representation of a movie

What You Need to Know About Representation in Film

The release of films like Get Out and Wonder Woman have sparked conversations and questions about representation in the film industry. So here is everything you need to know about media representation.

What does diverse and accurate representation in film mean? Ultimately, it is the portrayals of people of all genders, races, sexual orientations, levels of ability and more being presented in the media in a manner that reflects the population being depicted. A phrase often used to describe representation is, “If you can see it, you can be it.” Ultimately, it is about having visible role models to look up to.

Unfortunately, a lot of people cannot “see it.” Many people of various races, genders, disabilities and sexual orientations are not cast in roles that show these minorities in positive and successful situations, if they are even cast at all. This is the issue of diverse and accurate representation in media.

A study conducted in 2014 by the University of Southern California calls this representation, or lack thereof, an “epidemic of invisibility.” The study found that the entire film and television industry to be “whitewashed,” from cast to crew, and that the norms of the Hollywood film industry are not aligned with the demographics of the population these films claim to represent.

For example, while half of the world is female, only a third of speaking roles in the films and television shows in the study were female, only 28.3% of speaking roles were racial minorities, and a meager 2% of speaking characters were identified as members of the LGBTQ community. However, the study names more than just casting as an issue. Only 3.4% of directors in the 109 films studied were female, and only two were directed by black women. The films that were chosen for the study were the top-grossing films of the year the study was conducted. There’s clearly lots of room for improvement, but there are also examples of representation done right.

Image source: Pixabay

The recent success of the new Wonder Woman movie is one of these examples. The film features a woman of colour and former Israeli soldier, Gal Gadot, as the main character. Many characters are racial minorities, including a character suffering from mental health issues and a female scientist villain. Wonder Woman was also directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins. While the presence of female characters in Wonder Woman is important, it is equally as important that they are often seen as being strong and independent. The Disney hit Moana is another good example of representation done right, with a cast of Pacific Islanders and a strong female lead chasing her dream instead of a love interest.

However, the importance of diverse and accurate representation is clearest in the films where it is lacking the most. A prime example is the film Ghost in the Shell , where Scarlett Johansson was cast as the lead in a film adaptation of a manga series that was meant to have an all-Japanese cast.

Having visible role models is vital to inspiring people, especially young people, to have goals and to follow them, and it is something that many of us take for granted. Seeing other people that look or act the same way that you do and seeing them succeed in the roles you aspire to is incredibly powerful. However, when genders, races, sexual orientations and more are shown in stereotypical roles, replaced because of “whitewashing” or even not shown at all, it can be extremely damaging and only serves to reinforce that people who are different cannot live accomplished and happy lives.

When women are depicted as demure background characters and sexual objects, when racial minorities are shown as criminal and lazy, when the disabled are portrayed as helpless and stupid, when white actors are cast in roles that are meant to be characters of colour, these harmful stereotypes are reinforced in societal norms and in the minds of those who see these representations. Whether we notice or not, erasing populations of people or only showing them in a certain light is a problem that cannot go unaddressed.

Featured Image Source: Pixabay

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How can TV and movies get representation right? We asked 6 Hollywood diversity consultants.

Here’s what they said about writing characters that actually reflect America.

by Abbey White

In 2012, Kerry Washington, star of the Shonda Rhimes-created ABC political drama Scandal, became the first black woman to lead a network drama in nearly four decades. Two seasons later, the series became the first on a major broadcast network that “was created by a black woman, starring a black woman” and also directed by a black woman, when Ava DuVernay stepped in to helm an episode.

Fast-forward to 2016, when an episode of The CW’s post-apocalyptic drama The 100 featured a groundbreaking love scene between the show’s bisexual female lead Clarke (Eliza Taylor) and her lesbian love interest Lexa (Alycia Debnam Carey) — right before killing off Lexa. The plot bomb resonated so widely that it sparked a Hollywood pledge to stop needlessly killing LGBTQ characters and raised a larger discussion about who was dying onscreen .

With the help of social media, both shows and others like them are shifting discussions around “good representation” from a simple desire to a necessity. Who lives, who dies, and who tells the story — as Hamilton so succinctly put it — matters now perhaps more than it has ever before.

So who is helping Hollywood tell better, more diverse stories? How are they doing it? What is Hollywood currently getting right, and what is it still getting wrong? To find the answers, I spoke with diversity consultants, many from nonprofit media advocacy organizations, who, along with tasks like compiling data on minority representation, offer free training and research support to studios and networks.

Here’s what representatives from GLAAD (which focuses on LGBTQ representation), Color of Change (race), the Geena Davis Institute (gender), Define American (immigration), and RespectAbility (disability), as well as a religion expert, told me about the work of Hollywood diversity consulting and the state of representation onscreen.

Everyone wants good diversity, but “good” and “diversity” can look different to various identities

Rashad robinson, executive director, color of change.

We are looking for representations that are authentic, fair, and have humanity. Where black people are not the side script to larger stories and are not just seen through white eyes. There is a way in which we get the same types of representation over and over again, which kind of decreases the sensitivity and humanity that people receive because the media images we see of people can be so skewed.

Madeline Di Nonno, CEO, Geena Davis Institute

[Through our research,] we found that even though there were female characters, they were onscreen and speaking two to three times less. That gave us a whole other thing to talk to people. You can have a cast of 100 and 50 are female, but are you hearing them?

Elizabeth Grizzle Voorhees, entertainment media director, Define American

What most might consider good immigrant representation is characters that are hard-working, humble but high-achieving ... non-threatening to “the American way.” We find the “good immigrant versus bad immigrant” ... perpetuates the respectability politics forced upon many marginalized communities and suggests that only certain people are worthy of our humanity. [We need] reinforcement in mainstream culture that — at the end of the day — we ... have more in common than not.

Jennifer Mizrahi, CEO and president, RespectAbility

The two [current] gold standards are the TV show Speechless , which is scripted, and Born This Way , which is reality unscripted, and that’s because the leads are people with disabilities — played by people with disabilities — authentically portraying their lives.

We see it as a success if an amputee is playing a police officer in an episode of Law & Order and you never talk about that person’s disability. All you see is an incredible police officer.

Megan Reid, professor and religion consultant, Cal State Long Beach

[Some] shows do a good job of showing the faith part accurately, but that’s all we ever see. If it’s a show where religion is an essential plot, it would be helpful not just to see characters who struggle with their faith but how to make decisions about what to do in a multicultural environment.

Whether their services are offered or asked for, Hollywood diversity consultants aim to increase representation and inclusion at various levels of the industry

Zeke stokes, vice president of programs, glaad.

I can tell you in a very general way that if you are seeing LGBTQ inclusion on television, there is a very, very strong likelihood that GLAAD played a part in it at some point.

It may not be in an ongoing way with a production if it’s a long-developing arc or if an LGBTQ character or storyline is a basis for the show, but you can generally bet we were involved at the outset in helping them ensure that they weren’t falling into outdated tropes, that a character wasn’t just there to support everyone else’s storyline, that they have a well-developed storyline of their own and sort of a reason for being indispensable.

Madeline Di Nonno

[The Geena Davis Institute] has met with every major studio, network, cable company, and pretty much every division. We really focus on who is making financial decisions and who is making creative decisions.

Once something is in construction, we’re not involved unless someone has asked us to be an adviser. For example, YouTube Red has launched originals, and we were asked to be advisers on a show called Hyperlink , which is about young girls in STEM. We looked at the scripts, the dimensionality of the characters — are the characters balanced? Are they well-rounded? Are they stereotypes?

Jennifer Mizrahi

We are meeting with the networks and then reaching out to them and letting them know we are available. Big partners for us are the unions [like] the Casting Society of America’s Committee on Diversity, the Screen Writers Guild, and SAG-AFTRA.

Elizabeth Grizzle Voorhees

There are a variety of ways we engage, including casting for undocumented and documented immigrants non-scripted television programs and films, providing storylines, and on-set consultation and scene review during filming.

Rashad Robinson

The working relationship can be dependent on the entity that we’re dealing with. We do a series of salons throughout the year, where we bring together writers from a host of shows — writers from Being Mary Jane , Black-ish , and Homeland have been there. We spend hours sort of talking about different themes.

Who is asking for help may not always be who you expect

The majority of folks that reach out [to Color of Change] are not black, but it’s really about what the show is trying to achieve. Do folks feel like they’re talking to us under duress? Do they feel like they’re actually trying to get something right? Are folks trying to get a feeling for the general surface rather than trying to go deeper? Each situation is very different, and I would say there have been a number of white folks in Hollywood that have reached out with good intentions and interest in trying to deal with challenges that have existed in the past.

What we have seen [from RespectAbility’s] work in Hollywood is that there is a huge number of people working who have ADHD, dyslexia, and mental health disorders. Just like sometimes people on the autism spectrum can be better at math, science, and engineering than people not on the autism spectrum, it does seem that people who have mental health differences can be better sometimes at acting or comedy.

But those people don’t come out about it.

In many, many cases, they tell us when they speak with us, “Well, I’m living with X, but don’t tell anyone.” It’s really quite common that there are people working in Hollywood with hidden disabilities who are not publicly disclosing those disabilities.

Zeke Stokes

[GLAAD] works with a lot of straight creators who want to tell stories in a really authentic way, and ... the same is true for LGBTQ creators. If you’re a white gay male creator, you might not have the depth of personal experience to write a really authentic queer woman of color.

I think more and more the LGBTQ creators in Hollywood are realizing that there are so many LGBTQ points of view that if you’re not bringing in people that have certain experiences to help guide your creative process — either as a full-time part of the production or as a consultant — then you’re very apt to get it wrong.

The questions and challenges that Hollywood needs help with are not one size fits all

A lot of people come to [the Geena Davis Institute] for help with getting their projects greenlit. Some come to us for recommendations on financing, or they come to us for recommendations on things like female directors and writers. Many of the talent agencies don’t represent enough women writers and directors. We’re at a point where the really well-known female writers and directors are working, so it’s creatives who are maybe on the cusp that really need the support and need to be given a chance.

A lot of times people are well intentioned, but their lexicon is wrong. For example, [a script] might use the expression “wheelchair-bound,” which is just really bad to say. If someone uses a wheelchair it’s an element of freedom, because that’s how they get around. So we look at scripts and help with that lexicon.

