Returning To The Film’s Body: Theory And Practice Of The Experience Of Film Body Perception

The so-called "experience of film body perception",as the name suggests,refers to the experience of watching a film in relation to physical sensations.In the history of film studies,there has been a long history of attention paid to the experience of film body perception.In the works of Yugo Munsterberg,Rudolf Arnheim,Andre Malraux,Jean Mitri and other pioneers of film theory,they all try to establish a research paradigm of film media experience through the explanation of scientific rationality.It can be said that the research on film sense,such as vision,feeling and fantasy,is a kind of original academic interest that has germinated since the birth of film.However,under the influence of French structuralism in the middle of the 20 th century,a critical discourse paradigm Which advocating "subject-location" and culturalism that call "grand theory" gradually became the main trend in film studies.while the research on film sense experience was abandoned for a long period of time.With the deepening of cognitive science research,a cognitivism film theory focusing on the audience’s feelings and emotional responses emerged quietly in the European and American academic circles at the end of the 20 th century.A group of film theorists headed by David Bordwell,Noel Carroll and Carl Plantinga rediscussed the emotion,empathy,identification,imagination,association and other issues of film in their own studies,and tried to break the monopoly of "grand theory" on the academic discourse of film studies,and pull the focus of film studies back to the experience of film body perception.Into the new century,the ideological achievements brought by the rapid development of cognitive science continue to radiate outward,which promotes the accelerated transformation of interdisciplinary research paradigm.The empirical research of "Neurocinematics" by means of physiological neurological measurement began to enter the field of view and became a hot topic in film research in recent years.Inspired by this,this paper advocates that we should re-understand the experience of film body perception and construct a theoretical system about the experience of film body perception.In addition,this paper proposes that "return to the film′s body" should be taken as the overall idea of the research,and the research on the experience of film body perception should be conducted through three different dimensions: "the theory of the body","the method of the body" and "the path of the body".This paper starts with the relationship between "film and body" and uses the two key concepts of "embodied cognition" and "sensory extension" to define the media cognitive attributes of film.Then,this paper discusses the relationship between the neural mechanism of film cognition,and systematically introduces the research methods and paradigms of neurocinematics.After that,this paper discusses "the operation mechanism of film emotion" and "the operation mechanism of film imagination" respectively,which correspond to the unconscious part and the consciousness dominated part of film cognition.Finally,this paper summarizes the evolution of motion picture experience,and discusses the two-way interaction between experience of film body perception and film history from the historical dimension.In addition,in order to verify the theory proposed in this study,the author also designed and implemented three neurocinematics experiments,which are added in the appendix at the end of the paper as auxiliary arguments.Three experiments were conducted using EDA,EEG and Eye-tracking,three major physiological neuromeasurement techniques,to explore the possibility of further applying interdisciplinary research methods to film research.This part of the content can be regarded as an independent practice of using new theories and new methods to study the experience of film body perception.