Cinematic Minds in the Making: An Investigation into Subjective and Intersubjective Experiences of Storytelling

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In this article I will refer to a one-time performance piece called ‘Remember by Erasure’ (Lesmes 2020), which explores the relationship between photographs, memories, and the act of narrating the stories behind those memories and photographs. I put this in dialogue with Sarah Polley’s documentary ‘Stories We Tell’ (2012), which follows the filmmaker as she tries to piece together who her late mother was, through the stories and testimonies of her family members. The performance centered on how the act of telling a story, describing a memory, brings it back to life, while the film follows a cacophony of voices to reconstruct the character of Polley’s mother mixed with different techniques (interviews, archive material, staging) to illustrate memory and how this affects the way in which audiences connect to the film. I understand memory as an embodied experience in a relational and affective contact with the world, one that is constantly being reinterpreted and transformed. Relying on the notion of heterochronicity (Karlholm 2017, Moxey 2018) and the Bergsonian understanding of time, I explore how, in both the film and the performance, memories – or the lack of them – time, and narrative interact with each other. I propose the concept of a negative specter of memory, which refers to the things we can only recognize by their absence, the knowledge of the missing part, only possible because it is gone. A void. My goal is to explore how these ideas can have an impact on the possibilities that film and arts offer as ways to explore the relationship between memories, narratives, time, and their voids.
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Affected Stories, Sensed Memories, and Documented Voids

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The task of production design is to create locations where cinematic events occur. Since the subjective experiences of the characters in the film are mainly observable externally, the entire film practice aims to express them through secondary means, for example by design and cinematography. The filmmaker can choose what she brings to the foreground from the character’s experience and what aspects she emphasizes. In the case of production design, it is possible to express metaphorical correlations through the spatialization process of cinematic events while anticipating the embodied situatedness of the camera and the eventual film viewer. The notion of situated authorship is discussed through iconic design examples from <italic>Gone With the Wind</italic> and <italic>The Birds</italic>, which have historically shaped the concept of production design practice. In the case study referring to my work as a designer, I intend to evaluate the schemas used in the spatialization process in the context of Embodied Simulation Theory (EST) and Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Here, I propose the idea of a dynamic staging scenario that indicates how cinematic movement – especially the action of the scene and the movement of the camera onset – is considered in spatialization. With the discussion, I conduct a design analysis with which the properties of the space can be evaluated based on the concepts of image schema, primary metaphor, and conceptual metaphor.
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Toward Production Design Metaphor: Implications of Situated Authorship and Meaning-Making

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When studying subjective reports in neuroscience, data that are more easily quantifiable understandably hold more appeal due to the methodological complexities involved with in-depth approaches (second-person interview techniques and analyses) that require extended training of a researcher but also epistemological regard for the problem. A methodological direction for neurocinematics that could better capture the complexities inherent in the experience of film-viewing is to treat distinct domains of the neurocinematic phenomenon, the film stimuli, related subjective accounts, and their neural correlates as co-constitutive in the data analysis. The present proposal outlines an empirical phenomenology approach in the naturalistic paradigm with film stimuli building on the neurophenomenological ideas of pragmatically approaching the relationship between neurocognitive processes and phenomenological accounts. Using the micro-phenomenological method as a guide, i.e. non-naïve introspection (“becoming aware”) with a trained interviewer, the objective is to emphasize the process of accessing lived experiences for systematic second-person investigations. Such in-depth subjective reports have the potential to yield fine-grained descriptions of the participants’ experience related to (free) viewing of films as opposed to relying on naïve introspections (“just ask”) or easily quantifiable assessments that lack complexity (“just look”) and are prone to bias due to the simplification of experience. Building up a case for empirical phenomenology through the methodological demands of its framework, the illustration of the micro-phenomenological method serves to underscore the non-trivial nature of accessing and reporting experience and its role in the neurocognitive domain.
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Lived Experience in the “Naturalistic” Paradigm: Implementing Empirical Phenomenology with Expert Participants for Neurocinematics