[Color of Change] has a big report coming out this fall with UCLA on the diversity of writers’ rooms, and much of that report is about content. We’re looking at upward of 150 shows ... tracking back to three different themes. One is racism in the show and whether it’s individual or structural. Another is ways in which black people or black families feel like a problem rather than a solution. Then we’re looking at how the criminal justice system is often shown as infallible — so police officers, district attorneys, DNA evidence.

There are a lot of identities and issues outside those traditional sexual orientation and gender binaries that are suddenly in the public consciousness, and [GLAAD is] being called on to do work around that a lot. We’ve been living in this sort of transgender tipping point, so we get a lot of calls from creators and networks who want to get that narrative right.

Just in this past year or so, networks and creators have begun to tackle the realities of this next generation, which is, that they’re eschewing labels in a lot of respects. So we’re doing a lot of consulting around what that means and ... the impact of bad representation on that community.

[There] is definitely a huge effort to portray religious rituals correctly. Also an effort to make settings plausible ... [and for] more respectful portrayals of prayer leaders. Many networks are seeking to get right issues with regard to [religious] law and how it plays a part in people’s lives here and abroad.

What they have gotten wrong, but don’t normally ask for help about — and it’s a problem of perception: the lack of a plausible, nuanced range of the level of religiosity in portrayals of Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Sikhs, [and others].

We’re starting to see more of the linking of universal themes with the stories and experiences of immigrant families. Storylines that appear in TV and film often follow the headlines we are seeing in the news media, so specific topics like deportations and ICE raids have had high-interest levels recently, [too].

Increasing intersectionality is a top priority

The point of view is: Infuse your content with a lot of female characters, and as you add, then think about the rainbow of what that could be. Could that person be someone with disabilities, could that person be someone of color, could that person be LGBTQ? Lots of times if creators have a limit on female characters, if they have only one female character, they tend to try to make her flawless. The problem comes in because there’s often just one.

If you look at the inclusion that’s happened on television over the last 20 years, from Will & Grace forward, while there has been a lot of LGBTQ inclusion, the vast majority of it, for way too long, was white men. That’s one of the things [GLAAD is] really working to change. We want to make sure that it’s not just diversity and inclusion, but we’re seeing diversity in inclusion. People of color, women, Muslims, immigrants — when you think of all these communities that have been marginalized, they all live within the LGBTQ community as well.

[RespectAbility] feels very strongly that people with physical disabilities should be represented in every crowd scene and they cannot only be white. In terms of the invisible disability — mental health, sensory, attention deficit — that can be put into a storyline. If you want to be authentic and tell authentic stories, they need to be as people are in humanity. Where’s the person who is a wheelchair user? Where’s the service dog? Where’s the person with Down syndrome? We have 56 million Americans with disabilities, so one out of five Americans. The disability experience is something many Americans live with.

Some Hollywood diversity consultants see their job as a challenging balance between education and accountability

There may be a variety of reasons that people reach out to [Color of Change], but a lot of this is about building relationships and trust and then having enough honesty on our part to say, “Just because we give you advice doesn’t mean we’re going to like the outcome.” It’s getting people to understand that the content they put out doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

GLAAD is the organization that literally started tracking the characters, the representation, the kinds of portrayals we were seeing, and reporting that publicly, so that the industry was being held responsible.

It’s one thing to know something, but to see it in writing and reported in the media I think awakens the industry to a different level of consciousness. So not only do they want to do better because it’s the right thing to do, but they want to do better because there can be consequences if they don’t.

Changes are happening, but not in the same way or at the same pace for everyone

[RespectAbility] just did a focus group in Hollywood, and these folks said when they’re casting, they now know that if they’re going to have four stars of a show, one needs to be nonwhite. But they are hesitant to have that person have a disability because they feel that it’s a stigma. But why can’t a person with a disability be a black person who has the most talent in the room? Disability means you can’t do Thing A, but it doesn’t mean you’re not the best in the world at Thing B. The stigma is [harming] employers’ willingness to hire people. Ninety-five percent of the time [that] there is a character with disabilities onscreen, they are played by an actor without that disability.

Many issues don’t come up as issues of religion until the story is actually about religion. Much of what else we see on television — actors and storylines — are about white, even black, Americans, and we just assume they’re from the Christian background.

Otherwise, [religion is] nearly always in the context of a violent incident. Why can so few people name a single incident on TV or film where a Muslim, Hindu, or several other devout practitioners of their faith laughs so hard he or she cries?

Honestly, there hasn’t been a huge shift yet with writers and executives wanting to portray a more diverse and accurate depiction of immigrants. What we have seen is a desire for more intersectionality, which naturally results in more diverse characters.

As we increase the quantity [of representations], it also raises the bar on quality and that requires content creators to be much more surgical. It’s one thing to be a straight white person who is creating a woman of color on their show, who finds a queer woman of color to talk to about this, but what are we doing as an industry to empower queer women of color to tell their own stories, to create their own content, to have access to writers’ rooms and a career path in the industry?

One of the shifts that I’ve seen is that with black showrunners ... there’s been a wider range of portrayal and a wider range of stories about the black experience. I still don’t think we see enough economically challenged people on television, and I feel like this has been a trend across race that we’ve seen. I think not having stories featuring people who are economically challenged adds to the lack of empathy that we have for the challenges people are having.

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By Mary Ellen Dowd

“Representation in the fictional world signifies social existence. Absence means symbolic annihilation.” George Gerbner

Representation is a key aspect of individual empowerment in a society that so highly values media as a forecaster of culture. It becomes increasingly more difficult for an individual or group of individuals to find value in their differences when they are constantly ignored or, worse, alienated for those differences by popular media.

In terms of race and film, this process of ignoration and alienation began with the inception of the moving picture and continues to some extent today.

In 1891, the Edison Company created the Kinetoscope, which would become the very first machine to deliver the moving picture. A century and a half later, the moving picture, which would evolve into television and film, has become an integral part of popular culture.

Early film could be defined as short, colourless, and without synchronised dialogue. Still, even at the beginning of its long and complicated life, film was a uniting medium that was often situated at the centre of culture. These early films were often accompanied by music, lectures and audience participation. Like most other things during this period of history, mainstream film primarily highlighted white narratives often featuring blackface or “token” Black characters.

As film began to include colour and dialogue, and otherwise began to progress as a medium, the power held by the industry grew. The public looked to the film industry as it began to produce works like The Birth of a Nation (1915), one of the first full-length feature films ever made.

The irony of this piece is its undeniable significance to film as a medium. It has been described as a landmark achievement for cinema with its employment of formal techniques ahead of their time. It made history as the first film to ever be shown at the White House and attracted complete mainstream success. The problem? The film was viciously racist in its depictions of African Americans.

The film depicted a post-Civil War society in which giving African Americans the right to vote ended in utter chaos and disaster. African Americans were illustrated in an extremely negative light by white actors wearing blackface while members of the Klu Klux Klan were celebrated as heroes.

“Almost worse than the film itself, is the fact that it was so hugely popular”, writes Russell Sharman in his book Moving Pictures. “Because it reaffirmed the contemporary, hegemonic idea of race in America. It presented the subjugation of Black people to white people as the “natural order of things” by showing audiences the danger of upending that order. And by fabricating a narrative of the KKK as the (white) saviors of democracy in the south, it wrapped a lie in the persuasive power of mass media. It made it feel true.”

Sharman argues that this film, as well as many others like it, are evidence that cinema exists in society as a tool of hegemony, in the case of The Birth of a Nation , white hegemony. Stereotypes of African Americans consistently employed in film during these early years, like the hyper-masculine and dangerous Black man used in this particular film, shaped the way the audience would perceive racial difference, which effectively allowed for white supremacist mindsets to prevail.

Although these issues have improved over time, racism and underrepresentation in film continue a century later. What was once an exaggerated caricature of race has transitioned to lingering stereotypes.

“As Hollywood has featured more black characters and cast more black actors, it has also emphasised other stereotypes”, reads a data analysis by dw.com . “To this day, black men are often portrayed as scary or angry and black women as loudmouthed and sassy. If a movie features one token black character, it’s likely to be the black best friend. And, if people die in a movie, the black character is still likely to go first. Even with awareness of racial stereotypes rising, Hollywood persists with these tropes.”

Underrepresentation of people of colour continues and in some cases, actors still do not share a racial likeness with the character they were cast to play.

Contemporary films like Nina (2016), a biopic of Nina Simone, an acclaimed Black singer, songwriter, musician and civil rights activist who lived during the 20th century, have received significant criticism for their casting of actors that lack racial likeness with the character being portrayed. In Nina , actress Zoe Saldana, who identifies as Latina and black, allegedly wore a prosthetic nose and skin darkening makeup for her role as Nina Simone.

Sam Waymon, one of Simone’s brothers, compared the performance to blackface in an interview with NPR , and Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an article for The Atlantic   condemning Saldana as well as the producers.

“Doubtless, these are good, non-racist people—but not good enough. No one on the team seems to understand the absurdity at hand—making a movie about Nina Simone while operating within the very same machinery that caused Simone so much agony in the first place”, writes Coates. “But there is something deeply shameful—and hurtful—in the fact that even today a young Nina Simone would have a hard time being cast in her own biopic. In this sense, the creation of Nina is not a neutral act. It is part of the problem.”

Coates cites the irony of casting a fairer-skinned actress to play Simone in her biopic when the musician had spent much of her career struggling with beauty standards in the entertainment industry. He describes how this experience is consistent with his own as a young Black man and with the experiences of Black women across America. He accuses the creators of the film of appropriating Simone by profiting from her music while reinforcing a system that consistently brought her pain and obstacles.

All arguments by Coates point to the overarching issue that still exists in the entertainment industry and beyond, which is a general disregard or ignorance of the real, and often traumatic, experiences of people of colour in a society rooting against them.

This is all not to discount the significant improvement in representation in other areas of the film industry during the 21st century. For example, Black Panther (2018), was a milestone in Black representation as it made a blockbuster film from the first black comic book superhero, a concept first drawn in 1966.

