Before addressing them, however, let me establish some important terms from the filmmaking and film studies literatures that are pertinent to this discussion.įilm style is the collection of all aspects of the craft of making movies. This article considers three dynamic patterns that are now meshed with psychological principles of attention and emotion. Heretofore, however, there have been no treatments of the psychologically relevant changes in these variables as they are arrayed over the length of entire films. There are also treatments of the changes in physical attributes of movies, both qualitative (Bordwell, 2006) and quantitative (Bordwell, Staiger, & Thompson, 1985 Cutting, DeLong, & Brunick, 2011 Cutting, DeLong, Brunick, Iricinschi, & Candan, 2011). Some of the literature addressing this change has focused on technology (see, for example, Salt, 1992), and there are numerous textbooks and monographs that have traced cultural, economic, and political changes from the silent era to the present (see, for example, Christiansen, 1987 Kelley, 1998 Kolker, 2006 Thompson & Bordwell, 2010). In addition, few art forms have changed as much as movies over the last 100 years. Although this estimate seems overly enthusiastic, it bespeaks an impressive penetration of film media into everyday life. The British Film Institute ( 2012, p.141) estimated that the average citizen in the United Kingdom sees more than 80 films per year. Moreover, throughout the intervening century, movies have never lost their grip on popular culture, and, with mobile technologies, they have become more prevalent than ever.
#Timing synonym pacing tempo movie#
A better understanding of movie structure and of movie cognition (for example, Hasson, Mallach, & Heeger, 2010 Zacks, Speer, Swallow, & Maley, 2010) continues to open a new window onto the study of mental processes as they work continuously over spans of up to 2 h and more.Īs a psychologist, Münsterberg was overwhelmed by movies, but so were the increasingly large audiences that viewed them in the 1910s. Nonetheless, it has taken most of that century for filmmakers to learn to fashion their tools of film style, creating a film form that couples these three physical changes (and their psychological implications) to narrative structure. Rapid transients (cuts), motion changes, and luminance changes have been endemic to movies for a century, and they are components of what film editors call pace. Still other controlled studies have shown that we have positive associations to brightness and negative associations to darkness (Valdez & Mehrabian, 1994), a finding also found for people watching short movies (Tarvainen, Westman, & Oittinen, 2015).
Many other laboratory studies have shown that motion also captures attention (see, for example, Franconeri & Simons, 2003), which has also been shown for people watching sections of movies (Mital, Smith, Hill, & Henderson, 2011). This has been demonstrated many times in the laboratory (see, for example, Theeuwes, 1991) and also when people watch movie clips (Smith, 2012). Coupled with narrative form, all of these may serve to increase the engagement of the movie viewer.Įxperiments in cognitive psychology have shown us that rapid changes in the visual field attract our eye movements and attention. Decreasing shot durations mean more cuts more cuts mean potentially more saccades that drive attention more motion also captures attention and brighter and darker images are associated with positive and negative emotions. The altered patterns in film style found here affect a movie’s pace: increasing shot durations and decreasing motion in the setup, darkening across the complication and development followed by brightening across the climax, decreasing shot durations and increasing motion during the first part of the climax followed by increasing shot durations and decreasing motion at the end of the climax. Narrative form, on the other hand, appears to have been relatively unchanged over that time and is often characterized as having four more or less equal duration parts, sometimes called acts – setup, complication, development, and climax. In particular, arrangements of shot durations, motion, and luminance have altered and come to reflect aspects of the narrative form. Several of these changes in popular English-language filmmaking practice are reflected in patterns of film style as distributed over the length of movies.
Movies have changed dramatically over the last 100 years.
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