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Within the academic domain focused on the artistic practice of screenwriting, this exploratory study assesses the presence of emotional transportation and character identification processes within the solitary screenwriter’s creative imagination during the writing process. Screen-writing research is facing a dichotomy of the screenwriter who embodies both the role of a narrative specialist and that of a visual storytelling poet. Screenwriters often work in isolation, even in collaborative projects, leading to a tension between solitary work and collaborative roles. Narrative theories in screenwriting have mainly centered on identification of the audience, neglecting the screenwriter’s perspective. However, screenwriting can serve as a platform for experimentation and a reflection of new ideas, insights, and hands-on experience, meeting the demand for a systematic understanding of the writer’s processes. The results of this study provide preliminary insights into the mechanisms of emotional transportation, identification, and eureka moments in screenwriting practice. The study suggests that the transportation effect in writers is induced by a feeling of security, which arises from the limitations of the assignment. The data also suggests that pressure can lead to more original dramaturgical solutions. As such, this experimental pilot study already sheds light on the screenwriter’s artistic process. Yet, it has limitations, including a small number of informants and the novelty of the research method.
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Emotional Transportation and Identification in Screenwriting: A Pilot Study

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<italic>Mr. Robot</italic> is an American television series that conveys the alienating effects of technology through unusual composition patterns. These patterns do not constitute mere coatings but manifestations of embodied metaphors that serve as emotion markers, redundant elements to maintain the mood. The viewers are led to share the character’s emotions, due to perceptual and sensory-motor experiences that are activated through the metaphoric <italic>mise-en-scène</italic>. The unorthodox framing also appears to affect the attentional synchrony, helping to immerse viewers in the obscure fictional world. All in all, the cinematography seems to facilitate the connection between the minds of fictional characters and viewers through bodily experiences.
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Embodied Cinematography in <italic>Mr. Robot</italic>

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This paper engages with research on embodiment, cognition, and figurative meaning in cinema to develop a system for categorizing the cinematic cues that viewers use to gauge character affective experience. Many film theorists whose work is primarily focused on affective experience consider the relationship between the spectator and the character’s facial and bodily expressions. However, films often convey the affective states of characters by integrating bodily expressions with cinematic techniques, such as lighting, framing, and editing. These cinematic techniques can provide insight into a character’s affective states through their figurative associations with represented moods, feelings, and emotions. By exploring the metonymic, metaphoric, and similative properties of cinematic representations of affect, we can better understand how cinematic representations are understood by a community of viewers. Throughout this paper, I put forth the framework of “embodied affective cues” and identify behavioral, physical, and environmental cues to address how a character’s affective experience is represented by cinematic cues external to their body.
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Embodied Figuration and Character Emotion in Cinema: The Role of Embodied Affective Cues

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This article aims to highlight the role of embodied mental representations or embodied schemas in both perception and filmmaking/viewing by foregrounding three premises: (1) perception is inferential and relies on prior embodied schemas; (2) filmmakers (authors) do not merely reproduce reality but equally impose body-based schemas onto the parts of a film in order to convey meanings; and (3) these schemas, as presented by the formal design of the work, may enrich the viewers’ experience by allowing them a privileged look into the embodied creative-thinking processes of filmmakers. It will be argued that viewers are prompted to peek into these processes because the representational embodied concepts, as cued by the films, are grounded in shared sensory-motor capacities that scaffold all abstract thinking and reasoning.
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Shaping Films from the Inside Out: Embodied Mental Schemas in Filmmaking and Viewing

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This paper explores cinematic editing within Ronald Langacker’s cognitive grammar (CG) framework, analyzing the structural and conceptual aspects of film language. By examining the juxtaposition of shots, from a linguistic perspective, the study identifies recurring schematic patterns across expressive instances. Emphasizing grammatical constructions, it delves into the connections between shots, especially in sequences involving a character’s point of view (POV). The present investigation argues for the existence of a shared conceptual mechanism used in order to make sense of verbal and visual discourse. The study employs sequences from Buster Keaton and Michael Haneke, with a primary focus on hypothetical shot juxta-positions crafted to provide visual examples. To concretize the application of Langacker’s CG to cinema image analysis, a case study on the Kuleshov effect as experimented with by Hitchcock will be presented. The principal objective of this study is to construct a theoretical framework employing the analytical tools of CG to augment and refine Noël Carroll’s concept of <italic>erotetic narration</italic>. A subsequent claim is that the juxtapositions of shots are conceptual systems bound at several levels by circular loops. Several configurations of the system coexist and the viewer has the necessary executive control for implementing alternative meaning construals.
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Point-of-view Shots in Light of Cognitive Grammar

