The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory

Joseph D. Anderson. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 200 pp. $29.95. Recently there has been growth of scientific interest in film and video. This interest has coalesced into cognitive film theory. Unlike psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist approaches, cognitive film theory neither offers nor seeks any analysis of cultural, historical, or political influences on film or on viewers. Instead, the central idea is that film succeeds because it meshes with our perceptual and cognitive endowment. From this view follows interest in such things as why flicker and flickerless images occur, how form and motion are perceived stripped of their meaning, how color and lighting work stripped of their effects on mood, how lens effects and shot angles affect perceived space, and how continuity and the juxtaposition of shots and cuts imply narrative structure. These topics and more are addressed with considerable clarity in Joseph Anderson's The Reality of Illusion. But Anderson's book is not simply about cognitive film theory. Its subtitle, An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory, allies it with a particular approach within the cognitive sciences, that of James J. Gibson.1Gibson looked to match the constraints of evolutionary biology to everyday human tasks and activities. Thus, Anderson's book is about the evolutionary constraints on human eyes and minds and how these have shaped film. Before Anderson's book, there was no systematic ecological approach to film.2 Anderson begins (I) with two questions: "Why [in a film] do the spokes of a wheel turn backward?" and "Why does a movie seem so real?" The answer to the first is straightforward, and is typical of the focus of his first five chapters. Backward wagon wheels refer to two phenomena, stroboscopic motion and structure-from-motion. The discrete presentation of frames in film (at 72 frames per second) is generally above the temporal resolving capacity of the human visual system. Thus, most motion is seen as smooth and correct. But these discrete frames also make separate images of adjacent spokes closer together than those of the same spoke. The visual system then assigns identity to these adjacent spokes, and the wheel looks as if it turns, often smoothly, backward.] Attempts at partial answers to the second question-about the "reality" of film-run throughout Anderson's book. The question runs deep. Part of an answer, not addressed by Anderson, concerns projected size-the larger (in terms of visual angle) and the better the resolution, the more a viewer feels like he or she is "in" the display.4 The effect of wide screens is that, while we focus more locally on characters and content, the layout and motion presented to our peripheral visual systems surrounding that focus very much control our visceral responses. Anderson's introductory chapter outlines differences between cognitive film theory and other approaches, and the second builds an understanding of the ecology of cinema-that is, the manner in which film has adapted to the auditory and visual systems of humans. It also contains a theoretical aside on the places of illusion (a term Anderson uses a bit more broadly than in the cognitive sciences) and computation in perceptual and cognitive theory. The third chapter concerns capacities and strategies of the cognitive system, with particular attention to the resolution of ambiguity and the categorization of natural objects around us. Traditionally and currently, these are wellresearched topics in cognitive science about the mental activity of building coherence from the world around us. The fourth chapter is the lengthiest and dives into specifics of flicker, motion, form, color, and depth perception. Anderson reviews the evidence for the generally separable parts of the human visual system that process form, color, and motion and depth. That is, the form system cares little about color or motion, the color system cares little about location and motion, and the motion and depth system cares little about form or color. …