Attachment--and loss.

Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

Patterns of Attachment

The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart

Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions.

This article discusses the role of empathy based on evolutionary, human developmental, and neuropsychological theories in combination with film theory and analysis in order to explain the film viewer’s emotional reactions primarily to painful fictive scenarios.

/pdf/empathy-film-and-the-brain-4fajmeypsh.pdf

Empathy, Film, and the Brain

'Cognitive Theory and Documentary Film' is an edited collection of essays exploring the intersection between cognitive and documentary film studies. Given that most Western societies are mass-mediated cultures in which their citizens largely understand “reality” through factual-based media, documentary film has significantly informed the consolidation of the audience’s emotional and cognitive understanding of the world. This understanding is informed through the intricate interplay between two apparent opposites inherent to the documentary film text: Firstly, on an extra-textual dimension, truth assertions establish a strong indexical link between representations and their real-life counterparts. Secondly, on an intra-textual dimension, narrative and aesthetic strategies are employed to achieve a particular kind of “immersion”, whether emotional or intellectual. The co-occurrence and interplay of these two dimensions has arguably resulted in documentaries having a far higher potential than fiction films to impact on our attitudes towards, and interaction with, the world, but also on the construction of our own social, cultural and individual identity. 

Unfortunately, there has been very little convergence between cognitive film theory and documentary studies. Cognitive film scholars have largely focussed on the analysis of fiction film, whilst documentary scholars have deemed cognitive models too limited in that they only address the hardwired attributes of audience reception, thus hypothesising a universal body of spectators and dismissing social, cultural and historical contexts of authorship and spectatorship. However, the new wave of cognitive film theory has moved from neo-formalist and purely cognitive concerns towards the study of emotional and embodied engagement, taking into account social, cultural and individual aspects. Thus, cognitive models have the potential to explore not only narrative-driven and expository documentaries, but also more contemporary formats, such as essay films, participatory documentaries, docu-dramas and docu-musicals.

This anthology explores cognitive approaches to documentary film texts, production practices, institutions and spectatorship. It seeks a better understanding of the reception, as well as the production and exhibition of documentary films, establishing the practitioner/institution/platform as a socio-cultural entity driven by similar mechanisms as the spectator.

Cognitive theory and documentary film

Traditionally, there has been little intersection between cognitive film theory and documentary studies. This article initially outlines the main reasons for this lacuna, but also highlights the few existing exceptions. Whilst these remain too embryonic to initiate a large, overarching and evolving discourse, they constitute seminal landmarks and stepping stones for the future of cognitive documentary studies, which, as we argue, needs to be a pragmatic endeavor. Based on this premise, we propose a research framework consisting of four areas of interest: the mediation of realities, character engagement, emotion and embodied experience, and documentary practice. This framework takes into account intratextual and extratextual aspects in relation to documentary production and reception, as well as potential social impacts. The aim is to address a wide spectrum of documentaries, including classical, but also contemporary forms that deviate from the orthodox doctrine of factuality, such as essay films, performative documentaries, docudramas, and animated documentaries.

/pdf/a-pragmatic-framework-for-the-cognitive-study-of-documentary-c3neki9rq1.pdf

A pragmatic framework for the cognitive study of documentary

Except for a couple of articles from cognitive film theory, theoretical writing about film has shed little light on the underlying processes governing affective film experience in relation to attachment concerns. In this paper, I explore the relevance of neuro-psychoanalytic theory in laying down a framework for understanding the viewer's experience of emotional episodes of loss primarily in romantic films and melodramas. As this paper will show, the pleasure of sad scenes – for instance, in the melodrama – has been explained by the use of ‘meta-emotion’ within a framework of cognitive appraisal theory. A personal experience in the cinema, however, has inspired me to discuss an overlooked contributor to emotional processes in sad experiences: specifically the topic of spectator affect regulation and its close relationship to physiology, bodily appraisal and attachment theory. This paper surveys some of the central concepts of ‘neuro-psychoanalysis’, which is an integration of concepts from psychoanalysis ...

The embrace of Mother Nature: appraisal processes and the regulation of affect in attachment genres

This chapter discusses and analyses how the schematic structures of the “intimate” first-person documentary tap into our “implicit and explicit relational knowledge” (Lyons-Ruth et al., “Implicit relational knowing: Its role in development and psychoanalytic treatment,” Infant Mental Health Journal, 19, 282–289, 1998) and “attachment emotions” (Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol. 2: Separation, 1969) by drawing upon the embodied reality that is enacted in this type of film. The chapter analyzes two films: the main case study is Pappa Och Jag (Father and I) (Linda Vastrik 1999), but it also looks at the documentary, Family (Phie Ambo and Sami Saif 2001), in order to explore how relational schemas play a role in the directors’ regulation of attachment emotion and to analyze the impact the directors’ relational knowledge has on the films’ emotional communication.

The Communication of Relational Knowledge in the First-Person Documentary

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