Perception while watching movies:effects of physical screen size and scene type

Over the last decade, television screens and display monitors have increased in size considerably, but has this improved our televisual experience? Our working hypothesis was that the audiences adopt a general strategy that “bigger is better.” However, as our visual perceptions do not tap directly into basic retinal image properties such as retinal image size (C. A. Burbeck, 1987), we wondered whether object size itself might be an important factor. To test this, we needed a task that would tap into the subjective experiences of participants watching a movie on different-sized displays with the same retinal subtense. Our participants used a line bisection task to self-report their level of “presence” (i.e., their involvement with the movie) at several target locations that were probed in a 45-min section of the movie “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Measures of pupil dilation and reaction time to the probes were also obtained. In Experiment 1, we found that subjective ratings of presence increased with physical screen size, supporting our hypothesis. Face scenes also produced higher presence scores than landscape scenes for both screen sizes. In Experiment 2, reaction time and pupil dilation results showed the same trends as the presence ratings and pupil dilation correlated with presence ratings, providing some validation of the method. Overall, the results suggest that real-time measures of subjective presence might be a valuable tool for measuring audience experience for different types of (i) display and (ii) audiovisual material.

Older women watching the St. Anthony's Procession

General note: Title and date provided by Bettye Lane.

The Worldhood of the Cinematic Image

A close analysis of the specifically cinematographic procedure in Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Dream’ Crows reveals it as an articulated and insightful philosophical statement, endowed with general relevance concerning ‘natural’ perception, phenomenological Erlebnis, mechanical image and aesthetic rapture. The antagonism between the Benjaminian lineage of a mechanical irreducibility of the cinematic image to anthropocentric categories, and the Cartesian tradition of a film-philosophy still relying on the equally irreducible structure of the intentional act, be it the one of a deeply embodied and enworlded counsciousness, in accounting for the essential structure of film and spectator (and their relation), i.e., the antagonism between the decentering primacy of the image and the self-centered primacy of perception, cannot be settled through a simple Phenomenological shift from occularcentric, intentional counsciousness to its embodyment ‘in-the-world’ as yet another carrier of intentionality. Still it remains to be explained what is it in the mechanical image that is able to so deeply affect the human flesh, and conversely, to what features in the human bodily experience is its mechanical other, the fascinating image, so successfuly adressing? It should be expected from the anti-Cartesianism of both the early and the late Merleau-Ponty the textual support for an approach to the essential condition of passivity in movie watching, that would be convergent with Benjamin. The Chapter ‘Le sentir’, in Phénoménologie de la perception, will offer us the proper guide to elucidate what we are already perceiving and conceiving in Kurosawa’s film, where the ex-static phenomenological body of the aesthetical contemplator ‘enters the frame’ like the Benjaminian surgeon enters the body and like the painter - and always already like our deepest level of ‘sensing’, previously to any act of cousciousness - ‘just looses himself in the scene before him’. The Polichinello secret of cinema watching is nonetheless too evident to be seen, and that is where Phenomenological description and reduction are still required.