“Those of us who are not white have considerably more trouble not only finding representation of ourselves in mass media and other arenas of public life, but also finding representation that indicates that our humanity is multi­faceted,” writes Jamil Smith for Time . “Relating to characters onscreen is necessary not merely for us to feel seen and understood, but also for others who need to see and understand us. When it doesn’t happen, we are all the poorer for it. This is one of the many reasons Black Panther is significant.”

Racial equity will never be achieved when elevated, mainstream media is not only exclusionary but slyly reinforces racial stereotypes. Popular media dictates what will be normalised and accepted in our culture; which means if representation of people of colour is negative or nonexistent, the general public will perceive racial differences in the same ways. In the pursuit of racial equity, the authentic voices of people of colour should be included in all content produced by the entertainment industry, mainstream or otherwise.

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Representation in Cinema

I’ve spent the last several chapters discussing in great detail how cinema communicates, how it uses its own unique and evolving cinematic language to connect with and engage its audience. Namely, you. With a firm grasp on the tools and techniques employed by filmmakers, we can break the medium down to its constituent parts, analyze how mise-en-scene, narrative structure, framing, composition, camera movement, lighting, sound design, editing, performance and a thousand other components add up to an affecting cinematic experience. Or how they add up to a deeply disappointing one. But at least we’ll know why.

Most introductory textbooks stop there. And with good reason. That’s plenty of information to absorb, much less master, for one semester. But it stands to reason that if we spent all this time understanding how cinema communicates, we should probably also spend some time thinking about what , exactly, it is trying to say.

Way back in Chapter Two, I brought up the idea that the cultural norms that shape cinematic content, much like cinematic language, are largely invisible or unconscious. Cinema, like any other art form, is created by artists who are themselves bound up in a given historical and cultural context. And no matter how enlightened and advanced they may be, they cannot possibly grasp every aspect of how that historical and cultural context shapes their view of the world. Inevitably, the unexamined norms and values that makes us who we are filter into the cinematic stories we tell.

The result is a kind of cultural feedback loop where cinema both influences and is influenced by the context in which it is created.

Because that process is largely invisible and unconscious, cinema remains more effective at re-affirming a particular view of the world than challenging or changing it. That is to say, it is an inherently conservative medium. Not in the partisan sense, but in the sense of maintaining or “conserving” the status quo. Part of the problem (if you accept that this is a problem) is the economic reality that cinema must appeal to the masses to survive. It costs a LOT of money to make a feature film or tv series. So, filmmakers and their financiers tend to avoid offending our collective sensibilities. They want us to buy more tickets and pay more streaming fees, so they’re going to err on the side of making us feel better about who we already think we are.

But there’s another really important reason why cinema does not tend to challenge the status quo. The reality is that the people who have historically had access to the capital required to produce this very expensive medium… well, they tend to all look alike. That is, mostly white, and mostly men. And as I mentioned back in Chapter Two, when the same kind of people with the same kind of experiences tend to have the most consistent access to the medium, we tend to get the same kinds of stories, reproducing the same, often unexamined, norms, values and ideas.

This cultural and economic dynamic has shaped cinematic content from the beginning. And by pulling our focus from form to content, from cinema as a technical medium to cinema as a cultural document, we can better understand what cinema has to say about who we think we are.

This emphasis on how culture shapes content (and vice versa) inevitably leads to the issue of representation. Not only in the sense of who is on screen and how we see them, but perhaps even more importantly, who is behind the camera . After all, whoever controls the means of communication controls the message.

Obviously, a deep dive into the issue of representation in cinema could easily fill its own, stand-alone introductory text. [1] Which is probably why most textbooks on formal film analysis avoid the topic altogether. But hey, we’ve come this far, why not put all of that newfound knowledge about how cinema communicates to at least a couple of examples of what it’s trying to say.

To that end, I’m going to focus on two specific case studies in cinematic representation. Now, the options are endless. I could have easily written chapters on gender and sexuality or race and ethnicity or even issues of inequality and class as general topics of representation in cinema. But I think there is power in specificity. The more focused we can be in our analysis, the more fruitful the exploration. So, I’m going to zero in on the role of women in cinema and the role of African Americans in cinema; both in terms of how they are portrayed on screen, and the ways women and Black filmmakers specifically have fought for control of their own cinematic narratives.

This emphasis is due in part to the historical moment. The #MeToo Movement has led to the beginnings of real systemic change in the entertainment industry for women, and placing that cultural shift in cinematic context seems particularly important. The same could be said for the recent #OscarsSoWhite campaign, and cinematic representations of African Americans. But even more recently, the murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter movement has forced a deep and hopefully lasting examination of who we think we are as a society. And I would argue cinema has an important role to play in that process, both historically and moving forward.

But I encourage you not to stop here. Use this as an opportunity to explore issues of representation for Native Americans, Asian Americans and the Latinx community. How does cinema influence our understanding of masculinity? Immigration? Mental health?

The list is as long as our collective experience.

• In fact, it has. Harry Bernshoff and Sean Griffin’s America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies is a stunningly thorough treatment of the topic from multiple angles. You should check it out. ↵

Moving Pictures Copyright © 2020 by Russell Sharman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Representation, Depiction and Portrayal in Film

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An account of the experience of film as art that allows a central role to the notion of phantasy, as this book suggests, cannot fail to benefit from an account of representation. The reason for this will become clearer when we discuss the idea of phantasy itself being understood as a kind of representation, and as such a link can be established between pictorial representation and psychological states themselves. But in the first place such an argument requires a detour through heavily disputed philosophical questions of pictorial representation which, for historical reasons, have focused largely on the art of painting. 1 Since Plato, painting, as a two-dimensional means of representing persons, objects and events in three-dimensional space, has been the art form which traditionally has posed the question of the nature of understanding pictorial representation. What does pictorial representation involve? Is it a matter of an illusion, of a resemblance, of a symbolic system, or what? Put at its most schematic: what is it for one thing to represent another, where the representation could be a painting, a drawing, a diagram, a map?

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R. Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture ( London: Methuen, 1983 ), p. 122.

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See S. Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film , enlarged edition ( London: Harvard University Press, 1979 ).

R. Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 ).

K. L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundation of the Representational Arts ( London: Harvard University Press, 1990 ).

See A. Phillips, ‘Drawing from Life’, in J. Hopkins and A. Savile (eds.), Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art: Perspectives on Richard Wollheim ( Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 ).

See Richard Wollheim, ‘On Pictorial Representation’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vol. 56, no. 3 (Summer 1998), p. 218.

See Walton, ‘Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism’, Critical Inquiry , vol. 11, no. 2 (December 1984), pp. 246–77.

Article   Google Scholar  

See R. Wollheim, The Mind and its Depth (London: Harvard University Press, 1993), ch. X.

See H. Osbourne (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Art ( London: Oxford University Press, 1970 ), p. 788.

See Peacocke, ‘Depiction’, p. 393, who refers to Pirenne, Optics, Painting and Photography ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970 ).

See S. L. Feagan, ‘Presentation and Representation’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , vol. 56, no. 3 (Summer 1988 ), pp. 234–40.

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O’Pray, M. (2004). Representation, Depiction and Portrayal in Film. In: Film, Form and Phantasy. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230535770_1

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The Importance of Positive Representation in the Acting Industry

From disability to gender and female characters, understanding why representation matters in film, theatre and media is crucial. explore the impact of on-screen diversity, good examples of representation, and the positive effects diverse portrayals in the entertainment industry brings.

The UK and Ireland are home to an incredible crop of diverse talent delivering scene-stealing performances across our stages and screens. While TV shows such as  Doctor Who  and  Bridgerton  are smashing casting barriers, the industry is still not where it needs to be.  14-year-old Lenny Rush, who won the BAFTA for Best Male Performance in a Comedy Programme at the 2023 Awards , told Metro  he is “proud to represent the disabled community on stage, as it is still rare to see .”

Positive representation authentically portrays the real world and creates equal opportunities for actors – therefore, it’s essential the industry keeps striving to make it the norm.

What is Positive Representation?

Positive representation is the inclusion of people regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, body type, race, and religion, and is integral in breaking down harmful stereotypes historically portrayed on screen and stage.

For many years, period dramas had predominantly white casts, which excluded actors who didn’t fit the specific casting criteria. The industry has evolved, and historical dramas are now ignoring the traditional casting habits and instead focusing on top talent. Netflix’s smash-hit show  Bridgerton  is a prime example, with a diverse range of actors in leading roles that have catapulted the careers of its cast, including Simone Ashley, Nicola Coughlan, and Regé-Jean Page.

Positive representation also helps overcome harmful stereotypes such as the ‘gay best friend,’ where an actor becomes a comedic accessory to a straight character instead of a character in their own right. Trans and non-binary actors remain underrepresented on our screens, and Emma D’Arcy said they “ felt pressure at the start of their career to hide their gender to succeed .” Emma told The Independent on coming out as non-binary, “I hope it will let younger people who may feel similar know that there is room in this industry for them.”

Disabled characters often fall into a stereotype and can be portrayed as unhappy, with their story focused on what they can’t do instead of what they can. Disabled actors find it difficult to get mainstream agents and can miss out on opportunities to non-disabled actors.

Rose Ayling-Ellis explains her initial challenges to The Guardian : “Agents weren’t interested in deaf actors,” she says. “Drama school felt inaccessible. Experience was hard to get.”

Acting agencies that represent actors with disabilities in the UK include  Zebedee Talent ,  VisABLE People ,  C Talent , and  Andrew Roach Talent . Accessible acting courses in the UK include the Central School of Speech and Drama’s  performance making diploma for learning disabled and autistic adults , and Guildhall offers disability support to its students.

British and Irish Talent Breaking Barriers

Disney released  Peter Pan & Wendy  in April 2023 and made history by casting actor  Noah Matofsky – the first actor with Down syndrome to be cast in a major role . 15-year-old Noah had never acted before, but recorded a self-tape after hearing Disney were looking for an actor with Down syndrome. He won the part of ‘Slightly’, the leader of the Lost Boys, marking a huge milestone for  disability representation as 95% of disabled characters on TV are played by able-bodied actors.

