because nobody expects him to, but for more let's say political reasons. But in the end he does win after all, and he leaves the celebration and goes in to his dressing room. An aide follows him, and the candidate turns to him and says "What do we do now?". "The End".

It's clear already that sometimes endings are easy to spot, sometimes they're not. I just watched the second film in the Lord of the Ring-series, The Two Towers (2002) and there were several times I thought the end was near, due to the use of music, dialogue and editing patterns, but it didn't come. It's importance here that what I was expecting wasn't a definitive ending, but just a fadeout, because I knew it was only the second instalment in a trilogy, and the end of a film which is to be followed by another film continuing the story, is usually done in yet another different way. A fadeout I eventually got, but only after a much longer time then I'd thought. It's difficult to explain in a few words what I mean by the special "the end is near"-feeling, but it's likely that you've already experienced the effect. See also the second (or fifth if you like) Star Wars-film The Empire Strikes Back (1980) for the same thing.

So, the research around endings will continue, but first a side note.

At Dave Kehr's blog there was a debate last week about "spoiler alerts" and whether or not it's OK to reveal the endings in comments and reviews. Jonathan Rosenbaum has also written on the subject. For some, the very idea that people don't want to know the ending before having seen the film was somehow almost offensive. Those that do not want to know the ending, it was said, are apparently not interested in style and atmosphere, but somehow shallow and should be ridiculed. But that's just arrogant if you ask me. Most people do after all enjoy watching the story unfold, and being surprised and amused by it, and there's of course nothing wrong with that. It doesn't mean that they're not interested in anything else. It's only common decency to warn (or ask permission) before revealing how a film ends.

One of the arguments was that there's to much emphasis on plot and story in film criticism and reviewing, and very little attention is paid to style. This is something I very much agree with, and something I find annoying. As I've said before, the story and the plot is only one part of the film, perhaps half of it, and not talking about the rest is just lazy. Cinematography, music, art direction, editing and so on needs to be given its dues as well.

Cine-literacy

Most children are being taught in school how to read, and most, at least in the more developed countries learn how to do it. But some are more literate than others, and some are illiterate. Due to such things as genetics, personal problems, bad teaching, some will never learn, or will at best learn to read just a few basic things. But at least it's something that is being taught almost every day in school. Many are also taught different languages, so at least they can read, write and speak more than their mother tongue.

But that is not the case with learning how to read movies, there are no proper efforts to teach us cine-literacy. That is something that seems to be more or less taken for granted that you needn't learn, that perhaps we have some innate ability to understand movies. I would argue that we don't. We learn to understand movies by watching them and as long as they play by the rules of our cultural context. The more films we see, the more we understand them. But only up to a point. If we don't have an open mind, or an interest, we won't understand the more complicated things, or the more unfamiliar.

At the SCSMI conference one paper, by Todd Berliner and Dale Cohen, talked about how we understand continuity editing, and they took as an example a scene from The Philadelphia Story (1940), where three characters drive up to a house, get out of the car and press the doorbell. Then a butler appears and opens the door. The question was how do we understand that they stop the car in front of the house we saw in the previous shot, and how do we know that there's a door there. In one shot, from the point of view of the door, we see them approach and press the doorbell, and the next shot we see the butler open the door (which we hadn't seen previously). My take on it is that we understand these things because we've seen many films so we know subconsciously how they are constructed, and also because the setting is one which is a part of our cultural context. But if we were to imagine a person who comes from a culture which doesn't live in houses and has no knowledge of the existence and functioning of doors, that person would not understand anything.

It might be regarded as an extreme example, but I think there are similar things going on when people from Scotland watch films from Iran, or people from Brazil watch films from Burkina Faso, and neither likes it nor understands it. And it's not only a question of different cultures, there's also a difference in time. Someone born in the 1970s might have difficulties understanding parts of a film from the 1940s, even if it's from the same culture and country that that person was born in. This is something that probably partly explains why some films that were very popular many years ago, have now lost their general appeal.

In order to be universally cine-literate you need to be fluent in many languages and knowledgeable about many cultures and the history of those cultures. Beyond the cultural context, which might be seen as a vital part of cine-literacy, as is language skills to common literacy, there are also technical and narrative aspects that need to be considered. Here again, exposure and an open mind is of the outmost importance. Some films are too complex for some people, so that they don't understand what is going on. Indeed some films are too complex for most people, which is probably because these films are so rare that we are not able to get enough exposure to them for us to be able to understand how they operate.