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Cinematographers represent a group of experts whose professional skills depend to a great extent on their visual perceptual abilities. By the term <italic>perceptual professionalization</italic>, we emphasize the embodied dynamics of perceptual learning processes that shape the ways in which cinematographers make creative decisions during their daily practices. Novice cinematographers are initiated in film schools and during assisting jobs to a range of technical skills required for working as heads of the camera department in film productions. However, honing one’s perceptual skills as a professional cinematographer is nothing less than a lifelong process. While scientific studies show evidence for behavioral and physiological differences between experts and novices in many different fields, so far no such studies exist between professional cinematographers and novices. As a starting point for studying how cinematographers’ perceptual learning evolves from the level of novice to that of experienced professional, we assumed that the different expertise levels of cinematographers can be observed in the way they view moving images. We then conducted an eye-tracking case study where we identified differences in the gaze patterns between film professionals with different levels of expertise in cinematography during viewing a film trailer. As the experiential heuristics of creative decision-making of professional cinematographers largely rely on the practical skills accumulated in film work, in order to gain access to such knowledge, we also report how involving a practicing cinematographer both in designing the study and in analyzing the results provided us new insights to the topic under scrutiny. Based on our findings, a new study protocol is proposed.
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Cinematographers’ Perceptual Professionalization from Novices to Experts: Observations from an Eye-tracking Case Study

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This paper will address ethical concerns surrounding the representation of vulnerable groups as well as the methodological challenges inherent in using artificial intelligence and human-like computer-generated characters in human studies that involve representing such groups. Such concerns focus on consequences arising from the technological affordances of new systems for creating narratives, as well as graphical and audio representations that are capable of portraying beings with close resemblance to humans. Enacting such virtual representations of humans inevitably gives rise to important ethical questions: (1) Who has the right to tell certain stories? (2) Is it ethical to change the medium of a narrative and the identity of a protagonist? (3) Do such changes, or technological mediations, affect whether a vulnerable group will be fairly and accurately portrayed? (4) And what are the implications, either way? While the backdrop of the paper involves discussing the potential of virtual representation as a meditative tool for moral and social change, the ethical implications inherent in the use of new cutting-edge technologies, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman, to create human-like virtual character narratives call for theoretical scrutiny from a methodological perspective.
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Virtual Representations and Their Ethical Implications

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 11 (2023): Issue 1 (December 2023)

Volume 10 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 10 (2022): Issue 1 (April 2022)

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Volume 7 (2019): Issue 1 (December 2019)

Volume 6 (2018): Issue 1 (December 2018)

Volume 5 (2017): Issue 1 (December 2017)

Volume 4 (2016): Issue 1 (December 2016)

Volume 3 (2015): Issue 1 (November 2015)

Volume 2 (2014): Issue 1 (November 2014)

Volume 1 (2013): Issue 1 (October 2013)

Baltic Screen Media Review

 Why subscribe and read   Only journal in the Baltic Sea Region that focuses on all forms of audiovisual culture emerging from the region and approaches these from a fiercely interdisciplinary angle – incorporating conceptual and methodological insights deriving from film and media studies, new media studies, culture studies, media innovation and management studies, political economy of media and cultural industries, media policy studies, etc.   Why submit      Quick, fair and constructive double-blind peer review   Good visibility in the scholarly target community      Rejection Rate    40%      The core mission of Baltic Screen Media Review is to publish original and critical research articles on a variety of screen media forms and phenomena that are either produced in or represent the cultures and realities of the Baltic region. Therein we define the Baltic region flexibly – it may not only refer to the three Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), but include all the countries and cultures around the Baltic Sea, a region typically neglected in film and media studies. Our specific interest is to discuss and critically analyze the interconnections and exchanges between the countries of the region and their audiovisual cultures. The term ‘screen media’ indicates that the journal’s focus is ‘convergent’ – we publish articles on film, television, interactive media, video art, video games, mobile augmented reality, etc. Manuscripts scrutinizing the co-evolution of these various screen media forms are given a priority. We also invite articles on the full spectrum of audiovisual culture and different methodological takes on it – including textual analyses, accounts on education, production, exhibition, distribution and reception, as well as reflections on relevant theories and frames of references.   The journal is currently published twice a year and is a blind peer-reviewed journal addressed to the international scholarly community.   Archiving   Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.   Plagiarism Policy   The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 