Yasmin Finney, whose breakout role was in Netflix’s  Heartstopper , has joined the cast of  Doctor Who  as a character named Rose. Yasmin, who hails from Manchester, heard about the casting for a trans girl of colour from her TikTok followers. The actress was studying drama at college at the time and was disheartened by the lack of acting opportunities, saying,  “I was like, ‘There are no trans roles, there’s nothing. I’m basically setting myself up to fail.’ I didn’t see myself reflected in the UK media anywhere.” 

Yasmin is open to all types of acting roles in the future and doesn’t want to be limited  by her aspirational role in  Heartstopper , saying, “I think we’ll really have change when I can play a character whose gender identity or sexuality isn’t specified. That’s when the industry will start to see trans actors as normal actors like everybody else, and we can play any role that we want to.”

Sex Education  star, Ncuti Gatwa, will take over as ‘Doctor Who’ from the first female Doctor, Jodie Whittaker. Gatwa is the first black actor to portray the iconic role, and showrunner Russell T. Davies said of his audition, “Ncuti dazzled us, seized hold of the Doctor and owned those TARDIS keys in seconds. It’s an honour to work with him, and a hoot, I can’t wait to get started.”

The short film,  An Irish Goodbye , won the Oscar this year in its category and starred Irish actor, James Martin, who became the first actor with Down syndrome to star in an Academy Award-winning film. The actor said in an interview, “Anybody can act, it doesn’t matter if you have Down’s syndrome.” Since, James has not let fame go to his head  and has returned to his part-time job at Starbucks .

Casting Milestones

HBO hit  Euphoria  is the network’s second most-watched show after  Game of Thrones . Breakout star, Hunter Schafer, plays ‘Jules’, a trans girl navigating high school, and writer Sam Levison employed Scott Turner Schofield – the first openly transgender actor on daytime TV –  as a trans consultant to create an authentic representation .

Marvel blockbuster  Black Panther  released in 2018 and was another ground-breaking milestone for casting. The film, with a predominantly black cast, boasts strong-female characters, a black director, and created positive role models for audiences worldwide.

Black Panther , set in the fictional African country of ‘Wakanda’, also helped smash African stereotypes. Writer Chiney Ogwumike wrote,  “In many ways, Black Panther helped normalise African heritage and style in popular culture by truly celebrating it. ”

The late Chadwick Boseman left behind an inspiring legacy, and he said that the film had changed what it means to be, “Young, gifted and black.”

Film, TV and theatre are storytelling platforms that significantly influence and shape our opinions. To reflect our ever-changing world and to truthfully tell people’s stories requires a diverse range of actors with lived experiences. Positive representation allows actors to succeed based on talent – while not getting restricted by demographics to create a fair, equal, and more authentic industry. And we hope to see more of it in the years to come.

From all of us at Spotlight, we want to say a huge thank you to Sarah for her amazing insights into positive representation in the industry.

Take a look at our  News & Advice section  for more casting news and acting tips.

Image credit: BBC/Bad Wolf/Disney

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Defining race and representation in film

A division of humankind into groups of people with similar (physical) characteristics. A sister concept to race is ethnicity , a division of humankind into groups of people with shared cultures or customs, including nationality, religion, language, and so on. In practice, the two are used somewhat interchangeably. The physical characteristics via which racial classifications have been made have no basis in science and are superficial: any given racially classified group is broadly similar in biological terms to any other. However, although race is constructed by and through culture, designated or adopted racial distinctions are a social and institutional fact, underpinning legislation, shaping common sense, bolstering prejudice, and informing cultural production.

In film studies, early film theory , including Screen theory , was relatively mute on questions of race. Work in this area began in earnest in the late 1970s when scholars began to examine how US cinema , and especially films of the silent cinema era and those produced within the Hollywood studio system , played a role in cultivating a deep-seated racism, founded on colonial conquest and slavery. Celebrated canonical films, such as The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915), were re-evaluated and critiqued for their dissemination of negative stereotypes of African-Americans, including stock characters such as the Uncle Tom, the Lazy Coon, the Mammy, the Tragic Mulatto, and the Black Buck. The western genre was also re-examined in relation to its depiction of Native Americans, and further work described Hollywood’s representation of Irish-, Italian-, Latino-, Jewish-, Asian-, and Arab-Americans ( see also stereotype ).

Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020).  Race . In  A Dictionary of Film Studies . Oxford University Press. Retrieved 28 Aug. 2023

REPRESENTATION

The image or idea of a thing. In film studies, representation is an overdetermined term with various meanings.

1. In a common use, representation is a synonym for film in general, inasmuch as all films constitute an image or idea of the thing they depict. In relation to this, it is necessary to note that what we actually see is a re-presentation (i.e. the screening) of a representation (the film).

2. In debates about film and realism , the specific qualities of photography have led to claims that the film image transcribes, or indexes, reality rather than represents it; in this formulation the film is the thing ( see index ). A counterclaim has it that all representation is governed by a framework of codes and conventions specific to a particular time and place ( see poststructuralism ; semiotics ) and also that the thing represented is often just another representation ( see intertextuality ): in this formulation the once-removed nature, and perhaps even the untrustworthiness, of representation is emphasized.

3. Representation is also a key term for scholars who work on questions of identity and on the ways in which films may construct or deploy negative stereotypes of marginalized or oppressed groups ( see disability ; gender ; race ; religion ; sexuality ; social class ). In this context, the term can also mean to advocate on behalf of an individual or a group, as with an elected politician or legal representation. Used thus, filmmakers from marginalized or oppressed groups are sometimes said to bear the burden of representation inasmuch as their work is asked to speak on behalf of, or represent, the group to which they belong or are presumed by others to belong ( see cultural studies and film ).

4. The use of the term to denote the process of mental representation is less common, though it is integral to some theories of perception and psychology that are occasionally addressed within film studies ( see cognitivism ; phenomenology and film ).

Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020). Representation . In  A Dictionary of Film Studies . Oxford University Press. Retrieved 28 Aug. 2023

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/why-on-screen-representation-matters-according-to-these-teens

Why on-screen representation matters, according to these teens

Why does representation in pop culture matter?

For some young students, portrayals of minorities in the media not only affect how others see them, but it affects how they see themselves.

“I do think it’s powerful for people of a minority race to be represented in pop culture to really show a message that everybody has a place in this world,” said Alec Fields, a junior at Forest Hills High School in Pennsylvania.

Fields was one of 144 middle and high school students who were interviewed about seeing themselves reflected — or not — on the screen. PBS NewsHour turned to our Student Reporting Labs from across the country to hear what students had to say a topic that research shows still has room for growth.

The success of recent films like “Black Panther” and “Crazy Rich Asians” have — again — sent a message about the importance of representation of minorities, not only in Hollywood but in other aspects of pop culture as well.

Only two out of every 10 lead film actors (or 19.8 percent) were people of color in 2017, this year’s UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report found. Still, that’s a jump from the year before, when people of color accounted for 13.9 percent of lead roles. People of color have yet to reach proportional representation within the film industry, but there have been gains in specific areas, including film leads and overall cast diversity.

According to 2018 U.S. Census Bureau estimates , the nation’s population is nearly 40 percent non-white. By 2055, the country’s racial makeup is expected to change dramatically, the U.S. will not have one racial or ethnic majority group by 2055, the Pew Research Center estimated .

Some students said that not seeing yourself represented in elements of pop culture can affect mental health.

“It just makes you feel like, ‘Why don’t I see anybody like me?’ [It] kind of like brings your self-esteem down,” said Kimore Willis, a junior at Etiwanda High School in California.

Others said they often look to trends in pop culture when forming their own identities.

“We need to see people that look like ourselves and can say, ‘Oh, that looks like me!’ or ‘I identify with that,’” said Sonali Chhotalal, a junior at Cape May Technical High School in New Jersey.

Others, however, feel that Hollywood is overcompensating for their lack of diversity by depicting exaggerated and stereotypical characters.

Eric Wojtalewicz from Black River Falls High School in Wisconsin said that he sees a lot of gay characters that seem “over-the-top,” playing on old tropes. “I definitely think that not all gays are like that,” he said.

Kate Casper, a junior at T.C. Williams High School in Virginia, called Hollywood’s attempt at diversity “disingenuous.” Although there can never be enough diversity, Casper said, she feels that the entertainment industry is using diversity for economic benefit. “Diversity equals money in today’s world, which is cool, I guess,” she said, adding that “it’s cooler to have pure motives.”

The UCLA report agrees that diversity sells. It says that the median global box office has been the highest for films featuring casts that were more than 20-percent minority, making nearly $450 million in 2017.

Although public opinion may be divided about whether the entertainment industry is doing enough to represent all types of people, South Mountain High School student Dazhane Brown in Arizona said that feeling represented is “empowering.”

“If you see people who look like you and act like you and speak like you and come from the same place you come from … it serves as an inspiration,” Brown said.

PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs produced this story in an effort to highlight the importance of representation of minorities in popular culture. Students from 31 Labs across the country submitted these responses.

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• Published: 03 July 2018

A psychology of the film

• Ed S. Tan 1 , 2  

Palgrave Communications volume  4 , Article number:  82 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies

The cinema as a cultural institution has been studied by academic researchers in the arts and humanities. At present, cultural media studies are the home to the aesthetics and critical analysis of film, film history and other branches of film scholarship. Probably less known to most is that research psychologists working in social and life science labs have also contributed to the study of the medium. They have examined the particular experience that motion pictures provide to the film audience and the mechanisms that explain the perception and comprehension of film, and how movies move viewers and to what effects. This article reviews achievements in psychological research of the film since its earliest beginnings in the 1910s. A leading issue in the research has been whether understanding films is a bottom-up process, or a top-down one. A bottom-up explanation likens film-viewing to highly automated detection of stimulus features physically given in the supply of images; a top-down one to the construction of scenes from very incomplete information using mental schemata. Early film psychologists tried to pinpoint critical features of simple visual stimuli responsible for the perception of smooth movement. The riddle of apparent motion has not yet been solved up to now. Gestalt psychologists were the first to point at the role of mental structures in seeing smooth movement, using simple visual forms and displays. Bottom-up and top-down approaches to the comprehension of film fought for priority from the 60s onwards and became integrated at the end of the century. Gibson’s concept of direct perception led to the identification of low-level film-stylistic cues that are used in mainstream film production, and support film viewers in highly automated seamless perception of film scenes. Hochberg’s argument for the indispensability of mental schemata, too, accounted for the smooth cognitive construction of portrayed action and scenes. Since the 90s, cognitive analyses of narration in film by film scholars from the humanities have revolutionised accounts of the comprehension of movies. They informed computational content analyses that link low-level film features with meaningful units of film-story-telling. After a century of research, some perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that support our interaction with events in the real world have been uncovered. Today, the film experience at large has reappeared on the agenda. An integration of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms is sought in explaining the remarkable intensity of the film experience. Advances are now being made in grasping what it is like to enjoy movies, by describing the absorbing and moving qualities of the experience. As an example, a current account of film viewers' emotional experience is presented. Further advances in our understanding of the film experience and its underlying mechanisms can be expected if film psychologists team up with cognitive film studies, computer vision and the neurosciences. This collaboration is also expected to allow for research into mainstream and other genres as forms of art.

