In my first two posts on this subject, I described brain scans of people watching movies obtained by Uri Hasson and his group. Instead of a complicated prediction, this team simply looked at the similarities in their subjects' brain activity as they watched and listened to different kinds of movies. The experimenters used a regular movie, a silent without accompanying sound track, a purely audio storytelling, an unedited film of people aimlessly moving about, and a series of films that demonstrated a gradation of less and less directorial control.
It is this last experiment that tells us most about the control that directors have. The experimenters compared responses to four mini-films: segments of an episode from Alfred Hitchcock's TV series, a segment from Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad,and the Ugly, an episode of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm (using lots of hand-held cameras and actors' improvisations), and the completely unedited film of people milling around Washington Square Park. They measured intersubject correlation (ISC), similarities in brain activity, in an MRI scanner.
The results showed a startlingly clear gradation from the tightly edited Hitchcock (65% ISC) to the looser Leone film (45%) to the still looser Larry David film (18%) and finally down to the entirely unedited film (<5%). Wow! The correlation between ISC and directorial control really says something about directorial control. The experimenters conclude that Hitchcock's ability to "orchestrate" responses in so many brain regions attests to "his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers' minds."
The group's work seems less convincing to me when they turn to film theory. They rather too easily identify similarity in response to "effectiveness." And they compare their loosely edited films to filmmakers in the tradition of André Bazin (such as the Italian neo-Realists) and their tightly edited films to a more controlling aesthetic (like Eisenstein's). Maybe.
It seems to me that the more important thing that this series of experiment gives us is an account of how a directors' tricks and style affects different brain areas leading either to very similar or to rather varying experiences among different viewers.
It's important to remember that ISC measures only the ability to evoke similar responses. For example, in the Hitchcock episode the ISC was high (0.67) in the auditory cortex all the way through. That tells us the soundtrack was grabbing viewers throughout. But the ISC in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was relatively low (0.24). This is a region involved in higher cognitive functions. Hitchcock was not controlling those. But the ISC in even that region rose to more than 0.48 during one two-minute period, apparently corresponding to the climactic scene.
In other words, we get this picture of the whole process of watching a movie. Viewers' brains treat the film alike at basic auditory and visual levels depending on how controlling the director's editing and camera work are. As we go to more and more cognitive processing in the polymodal and cognitive regions of the brain, the director can still exert some control, but processing varies more from viewer to viewer. Thus, an art film (think Godard, Resnais) might evoke largely different responses because of varying intellectual interpretations. We get this picture, I think: similar low-level brain activity governed by higher brain systems functioning in a more individual way. And different directors achieve different balances between higher and lower depending on how controlling the directors' style is.
The ISC measure can also pick up differences in how groups or individuals respond collectively. One could measure ISC against the obvious variables like age, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, cultural backgrond, education, although this remains to be done. But there is always and wonderfully the individual mind as well.
Hasson goes on to suggest that film producers and directors might turn to neuroimaging to gauge the effectiveness of their films. I have to say that I think he's being a bit optimistic. The time! The expense! The MRI scanner is hardly likely to replace the sneak preview. I doubt if the dollar-driven types that run Hollywood are likely to turn to an expensive and time-consuming experimental procedure instead of the time-honored focus group and test audience. But that is not to minimize Hasson and his team's achievement here. For the first time, I think, we have some remarkably detailed knowledge of how our brains function when we are watching a film, how much control the director has over our brains, what regions the film dominates and what regions are left for our own individual and creative responses. That's really something! Hasson calls it "neurocinematics," and I say, Fair enough! Here's to neurocinematics!
Psychological items I've referred to:
Hasson, Uri, et al. "Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film." Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 2.1 (Summer 2008): 1-23.
Hasson, Uri, et al. "Enhanced Intersubject Correlations During Movie Viewing Correlate with Successful Episodic Encoding." Neuron 57(3): 452-62.
