The Role of Cinematics on Understanding Filmed Narratives

This study explores the impact of editing and shot-scale on film comprehension. Participants (n = 120) viewed a film depicting a man and woman performing a modern dance. Two versions employed editing to focus on either the male or female dancer; a third version was from a single objective camera position. After viewing, participants were asked to recall what they saw. These recalls were analyzed to examine how the editing choices influenced viewers’ sense of narrativity and character. Keyword: film, narrative comprehension, cinematics CINEMATICS ON UNDERSTANDING NARRATIVE 3 The Role of Cinematics on Understanding Filmed Narratives Understanding narratives requires inferring and monitoring the characters’ internal states (Gernsbacher et al., 1998; Long et al., 1992). In text, authors can explicitly convey internal states if they choose. By contrast, filmmakers have different constraints placed on them regarding how to convey the internal thoughts and feelings of characters to the audience. Filmmakers rely on cinematics such as composition, shot scale (e.g., close-ups), lighting, and editing to help viewers understand the events conveyed in film in general, but internal thoughts in particular (Pudovkin, 1974). Clinton and colleagues (2017) demonstrated that differences in cinematic features can affect how viewers understand the basic emotions that characters feel as a scene unfolds. They had viewers watch one of two different versions of a scene. Both versions were commercially released -one as a short film and the other in the context of a feature film. The high-edited perspective version contained more cinematic devices that engendered character perspectives (e.g., close up, point of view, shot sequences) than the low-edited perspective version. Participants who viewed the high perspective version perceived greater changes in the affect of a prominent character than those who viewed the low perspective version. The goal of the present study was to further explore the role of cinematics on understanding characters in narrative film. Participants viewed a short film about two dancers. The film was composed of two scenes. The first scene was manipulated such that participants viewed an objective version or one of two versions edited to convey perspectives of either the male or female dancer. Then, the second scene was consistent across all participants and showed the dancers in a hallway. After viewing the movie, the participants were asked to recall the film. CINEMATICS ON UNDERSTANDING NARRATIVE 4 The recall protocols were coded for narrative features including internal states (e.g., goals, beliefs, and emotions), as well as physical characteristics (e.g., appearances or facial expressions) and actions (e.g., movements) of the dancers. Given the differences in cuts and shot-scales across editing conditions, we hypothesized that participants’ recalls would vary in the degree to which they talked about the internal states, physical states, and actions of the two dancers. We were also interested in whether the editing manipulation in the dance scene would lead to differences in the mentions of internal states, physical states, and actions in the hallway scene that was consistent across conditions.