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An agenda for the psychology of the film.

At the time of the first kinetoscope and cinema exhibitions in 1894–1895, thanks to devices such as the Phenakistoscope, Zoetrope and Praxinoscope, moving images had been popular for decades. Just before that time, academic psychology turned to the identification of the mechanisms underlying the functioning of the mind. Perception psychologists began to study apparent movement of experimental visual stimuli under controlled conditions because they found moving stimuli interesting cases in human perception, or as part of the study of psychological aesthetics founded by Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt. The publication of The Photoplay: A Psychological Study marked the beginning of the psychology of the film. Hugo Münsterberg was trained by Wundt and recruited by William James to lead the experimental psychology lab at Harvard. Importantly, Münsterberg was also an avid cinemagoer as his analyses of theatrical films of his time may tell, and a professing cinephile at that. Münsterberg set two tasks for the study of the film: one was to describe the functioning of psychological mechanisms in the reception of film; the other to give an account of film as an artistic medium.

Münsterberg shared his contemporaries’ and even today’s spectators’ fascination for the wonder of moving images and their apparent reality. He described the film experience as a 'unique inner experience' that due to the simultaneous character of reality and pictorial representation “brings our mind into a peculiar complex state” (p. 24).

In the first part of The Photoplay , explores how film characteristically addresses the mechanisms of the basic psychological functions investigated by experimental psychology—namely perception, attention, memory and emotion. Footnote 1 In The Photoplay the imagination is the psychological faculty that theatrical movies ultimately play upon; attention, perception, memory and emotion are also directed by the film, but contribute to the film experience as building blocks for the imagination in the first place. One of the ways that films entertain the imagination is by mimicking the psychological functions. Film scenes may represent as-if perceptions, as-if thoughts, as-if streams of associations, and as-if emotions or more generally: display subjectivity. Footnote 2 Second, the film creates an imagined world that deviates from real world scenes as we perceive these in real life. Liberated from real life perceptual constraints involves the spectator’s self in 'shaping reality by the demands of our soul' (p. 41). Third, Münsterberg has a nuanced view of the automaticity of responses to film. On the one hand, it is the spectator’s choice—based on their interest—which ideas from memory and the imagination to fit to images presented on screen; they are felt as 'our subjective supplements' (p. 46). On the other, the film’s suggestions function to control associated ideas, '… not felt as our creation but as something to which we have to submit' (p. 46). And yet in Münsterberg’s view the film does not dictate psychological responses in any way. Footnote 3

Finally, The Photoplay provides abundant and compelling introspective reports of the film experience and so probes into the phenomenology of film, that is, what it is like to watch a movie. I think it is fair to say that for Münsterberg the film experience is the ultimate explanandum for a psychology of the film. In order to account for that phenomenology by mechanism of the mind proper descriptions of the film experience are needed, and introspective reports are an indispensable starting point for these.

The other task Münsterberg set himself was to propose an account of the film as a form of art. Part two of The Photoplay proposes that the film experience includes an awareness of unreality of perceived scenes. This awareness is taken as fundamental for psychological aesthetics; all forms of art are perceived to go beyond the mere imitation of nature. Footnote 4 Münsterberg showed himself a formalist in that he theorised that aesthetic satisfaction depends not on recognition of similarity with the real world or practical needs, but on the sense of an 'inner agreement and harmony [of the film’s parts]' (p. 73). Footnote 5 But in order to qualify as art, according to Münsterberg film was not to deviate too much from realistic representation that distinguishes theatrical movies from non-mainstream forms.

Münsterberg’s agenda is in retrospect quite complete. The detailed investigation of psychological mechanisms and aesthetics of film is followed by a last chapter on the social functions of the photoplay. The thoughts forwarded in it are more global than those on perception and aesthetics. The immediate effect of theatrical films on their audience is enjoyment due to their freeing the imagination, and their easy accessibility to consciousness 'which no other art can furnish us' (p. 95). Enjoyment comes with additional gratifications such as a feeling of vitality, experiencing emotions, learning and above all aesthetic emotion.

In a final section behavioral effects of successful films are discussed. Here the film psychologist vents concerns on what we now refer to as undesirable attitude changes and social learning, especially in young audiences. The agenda of today's social science research on mass media effects (e.g. Dill, 2013 ) is not all that different from Münsterberg's in the last chapter of The Photoplay.

The two tasks that Münsterberg worked on set the agenda for the psychology of film in the century after The Photoplay . It is clearly recognisable in the psychology of the film as we know it today. Footnote 6 But the promising debut made in 1916 was not followed up until the nineteen seventies, or so it seems. James Gibson lamented in his last book on visual perception that whereas the technology of the cinema had reached peak levels of applied science, its psychology had so far not developed at all (1979, p. 292). The cognitive revolution in psychology of the 60s paved the way for its upsurge in the early 80s. But some qualifications need to be made on the seeming moratorium. First, Rudolf Arnheim developed since the 1920s a psychology of artistic film form. Second, although not visible as a coherent psychology of the film, laboratory research on issues in visual perception of the moving image—in particular studies of apparent movement—continued.

Gestalt psychology and film form

Rudolf Arnheim’s essays published first in 1932 added analytic force to Münsterberg’s conviction that film is not an imitation of life. Film and Reality ( 1957 ) highlights shortcomings of film in representing scenes as we know them from natural perception. Footnote 7 In the same essay, it is pointed out that comparing a filmic representation of a scene with its natural perception is what analytic philosophers would call an error of category. In The Making of Film ( 1957 ) Arnheim presented an inventory of formative means for artistic manipulations of visual scenes, including delimitation and point of view, distance to objects and mobility of framing. It is argued that chosen manipulations often go against the most realistic options. For example, ideal viewpoints and canonical distances are often dismissed in favour of more revealing options. Footnote 8 Arnheim’s aesthetics of film gravitates towards acknowledged artistic productions more than to the 'naturalistic narrative film' (e.g., 1957 , p. 116–117) the more moderate art form that Münsterberg tended to prefer.

Arnheim was informed by such founders of Gestalt psychology as Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka. This school held that natural perception results from the mind’s activity. It organises sensory inputs into patterns according to formal principles such as simplicity, regularity, order and symmetry. Arnheim developed into the leading Gestalt theorist of aesthetics of the 20th century. In his 1974 book he analysed a great number of pictorial, sculptural, architectural, musical and poetic works of art while only rarely referring to film. Footnote 9 The cornerstone aesthetic property of art works including film is expression, defined by Arnheim as 'modes of organic or inorganic behaviour displayed in the dynamic appearance of perceptual objects or events' ( 1974 , p. 445). Expression’s dynamic appearance is a structural creation of the mind imposing itself on sound, touch, muscular sensations and vision. Expressive qualities are in turn, the building blocks of symbolic meaning that art works including film add to the representation of objects and events as we know them in the outer world. Thus, Arnheim’s theory of expression and meaning in the arts seems to echo Münsterberg’s formalist position on the perception of 'inner harmony' as the determinant of film spectators’ aesthetic satisfaction.

Apparent motion

Münsterberg shared the amazement that moving images awakened in early film audiences. He considered the experience of movement a central issue for the psychology of the film. The experience of movement in response to a series of changing still pictures has been studied in psychology and physiology under the rubric of apparent motion . Footnote 10 In Münsterberg’s days, international psychology labs were probing the perception of movement in response to experimental stimuli that were perceived as moving images. Well-known examples include apparent motion induced by the subsequent views of single stationary lines in different positions that result in phi movement , the perception of one moving shape or line. Researchers in this area have continued to study the perception of movement in film as only one of many interesting visual stimuli, such as shapes painted on rotating disks, or dynamic computer-generated lights, shapes and objects of many kinds. Why and how we see motion has been as basic to the study of visual perception as questions of perception of colour, depth, and shape. Helmholtz proposed that what we need to explain is how retinal images that correspond one-to one, i.e., optically with a scene in the world are transformed into mental images, or percepts that we experience. In the case of apparent motion, we also need to understand how a succession of retinal images are perceived as one or more objects in motion Footnote 11 Apparent motion in film viewing needs to be smooth, Footnote 12 and depends on frame rates and masking effects. (The latter effects refer to dampening of the visual impact of one frame by a subsequently presented black frame).

