The Spectator’s Reality: A Revision of Screen Space Aesthetics Through Cognitive Film Semiotics

Abstract

This is part of a larger research project in which I attempt to investigate and review certain aspects of the audiovisual film language within new insights offered by cognitive semiotics. Issues about the perception, comprehension, and evaluation of screen images, that is, essentially of image aesthetics, are actually about the organization and experience of space, and as such they have been a central area in the problematics of film language and interpersonal and intercultural communication.

Inspiration for this project was triggered by Warren Buckland’s book Cognitive Film Semiotics, in which he describes the current trends in film theory, especially the efforts of some European film semioticians to bring back semiotics into the game of film theory and reinstate Christian Metz’s semiotic project “to understand how cinema can be understood.” Unlike their more widely renowned American film cognitivists, European film semioticians embrace the insights of American cognitive science, notably the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who place much emphasis on cognitive models of perception and thought that are based on prior bodily experience. By combining the tenets of cognitive science with those of linguistics and semiotics, European film semioticians have introduced new approaches (semantic, pragmatic) on contemporary film theory. I would like to view my research project as siding with that of the European film semioticians’, hoping to contribute with another approach, as to how semiotics can be applied to film theory and address some of the thorny problems about the audiovisual character of film language.

The scope of this chapter is limited to defining the spectator’s reality, essentially his or her relationship to cinematic or screen space. In my research project, the spectator’s activity, as a dynamic participant in the narrative situation and as a recipient of narrative meaning, is placed within a communication theoretical framework. Here, however, we examine the process of the spectator’s perception of screen spaces and argue that meaning is created by a process in the mind of the spectator which involves cognitive models, primarily based on primary actual everyday experiences that a person has with environmental space. Several of the categories of aesthetic factors that Herbert Zettl has tabulated, as being essential in the perception of screen space, will be reexamined through the perspective of cognitive semiotics models, in order to show that we do perceive and comprehend cinematic spaces in the same way we relate to actual space. In their contextual frame, these aspects of screen or image space, we are further going to argue, function as semiotic signs, imbuing even single cinematic frames with narrative meaning. Thus, semiotics, by assimilating the insights of the new cognitive theory, has still a dominant role to play in film theory.

Judgments of beauty are sensory, emotional and intellectual at once. (Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment))