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Summary Cognition and Comprehension - Bordwell
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Cognition and Comprehension - Viewing and Forgetting in MildredPierce
You drive on a road where you see someone opening up their trunk. What do you think? He is going to
change is tire, so he is going to get out a new tire or a tool. However, in a film he could be putting a body
into the coffin.
The process of understanding many things in films is likely to draw upon ordinary, informal reasoning
procedures.
Presented with a set of circumstances (flat tire, man opening trunk), you categorize it (driver changing
flat tire) and draw an informal, probabilistic conclusion, based on a structured piece of knowledge about
what is normally involved in the activity. You aren’t aware of doing so—it’s a nonconscious activity—but
there seems no need to invoke the drive-and-defense model of the unconscious.
But the point would be that even genre- based or stylistic conventions are learned and applied through
processes exercised. Cognition and Comprehension 137 in ordinary thinking. No special instruction,
parallel to that of learning a code like language or even semaphore, is necessary to pick up the
conventions of horror films or slow-motion violence.
Understanding narrative films can be seen as largely a matter of “cognizing.” Going beyond the
information given involves categorizing; drawing on prior knowledge; making informal, provisional
inferences; and hypothesizing what is likely to happen next. To be a skilled spectator is to know how to
execute these tacit but determining acts. The goal is at least partly the extraction of “gist.” When
confronted with a narrative, perceivers seek to grasp the crux or fundamental features of the event.
Transforming a scene into gist—the basic action that occurs, and its consequences for the characters
and the ensuing action—becomes a basis for more complex inferential elaboration.
How we look at films: Rather than searching for a “language” of film, we ought to look for the ways in
which films are designed to elicit the sorts of cognizing activities that will lead to comprehension (as well
as other effects).
Narrative norms
We can think of norm-driven subsystems as supplying cues to the spectator. The cues initiate the
process of elaboration, resulting eventually in inferences and hypotheses. The spectator brings to the
cues various bodies of relevant knowledge, most notably the sort known to cognitive theorists as
schema-based knowledge. A schema is a knowledge structure that enables the perceiver to extrapolate
beyond the information given.
Understanding a film calls upon cues and schemas constantly.
Similarly, in the spectator’s search for gist, she or he must possess some rudimentary notion of narrative
structure that permits certain information to be taken for granted and other information to be
understood as, say, exposition or an important revelation.
All these factors vary historically and culturally. We ought to expect that different filmmaking traditions,
in various times and places, will develop particular norms, schemas, and cues. Correspondingly, the
inferences and hypotheses available to spectators will vary as well.
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