Münsterberg’s conviction that the perception of movement needs a cognitive contribution from the viewer clashes with alternative explanations that rely on prewired visual mechanisms that automatically and immediately pick up the right stimulus features causing an immediate perception of motion, without the mind adding anything substantial. The inventors of nineteenth century moving image devices explained the illusion of movement by the slowness of the eye, possibly following P.M. Roget’s report on apparent motion to the Royal Society in 1824. In the early years of cinema, the persistence of vision account was meant to add precision to this explanation. It proposed that the retina, the optic nerve or the brain could not keep up with a rapid succession of projected frames, and that afterimages would bridge the intervals between subsequent frames. Anderson and Fisher ( 1978 ) and Anderson and Anderson ( 1993 ) have argued why the notion is false and misleading. It suggests that film viewers’ perceptual system sluggishly pile up retina images on top of one another. However, this would lead them to blur which obviously is not the case. The Andersons refer to the explanation as a myth because it is based on a mistaken conception of film viewing as a passive process. Even with the characteristically very small changes between subsequent frames characteristic of motion picture projection, the visual system performs an active integrative role in distinguishing what has changed from one image to another. This integrating mechanism in film viewing is exactly the same as in perceiving motion in real world scenes. Mechanistic explanations have since been founded on growing insights in the neuroscience of vision, such as single cell activity recordings in response to precisely localised stimulus features. Footnote 13 'Preprocessing' of visual input before it arrives in the cortex takes place in the retina and the lateral geniculate nucleus, which have specialised cells or trajectories for apprehending various aspects of motion. There are major interactions between perceptual modules. Footnote 14 Physiological and anatomical findings in the primate visual system, as well as clinical evidence, support the distinction of separate channels for the perception of movement on the one hand, and form, colour and depth on the other (Livingstone and Hubel, 1987 ). Research on how exactly the cortical integration systems for vision are organised has not yet come to a close. A variety of anatomical subsystems have been identified Footnote 15 , and there is room for task variables in the explanation of motion perception. Footnote 16 The operation of task variables in presumably automated processes (e.g., attentional set, induced by specific task instructions) complicates accounts of apparent motion and the perception of movement based on lowest processing levels.

Non-trivial and clear-cut contributions of the mind to smooth apparent motion have been proposed by Gestalt psychologists. Arnheim ( 1974 ) considered the perception of movement as subsidiary to that of change. The mind uses Gestalt principles such as good continuation and object consistency to perceive patterns in ongoing stimuli. Movement is the perception of developing sequences and events. Footnote 17 Gestalt psychologists have attempted to identify stimulus features that are perceived as a spatiotemporal pattern of 'good' motion, and they discovered various types of apparent motion have been distinguished as a function of stimulus features. In an overview volume, Kolers ( 1972 ) presented phi and beta motion as the major variants. Phi , the most famous, was first documented by Wertheimer in 1912 . An image of an object is presented twice in succession in different positions. Footnote 18 Pure or beta motion that is objectless motion, was the novel and amazing observation; the perception seemed to be a sum or integration by the mind beyond the stimulus parts, and asked for an explanation. It is also experienced when the objects in the subsequent presentations are different.

Wertheimer and those after him looked for mechanisms of the mind that could complement the features of the stimulus responsible for apparent motion in its various forms. Footnote 19 Other studies of apparent motion, too, indicated that simple models of stimulus features alone could not explain apparent motion. Footnote 20 One of the best examples of what the cognitive system adds to stimulus features is induced motion (Duncker, 1929 ). When we see a small target being displaced relative to a framework surrounding it, we invariably see the target moving irrespective of whether it is the target or the frame that is displaced. Ubiquitous film examples are shots of moving vehicles, with mobile or static framing.

In this summary and incomplete overview of the field, we could not make a strict distinction between mechanist and cognitive explanations for the perception of movement in film. The current state of research does not allow for it. Footnote 21 Kolers’s conclusions on the state of the field closing his 1972 volume on motion perception seem still valid. He inferred from then extant research that there must be separate mechanisms for extracting information from the visual stimulus and for selecting and supplementing the information into a visual experience of smooth object motion or motion brief. He concluded that 'The impletions of apparent motion make it clear that although the visual apparatus may select from an array [of] features to which it responds, the features themselves do not create the visual experience. Rather, that experience is generated from within, by means of supplementative mechanisms whose rules are accomodative and rationalizing rather than analytical' (p.198). But even if after Koler's analysis some perceptual (Cutting, 1986) or brain mechanisms (Zacks, 2015) have been identified today we still do not know enough about the self-supplied supplementations. Footnote 22

Perception and cognition of scenes

Mental representation and event comprehension.

Contributions of the mind can go considerably beyond apparent motion, i.e., the perception of smooth motion from one frame to another. The cognitive revolution in academic psychology that took off in the 1960s broadened the conceptualisation of contributions of the mind to the film experience beyond the narrower stimulus-response paradigms that had dominated psychological science until the 1960s. The cognitive revolution went beyond Gestalt notions of patterns applied by the mind on stimulus information. It introduced the concept of mental representation as a key to understanding the relation between sensory impressions from the environment on the one hand, and people’s responses to it. Moreover, these cognitive structures were seen functional in mental operations such as retrieval and accommodation of schemas from memory, inference and attribution. These were quite complex in comparison to perceptual and psychophysical responses. In the past 30 years, they have come to encompass event, action, person, cultural, narrative and formal-stylistic schemas. The cognitive turn in film psychology has stimulated a growing exchange with humanist film scholarship, resulting in advances in the elaboration of cognitive structural notions. Early applications of the cognitive perspective in the psychology of the film can be found in the 1940s and 50s in work by Albert Michotte ( 1946 ) and Heider and Simmel. Footnote 23

Against mental representation: direct perception of film events

The psychology of the film as a subdiscipline of academic psychology really took off in the late 1970s. Münsterberg’s broad agenda that had been scattered across isolated studies of mainly movement perception regained general acclaim. This was due first to the booming supply and consumption of moving images through media television and computer-generated imagery since the 60s. Second, the cognitive turn in experimental psychology renewed an interest in perception and cognition as it occurs in natural ecologies. This is the backdrop against which James Gibson ( 1979 ) noted the virtual absence of a psychology of the moving image, motivating his chapter on the film experience. The chapter was important in that it applied his highly influential ecological principles of perception of real world scenes to perception in the cinema. Gibson’s general theory of visual perception (e.g., Gibson, 1979 ) hinges on the notion that the visual system has evolved to extract relevant information from the world in a direct fashion. A scene presents itself to the observer as an ambient optical array that immediately and physically reflects the structure of the real world. Changes and transitions in the flow of the optical array are due to natural causes such as alternations of lighting intensity of the scene, e.g., due to clouds, or movement of objects in the scene or of the observer. These variations in the optical flow enable the automatic pick-up of invariants. Example invariants are the change in size of portions in the array, and the density of texture in that portion when the observer gets closer to, or farther away from the object. Footnote 24 The changes in these parameters are linked with depth-information in a way that is constant across different scenes, observer speeds, lighting conditions, etc. Invariants enable the direct perception of the real world in the service of adaptive action. Disturbances of the optic flow can automatically be perceived as events. The events are categorised on the basis of the nature of the disturbances, e.g., as terrestrial, animate, or chemical events. Furthermore, the direct tuning of the perceptual senses to the structures of the environment enable an immediate perception of affordances , for example the slope of a hill causes the direct perception of 'climbability'.

The experience of motion pictures according to Gibson involves a dynamic optical flow exactly like the one an observer would have when being present at the filmed scene. Footnote 25 Film represents the world to the senses that are calibrated to that world. The field of view of the camera becomes the optic array to the viewer (Gibson, 1979 , p. 298). Perception of objects, movement, events and affordances is direct and realist, based as it is on the same invariants and affordances that the scene in the real world would offer. Deviations from these as emphasised by cognitivist film psychologists from Münsterberg through Arnheim to Hochberg as we will shortly see, are largely taken as non-representative exceptions.

A major affordance offered by conventional movies is empathy with characters. Empathy presupposes that we understand what happens to characters. Scenes present their actions, reactions and feelings. However, most scenes are not continuous. How do we understand scenes presented in pieces, and what are the limits to our understanding? Gibson’s reply to the question of how continuity is perceived in scenes that is, smooth movement and unitary events across cuts would be that the perceptual system extracts the same invariants from the two shots on either side of the cut. The elegant explanation again rests upon a presumed correspondence between perception of real world scenes and film scenes.

Gibson inspired important theorising on the film experience, notably by Anderson and Cutting that we will turn to shortly. Here we emphasise that his direct perception account of the film experience stands in perpendicular opposition to the key innovation that the cognitive turn introduced in experimental psychology. Gibson denied the necessity of mental representations in the perception of objects and events, be it in real scenes or in film.

Cognitive schemas and the canonical set-up of the cinema

The role of mental representations, be they cognitive principles or schemas or other mental structures was argued over a lifetime of work in the psychology of film by Julian Hochberg. A perception psychologist with an interest in pictorial representations and their aesthetics, he devoted a large part of his work to identify what is given in film stimuli and how perception goes beyond that, in often ingenuous demonstrations and experiments. (The demonstrations are, in fact, introspective observations of film perception under exactly specified, reproducible stimulus conditions). A comprehensive overview can be found in Hochberg ( 1986 ). Footnote 26 His legacy should be referred to as the Hochberg and Brooks oeuvre, because his wife Virginia Brooks a psychologist and filmmaker, contributed such a great deal to it. Hochberg found that cognitive schemata are necessary in the perception of film for two reasons. The most profound one is that completely stimulus-driven (or 'bottom-up') accounts of the perception of movement, events, and scene continuity do not really explain the experience. For example, Hochberg and Brooks point out that neurophysiological motion detectors do not explain motion perception, that is, they 'amend but do not demolish' an account based on a mental representation of motion (Hochberg and Brooks, 1996b , p. 226). The same would go for any other direct perception account, including Gibson’s optics plus invariant extraction model. The more practical argument is that the direct perception account fails to pose limits to the scope of its application, leaving thresholds and ceiling conditions for the mechanisms out of consideration. The canonical set-up of cinematic devices for recording and displaying motion pictures has evolved to produce good impressions of depth, smooth and informative motion, emphasis on relevant objects and continuity of action, often violating the course of direct perception in comparable real world scenes. Figure 1 presents a demonstration of active disregard that viewers of mainstream movies typically display. (See also Cutting & Vishton ( 1995 ) on contextual use of depth-information).

Example of perceptual disregard in the cinema. Hochberg ( 2007 ) discusses the view of objects moving in front of a landscape. In normal film viewing flatness of studio-backgrounds and quasi-camera movement is disregarded. Traditional films can use a painted or projected landscape at the backdrop of the set, and panning camera movements instead of a really mobile camera to create a convincing impression in the viewer of following a moving object in the scene’s space. A cycling woman is followed in a pan shot moving from left to right; frames A and B constitute the beginning and the end of the panning shot. In normal perception in the real-world objects on the horizon seem to move in the direction of the moving subject, whereas nearby objects move in opposite direction. Panning involves a stationary viewpoint, causing the image to lack this 'motion parallax'. For example, the scarecrow in the middle ground of frame B should be further to the left from the ridge on the horizon than in frame A (DA < DB), but the distance between the objects has remained identical (DA = DB). However, the lack of parallax and resulting apparent flatness can be and is disregarded and viewers experience smooth self-motion parallel to the moving object. Disregard such a this is part and parcel of normal film viewing or the "ecology of the cinema".

