Semantic, Aesthetic, and Cognitive Effects of Flashbacks in Film

Semantic, Aesthetic, and Cognitive Effects of Flashbacks in Film Aline Sevenants (aline.sevenants@psy.kuleuven.be) Gery d’Ydewalle (gery.dyewalle@psy.kuleuven.be) University of Leuven, Laboratory of Experimental Psychology 102 Tiensestraat, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium Abstract Principles of narrative and intellectual film editing were investigated by assessing the semantic, cognitive, and aesthetic consequences of inserting flashbacks. A short narrative film was presented, either with flashbacks or in chronological/linear order. In Experiment 1, the gravity of the acts committed by the two main actors was perceived to be more salient in the linear than in the flashback version (based on Osgood’s semantic differential ratings). Aesthetic assessment did not vary as a function of the linearity. In reconstructing the movie segments into the right order, the linear film condition showed a better match with the chronological ordering than the flashback condition. In Experiment 2, pupil size of the viewers, as a measure of mental load, was registered on-line. In the flashback version, mental load was heightened due to the flashbacks disrupting the linear story grammar. In the discussion about distinctive advantages of intellectual versus narrative editing, intellectual editing lost the case in the present study. Flashbacks did not enhance aesthetic judgments, and linearity emphasized the semantic features of the leading actors with less consumption of mental resources. Introduction The year that the film was born is considered to be 1895. The race to be the first to present “living photographs” was won by the Skladanowsky brothers in Berlin on November 1, 1895. The presentation of the Lumiere brothers with their technically superior cinematograph in the Grand Cafe in Paris on December 28 of the same year, however, is considered as the point of departure of modern film technique. In the first motion pictures of the 1890’s, filmmakers positioned the camera and filmed until the spool to hold the film ran out. This means that the entire scene consisted of one single shot, showing continuous limited action at one place. David Llewelyn Wark Griffith (1875-1948), often referred to as the founding father of the classical Hollywood Cinema, is generally recognized as the inventor of film montage. Ever since, montage or editing (i.e., connecting different film shots and segments) has historically been accepted by film makers and film theorists as a crucial parameter of the film medium. Griffith claimed that an individual shot, rather than the scene, constitutes the central element of cinematic language. He therefore made use of a large amount of cuts and shots. In order to safeguard the temporal and spatial logic and linearity despite the large number of different shots, he developed guidelines for preserving continuity, which is still the prevailing standard in classical Hollywood cinema (Griffith, 1969). Griffith employed the new technique of montage primarily for heightening the dramatic tension. However, the Russian avant-garde filmmakers were the first ones to use the montage techniques very systematically. Vsevelod Pudovkin (1893-1953), often called the second greatest film maker next to Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), considered montage as a process of construction: Shots are like bricks that, joined together, build a sequence (Pudovkin, 1958). He maintained that concepts were best developed by successively presenting shots, which refer to the same general idea. This is called “narrative editing”. Based on several experiments with Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970), Pudovkin suggested that viewers’ expectations, inferences, deductions, and associations guide perception of montage sequences. Kuleshov conducted a series of experiments, called films without film , and developed the notion of the Kuleshov effect in which, through montage, each shot acquired a different shade of meaning according to its place in the sequence. He inserted identical frames of the actor Ivan Mazouchin (1889-1939) between scenes of different events (shots of a bowl of soup, a girl, a teddy bear, and a child's coffin) and asked viewers to describe the actor’s facial expression. Viewers interpreted the frames in accordance with the nature of the adjacent events, although the actor’s facial expression had not varied at all. Kuleshov proved that two shots projected in succession are not interpreted separately by the viewer; in the audience's mind, they are integrated into a whole. The meaning of a shot depends on its context, a general principle that has so strongly been stressed by Gestalt psychology. After studying Kuleshov's montage experiments, Eisenstein became convinced that in cinema one could manipulate time and space to create new meanings, especially if the images were not to be merely linked to create an impression of continuity, as Kuleshov and Pudovkin suggested, but juxtaposed (Eisenstein, 1949). Eisenstein stressed that montage is the basic and unique characteristic of cinema, the basis for its distinctive power as a medium and for its aesthetic principles. In particular, he theorized that the collision or conflict between temporally and spatially unrelated or unmatched shots or scenes could give rise to a new concept eliciting special emotional and cognitive reactions in the audience. According to his theory, the maximum effect of screen expressiveness can be gained if the shots do not fit together perfectly but create a shock to the viewer. This is called “intellectual editing”. Eisenstein proposed that the viewer