Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-195) and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
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Introduction -- Toward an ecology of cinema. An evolutionary perspective ; The visual system ; The auditory system ; Illusion and computation -- Capacities and strategies. Capacities ; Resolution of ambiguity ; Categorization ; Summary -- Some problems reconsidered. Flicker and motion perception ; Motion and form ; Depth ; Color -- Sound and image. Synchrony ; Sound effects ; Music ; Summary -- Continuity. Shot-to-shot transitions ; Orientational relationships ; Hierarchical spatial comprehension -- Diegesis. Visual orientation ; The capacity to play ; Play as cognitive practice ; The desire to play ; The capacity fo frame ; Summary -- Character. Recognition ; Attribution ; Identification -- Narrative. Origins of narrative ; Personalizing information ; The organization of a story ; The teller of a the story ; What one takes away ; Summary -- Conclusion.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
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Anderson investigates how viewers, with their mental capacities designed for survival, respond to particular aspects of filmic structure - continuity, diegesis, character development, and narrative - and examines the ways in which rules of visual and aural processing are recognized and exploited by filmmakers. He uses Orson Welles's Citizen Kane to disassemble and redefine the contemporary concept of character identification; he addresses continuity in a shot-by-shot analysis of images from Casablanca; and he uses a wide range of research studies, such as Harry F. Harlow's work with infant rhesus monkeys, to describe how motion pictures become a substitute or surrogate reality for an audience. By examining the human capacity for play and the inherent potential for illusion, Anderson considers the reasons viewers find movies so enthralling, so emotionally powerful, and so remarkably real.
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Anderson's primary argument is that motion picture viewers mentally process the projected images and sounds of a movie according to the same perceptual rules used in response to visual and aural stimuli in the world outside the theater. To process everyday events in the world, the human mind is equipped with capacities developed through millions of years of evolution. In this context, Anderson builds a metatheory influenced by the writings of J.J. and Eleanor Gibson and employs it to explore motion picture comprehension as a subset of general human comprehension and perception, focusing his ecological approach to film on the analysis of cinema's true substance: illusion.