Psychocinematics: With Movies in Mind

This entry also appears on the Oxford University Press blog site .      This year's Academy Award nominations of Argo , Lincoln , and Zero Dark Thirty , attest to our fascination of watching "true stories" depicted on the screen. We adopt a special set of expectations when we believe a movie is based on actual events, a sentiment the Coen Brothers parodied when they stated at the beginning of Fargo that "this is a true story," even though it wasn't. In the science fiction spoof, Galaxy Quest , aliens have intercepted a Star Trek-like TV show and believe the program to be a documentary of actual human warfare. They come to Earth to enlist Cmdr. Peter Quincy Taggart (Tim Allen), star of the TV show, to help fight the evil warlord Sarris (named after the film critic, Andrew Sarris), as they believe Taggart to be a true war hero rather than merely playing one on TV.      Movies that are "based on a true s

     On December 28, 1895,  Auguste and Louis Lumière, inventors of one of the first movie projectors, held their premiere public showing at which 33 Parisians paid one franc to watch ten short clips, each depicting simple activities, such as a couple feeding their baby or men playing cards (view the clips on YouTube ). Despite the novelty of seeing moving images, these single-shot "recordings" were easily recognized. Indeed, psychological studies   have confirmed that individuals who have never before seen movies can interpret the actions presented in single-shot film clips and even clips with simple edits (e.g., transitions that maintain the spatial frame). Yet the Hollywood blockbusters we watch today can contain as many as two thousand individual shots that are joined together to produce what one might imagine would be a perceptually jarring experience, particularly for one who has never seen a movie. When we watch a movie, however, the thousands of shot transitions