It's not only narrative and storytelling devices that can be difficult. Sometimes the mise-en-scène can be difficult to comprehend as well and arguably, most people who didn't understand it probably doesn't know that they didn't understand it. They were focused on the actors and the dialogue, as perhaps most are, so that they didn't pay attention to the space around the characters. And here comes one of the most intricate and perhaps more challenging aspects of what I mean with being cine-literate. If you only focus on story, actors and dialogue, you have only seen half of the film. Film is a visual medium, and everything in the image counts for something. But so many, including scholars and distinguished film critics, are so focused on the words and the gestures that they're almost half-blind to what goes on.

This is something I believe can explain a lot of wildly contradictory interpretations of films, and why person A might love a film that person B hates. One of them was just not paying as much attention to what was going on as the other. If they had, they might not have liked the film as much as they did, or the opposite, they might have liked it much more. I'm not saying that someone will not be able to appreciate a film if that person is not cine-literate enough, but I am saying that someone's experience might be very different if they were fully skilled in the art of watching films.

I'm not advocating that schools start extensive film studies programs, partly because it can be difficult to teach, and partly because there's no way of testing these skills. You can easily do a test to see if somebody's French is good or bad, but it would be much harder to have a similar test for cine-literacy. One thing might be to ask questions about what people were wearing, what colour the wallpapers had, what motivated the various characters to do whatever it was they were doing, and so on. As soon, though, as we go beyond questions of wallpaper colours it becomes more subjective and difficult to decide what is right or wrong. But it's also a question of DNA, RNA, luck, interest, ambition and personal circumstances that will decide how cine-literate you'll become, as is the case with your ability to learn how to read, write, do mathematics and play tennis and so on.

I do think though that it would be a good thing to at least make school children aware of these things, and let them debate and discuss films analytically. Since they will be of a different generation than their teachers, and hence perhaps more cine-literate in young contemporary cinema than the teachers, it might be beneficial for students and teachers alike.

Analysing and interpreting films is not only subjective. There's of course objective empirical research, but more relevant here is the fact that interpretations might be more or less valid. And the more cine-literate you are, the more valid will your interpretations be. But perhaps the most central thing, and the one most often forgotten, is the fact that when it comes to ideological, psychological and moral interpretations, there are no straight and definitive answers. Films are infinitely more complex than they appear to be, even the silliest high school comedy, even to the most trained eye.

SCSMI-conference report

So I'm back in Scotland after the conference and the additional visits to Washington and New York. It was most refreshing to get away and exchange ideas with a wide selection of film scholars, and I've now got an idea for a book about cinema. But more on that later.

For those of you who don't know what SCSMI stands for, it's the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, which aims to be a interdisciplinary society for the studies of films and TV, bringing together film history, psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, with perhaps a special interest in audience reception. The many papers presented at the conference covered most aspects of cinema and as is often the case, some of the papers were rather bad, but more often than not, good and interesting ideas and discoveries were presented.

It's always been my opinion that the more varied background you have, and the more angles you use when discussing cinema, the better and more enlightening the research and the interpretations will be. However, the vital thing is that you have a good command of film history. One of the most common fallacies in film criticism and film theory is the "novelty fallacy", i.e. the mistaken belief that what you have discovered is something new that hasn't been there before. I don't mean new in the sense that nobody has written about it before, because that might very well be the case, but new in the sense that this is something that filmmakers haven't done before. Because in 9 cases out of 10, it has been done before. Now, I've written about this before, but since this lack of historical perspective and knowledge is so agonizingly common I'm constantly reminded of it, and feel the urge to mention it yet again.

The other thing that struck me at the conference was how common it was, as, again, is so often the case, to state the obvious.

But this criticism of mine sometimes seems to be mostly due to my demand of perhaps unreasonably high standards. And I mustn't dwell on it too much.

What I did really like was, as alluded to in the beginning, the wide scale of topics being covered, and that for example sound was discussed in a very good and penetrating way, as was music. Sound and music are two fields that I feel is still not getting enough attention. Another thing I liked was that both film and TV were discussed, and I made me decide that from now on I will no longer hold back on writing about TV, which I've previously done, for reasons that are obscure even to myself. TV and cinema go hand in hand, and to understand the one you need to understand the other.

Among other things I really liked was a paper by Lars-Martin Sorensen about Yasujiro Ozu and the meanings of Ozu's repetitive patterns. It gave me some useful ideas for my own thoughts about authorship, and hence for my thesis. But the highlight of the conference was, I believe, a paper on embarrassment by Robert Blanchet. It was more about psychology and emotions than about films, but very interesting and informative, and for some perhaps thought-provoking.

So, to sum up, by bringing together people from various disciplines, the combined effect was one of constant stimulation and interest, and by beginning with looking at the films and then draw conclusions from them, rather than taking some theory and trying to apply it to a film, it brought a lot more food for thought and came to more relevant conclusions than is the case with so many other presentations, essays and books I've endured over the years.