The most immediate demonstration of apparent motion is Duncker’s induced motion referred to above, a cinematic effect because it is dependent on canonical projection within a frame. The best analytic examples are about the perception of events in filmed dance. Footnote 27 For Hochberg and Brooks an ecological approach to perception in the cinema needs to take the ecology of the cinema into account.

The necessity of cognitive schemas in film perception was pointed out most pregnantly in Hochberg’s dealing with the comprehension of shot transitions or cuts. It was argued that known sensory integration and Gibson’s extraction of invariants, fail to account for viewers’ comprehension of frequent and simple cinematic events like elision of space and time. Overlap in contents between successive shots can be hard to identify or lack at all. Hochberg and Brooks proposed a principled alternative: films play in the mind’s eye. Viewers construct an off-screen mental space from separate views, and they can link two successive views by the relation of each of these to this space. In constructing a mental space, overlap may even be overruled by other cues, that have nothing to do with any invariance. The construction must involve event schemas and cognitive principles removed from anything immediately given in the film. Schemas may indeed outperform (mathematical) invariants picked up from the optical array offered by the screen. Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996b ) show, for example how gaze direction of film characters or personae in subsequent shots may be more effective in the construction of a continuous mental scene than overlapping spatial or visual symbolic contents. Footnote 28 Mental schemas seem to be indispensable in the comprehension of sequences of completely non-overlapping cuts. A famous demonstration by Hochberg and Brooks is reproduced in Fig. 2 . The succession of shots is readily understood when it is preceded by the presentation of a cross, which provides the integrating schema. Viewers’ schema-based continuous perception of scenes is supported by the ways that traditional cinema tells its stories. The presentation of an overall view in so-called 'establishing shots' followed by a 'break-down' of its object into subsequently presented part views is a cornerstone procedure in classical continuity film style (Bordwell and Thompson, 1997 /1979).

Role of mental schemas in the comprehension of continuous space across shots as discussed in Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996 , 2007 ). a The sequence of eight static shots does not seem to make sense. b A static preview of the entire object as in A) would activate a mental schema of a cross. Subsequent shots are then recognised as consecutive camera relocations, counter-clockwise rotations offering subsequent views of corners From Hochberg and Brooks ( 2007 ). Adding a shot of the cross moving diagonally to the lower left corner of the frame would smoothen the transition between the entire object view and the view of its top right corner further and facilitate the perception of the subsequent parts. Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996 ) reported that replacing one of the shots by a blank frame does not lead to confusion. For example, if shot 7 were replaced by a blank frame, the view of the lower left angle of the cross would seem to have been skipped, and shot 8 would be recognised as to present a view of the lower left corner. That is, the trajectory of the views would remain intact in keeping with the overall view of the object. This illustrates all the more the leading role of the schema of a cross in the perception of its parts.

A smooth understanding of non-overlapping cuts may require dedicated knowledge of discursive story units and rules for their ordering that only literary analysis types of study can reveal (Hochberg, 1986 , pp. 22–50). Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996a , p. 382) pointed out that theoretical or empirical proposals as to the nature of such representations were lacking. They found Gestalt principles unsatisfactory (Hochberg, 1998 ). Current film psychologists have taken up this challenge as we shall see briefly.

As a final contribution of Hochberg and Brooks’ to the psychology of the film, we would like to highlight their view of film spectators as partners motivated to deliver their share in a communicative effort. Film viewers contribute to the canonical setup of the cinema in that they are astutely aware of the filmmaker’s communicative intentions: '… the viewer expects that the film maker has undertaken to present something in an intelligible fashion and will not provide indecipherable strings of shots' (Hochberg, 1986 , p. 22–53). Viewers must be assumed to have an associated motivation to explore the views presented to them. In a series of inventive experiments, Hochberg and Brooks gathered evidence for an impetus to gather visual information. Looking preference increased with cutting rate and with complexity of shot contents. Visual momentum , or viewer interest, (Brooks and Hochberg, 1976 ; Hochberg and Brooks, 1978 ) as they termed it is the absorbing experience typical of cinema viewing. These studies help us to understand how current cutting strategies meet the viewers’ typical motivation for cognitive enquiry. The reward of comprehension is carefully dosed by varying the time allowed to the viewer to inspect objects and scenes, dependent on their novelty and complexity.

Hochberg’s demonstrations of the involvement of mental structures in understanding portrayed events was in large part based on introspective evidence. They have been criticised for relying too heavily on top-down control of perception by too intricate mental structures, by Gibson and others. Footnote 29 Current research in the cognitive structure tradition uses more sophisticated experimental set-ups. Inspiration has been drawn from theories of discourse processing in cognitive science. In this research, the relationship of 'top-down' use of schemas in scene comprehension with 'bottom-up' processing of stimulus features has become an important question. Footnote 30 Zacks has extensively investigated how film viewers segment the ongoing stream of images and extract meaningful events and actions from it. Viewer segmentation depends on automatically detected changes in a situation (Zacks, 2004 ). Detection of the changes requires only minimal use of schemas, and triggers automated perceptual-motor simulations of events and subevents such as actions. Footnote 31 Segmentation follows the logic of events in the real world. Most importantly, multiple events can be organised in a hierarchical or linear fashion, as scenes, sets of events and subevents or actions (Zacks, 2013 ).

Theory of mind and layered meaning of events

Extracting events in understanding film scenes needs more than retrieving schemas of real world events. The fact that they are presented with an idea in mind, is reflected in their understanding. Understanding film scenes and especially characters, their actions, plans and goal has been argued to require a so-called Theory of Mind (Levin et al., 2013 ). TOM is a system of cognitive representations of what beliefs, needs, desires, intentions and feelings people have in their interaction with others and the world. It is acquired in early childhood, when children understand that others, too, have an internal life, similar to but also different from one’s own beliefs and feelings. Levin et al. explain how use of TOM, also referred to as mentalising is necessary for an elementary understanding of film character actions and feelings. For example, character gaze following that underlies our perception of what characters feel or want to do with respect to an object that they look at requires TOM. TOM underlies grasping spatial (and action-) relations in scene comprehension across cuts using gaze following. Understanding relations between more complex events require schema-controlled theorizing on what people believe, do, think, and feel. Finally, Levin et al. demonstrate through film analyses how film viewers construct multi-layered representations of a film’s action from the point of view of different characters, the viewer and even from the narrator’s or filmmaker’s. For example, viewer and character perspectives may clash as in dramatic irony , or the narrator may create false beliefs on story events in viewers.

Continuity of events and viewer attention

Hochberg’s question of what the mental schemas look like that enable us to perceive smooth progress of events across film cuts has recently been addressed by the next generation of film psychologists. They have sought answers in profound analyses of the canonical setup delivered by the founders of cognitive film theory in the humanities, such as Bordwell ( 1985 , 2008 ), and Anderson ( 1996 ). Bordwell’s extensive analyses of classical film narrative and his account of the viewer’s mental activity in the comprehension of the film’s story-world suggest a film-psychological hypothesis on the experience of continuity: Classical Hollywood film style serves smooth progress of the narrative. Continuity editing ensures fluency across shot transitions. Shot A cues cognitive schema-based or narrative expectations that are subsequently matched in shot B. Expectations can be perceptual or cognitive, i.e., requiring inferences supported by event schemas. Anderson added a Gibsonian perspective, arguing that the perception of film scenes mimics the perception of real world scenes. Continuity shooting and editing closely follow the constraints of the human perceptual systems that have evolved to 'extract' continuity from changing views of scenes in the real world. Recent research into the experience of smooth development of events and scenes across shot transitions draws on these principles of continuity narration. Footnote 32 Framing, editing and sound finetune the viewer’s top-down search to focus on candidate target stimuli. A quite complete and accurate explanation was offered by Tim Smith. His Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity ( 2012 ) explains the viewer’s sense of smooth progress by the continuity editing principles that mainstream filmmakers tend to adhere to. AToCC breaks away from Hochberg’s analyses to the degree that it holds that viewers do not need intricate spatial or semantic schemas to construct continuous events from separate shots. Rather it is built on the Gibsonian principle that perceiving continuity in film scenes derives from the continuity that we experience in perceiving scenes in the natural world. The ecology of the cinema renders it sufficient to follow a number of simple spatiotemporal guidelines. Continuity editing film style guides viewers’ attention in seamlessly following action across cuts. Attention, that is the focused selection of objects in a shot by the viewer, i.e., what and where the viewer directs their gaze, is led by the filmmaker. The viewers’ gaze in shot A is directed to the part of the screen where the target of interest in shot B, that is after the cut, will be. The shift of attention from one portion to another of the screen in shot A is shortly followed by the cut, and because the gaze 'lands' in the right place in shot B, the cut has become invisible. Footnote 33 The theory of continuity perception adds precise levels of analysis to the construction of mental scene spaces that Hochberg proposed. It distinguishes higher level and lower level control of attention. Higher-level ones include 'perceptual inquiries' as Hochberg and Brooks ( 1978a ) called them. The expectations or questions that guide the gaze may be minimally articulated, e.g., 'what or whom are these characters looking at' as in gaze following, but the operation of higher level cognitive schemas are not excluded. The best demonstration to date of the control of focus of attention by the narrative is given in research on suspense and its effects on film viewer gazes by Bezdek et al. ( 2015 ) and Bezdek and Gerrig ( 2017 ). Footnote 34 Their results can be taken to imply that suspense, a state of high absorption, is associated with focal attention to story-world details supervised by expectations created by the narrative (see also Doicaru, 2016 ).

The study of film viewers' attention has delivered a firm account of the role of the ubiquitous Hollywood continuity film style in the typical experience of smoothly flowing film scenes and stories that audiences allover the world have. (See for a review Smith, Levin & Cutting, 2012 ).

A lead role in perception for cinematic low-level features?

Experimental psychology has always aspired basic explanations of perceptual responses, preferably through transparent mechanistic associations with physically observable stimulus conditions. The role of high-level narrative schema-based attention in smooth film experiences discussed in the previous section, is subject to debates in which experimental data support arguments pro and con. To begin with, AToCC emphasises the role of leading expectations in following cuts, but more akin to the Gibsonian approach of visual perception than to Hochberg’s schema position as it is, it tends to stress lower level features as directing attention bottom-up, too or even more so. One lower level is given by film-stylistic devices, for instance the use of sound that can orient viewers to direct their gazes to the next shot’s portion of the screen where the sound’s origin will be shown. Another are lower level stimulus features in a narrower and technical sense, such as bright lights and movements with sudden onset that automatically attract attention due to the make-up of the senses and the brain. Especially movement was shown by Smith to be an extraordinary low level attentional cue. The power of low level feature control of attentional shifts has inspired Loschky et al. ( 2015 ) to speak of the 'tyranny of film'. They start from research findings suggesting that the use of low-level stylistic features can result in attentional synchrony across film audiences, that is individual viewers of a scene gaze at exactly the same portions of the screen at exactly the same time. Footnote 35 Remarkable degrees of inter-viewer synchronization of visual attention has also been established in studies of localisations of brain activity in film viewers (e.g., Hasson et al., 2003 ). However, Stephen Hinde’s research has recently shown that the distraction effect of inserted low-level attention triggers is quite limited (Hinde et al., 2017 ) In line with this notion of top-down attention control overriding bottom-up attention triggers, Magliano and Zacks ( 2011 ) demonstrated that the perception of cuts is suppressed by higher order processes related to the construction of complex events.

Gibson’s idea of invariants in optical arrays can now be made concrete, enabling the prediction of bottom-up controlled attention and perception from objectively identified features. Developments in computer vision, image and sound analysis have paved the way for automated extraction of features and patterns in visual and auditory stimuli in terms of multiple dimensions. For example, machine extraction of saliency as a feature predictive of bottom-up attention has been developed and applied in numerous computer vision applications. A much-cited article by Itti and Koch ( 2001 ) illustrates the idea for static images. Specialised neural network algorithms detect features such as colour, intensity, orientations, etc. in parallel over the entire visual field. Each feature is represented in a feature map, in which neurons compete for saliency. Feature maps are combined into a saliency map. A last network sequentially scans the saliency map, moving from the most salient location to the next less salient one and so on. Footnote 36 An excellent explanation of how to obtain saliency maps is given at a Matlab page. Footnote 37

Psychologists of film in their attempts to explain the extraordinary smooth and intense perceptual experience that mainstream film typically provides, currently seek to join forces with computer vision scientists. In a next step, they may seek collaboration with vision labs in the world that attempt to link their low-level film image feature analyses with film narrative structures and viewer responses. Footnote 38

Examples of computational film analyses. Number of shot transitions as a function of acts. Cutting ( 2016 ), Fig. 2 . Under Creative Commons License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ). Note that ordinates are inverted; lower positions of titles mean larger number of shots and decreased shot durations. Normalised time bins refer to units of duration standardised in view of variable film length of separate titles. Left panel displays distribution of cuts over time and acts, right panel of non-cut transitions such as dissolves, fades and wipes.

The work of perception researcher James Cutting has carried the psychology of the film into the next stage of the Gibsonian ecological approach, while also linking it with insights in the structure of film narrative from humanities scholarship. Footnote 39 In an interesting essay on the perception of scenes in the real world and in film Cutting ( 2005 ) summarised the ecological perspective on perception stating that understanding how we perceive the real world helps to grasp how we perceive film and vice versa. Footnote 40 In the last decade Cutting developed powerful computational content analysis methods that reveal the patterning of low-level features in relation to dimensions of film style and technology, in representative samples of Hollywood films of well over a hundred titles. The theoretical starting point of the approach is that movies exhibit reality. The psychologist Cutting subscribes to the analytical distinctions made in literary and film theories between plot, form and style of a narrative on the one hand, and the represented story-world on the other. The Gibsonian proposal is that analyses of the fabula or story-world (i.e., the action, events, characters and so on) should lead to identification of syuzhet features (i.e., formal and stylistic features that are physically given in the film stimulus or can be perceived without substantial instruction) functional in the perception and understanding of that story-world; vice versa, variations in form and style reflect variations in the portrayed story-world. Cutting’s definition of low-level film features used in the analyses was informed by analyses of narrative, style and technology by David Bordwell, and methods for statistical style analysis by Barry Salt ( 2009 ).

Low-level features analysed by Cutting and co-workers are physically and quantitatively determinable elements or aspects occurring in moving images, regardless of the narrative. They include shot duration, temporal shot structure, colour, contrast and movement. The value of each feature can be expressed as an index for an entire film, or for some segment targeted in an analysis. Footnote 41 Inspection by an analyst complements machine vision analyses, but I would qualify the indexing approach as computational (objective) film analysis , because of intensive tallying and numerical operations developed by specialists in psychological data-processing. The features do not constitute events or scenes, but they accentuate these. A recording of their measurements for an entire film would constitute an abstract backbone to be filled with scenes and events. One possible comparison is with the rhythmic score of a song without melodies and words. In the hands of capable film-makers they are indispensable for conveying the narrative, due to their direct, predictable and automated effects on the visual system.

The primary use of the approach is in film analysis. The multi-feature configurations of indices can be used to reliably 'fingerprint' films or sections. Reliably because the indices are derived from large numbers of measurements. Computational film analysis uses a historical corpus of films and has been deployed over the past decade to corroborate and enrich historical analyses of film style. Footnote 42 The climax so far of efforts to integrate computational content analysis with film theory and analysis is Cutting’s ( 2016 ) report on narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies. The corpus consisted of 160 English language films released between 1935 and 2010, ten for each year. As Figure 3 illustrates a typical course obtained of the number of shot transitions over film presentation time, interpretable as to mark the acts and the pace of narration, see Figure 3 . An important outcome of the analyses is that clear physical support was obtained for the four-act structure proposed by film historian Thompson ( 1999 ) across the entire period. It should be noted that Thompson’s act structure was identified largely on the basis of higher level narrative segmentation. Footnote 43 Shot scale was unrelated to the act structure. Cutting added analyses of higher order level film features that can be interpreted to co-vary with narration. Footnote 44 Cutting then ventured upon a multi-feature analysis of the entire corpus. Associations among all indices across all titles could be reduced to four dimensions: motion, framing, editing and sound. They correlated in a meaningful way. For example, shot scale was inversely related to shot duration; in classical narration close-ups tend towards briefer durations than wide shots. Each dimension represented polar opposites between features, e.g., music vs. conversation for sound and close-ups vs long shots for framing. Computational content analysis can explore the dynamics of the dimensional representations over subsequent acts of movies. Figure 4 reproduces Cuttings findings for prolog, setup, complication, development, climax, and epilog. Footnote 45 It would seem that the analysis winds up in a level of cinematic content representation that is grounded in directly given stimulus features, integrated with film-analytical features that can be readily indexed and seem relevant as production tools in regular filmmaking.

Five movie dimensions in narrational space. Reproduced from Cutting ( 2016 ) Fig. 9. under Creative Commons License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ). The displayed representation is obtained from dimensional reduction of the numerous associations between film titles in terms of their feature profiles. The results of the first stage of the analysis are not displayed here, see Fig. 8 in Cutting ( 2016 ). In that stage, the number of associations between all titles regarding all features was reduced to four dimensions (see main text) using principal component analysis. In the next stage the analysis was applied to the features and films for each separate act, to result in the configurations shown here. Arrows vary in length, correspondingly to differences in the range of values on the dimensions. Black dots indicate median values of the acts on the dimensions. Considering for example the sound dimension, it can be seen that the set-up tends to have more conversation and the climax has more music. The red bars indicate the dispersion of values on the dimension and the degree it is skewed towards one or the other end

What does computational content analysis mean psychologically, that is how do indices and dimensions function in the viewer’s perceiving and comprehending events? Patterns of features trigger changes in viewers’ physiological, attention, perception and emotion systems, according to Cutting ( 2016 , p. 27). Typical low-level configurations may correlate with possible effects on the viewer’s perception and experience of events. For example, shot duration may support interpretations of pace, mood and tension, think of drama’s long takes; temporal shot structure is functional for sustaining attention or suspense (e.g., when a sequence of brief shots abruptly merges into long duration shots), e.g., in thrillers; movement (of camera and objects on screen) serves arousal in the viewer, as in action movies; low luminance signals possible threat as in horror movies, while high luminance may lend 'a sense of other worldliness' (Brunick et al., 2013 , p. 141). All low-level features can help viewers in categorising films as to genre, and changes in these will support segmentation of events and scenes, which is at the basis of smooth narrative understanding. Combinations of indices enable more interesting interpretations of possible experience effects. Footnote 46 However, because the studies that the overarching computational content analysis was based on do not involve response measurement, a direct connection between cinematic form (especially narrative procedures) and cinematic meaning that Cutting argues for is open to further elaboration. Even in the face of the richness of directly given information that has been extracted using computers, Cutting sees room for the use of cognitive schemas. The very narrative acts that are underlined by immediately given information may be schematic in nature, but he finds it more likely that their functioning is less dependent on memory-processes than the very high-level cognitive structures implied in cognitive scripts and TOM reasoning.

To conclude the sections on the cognition of film scenes, we seem to have made important progress in understanding how movies construct events in film viewers' minds an brains, as put it in his state of the art review. Movies in part "dictate" events, actions and scenes to viewers' brains using an "alphabet" of visual and auditive features; viewers in turn contribute to the construction of story-worlds by developing and matching higher-order structural anticipations using embodied cognitive event, character and narrative schemas. Since 1916, the film units that have been analysed increased from paired single stimuli (as apparent motion experiments) to whole film acts (as in computational film analysis). Analyses of narrative structure from film theory have become for the psychology of film what harmonics and counterpoint analysis signify to the psychology of music or the theories of syntax and semantics to psycholinguistics. They inform psychological notions of film structure and organization.

The awareness of narrative film

The third part of The Photoplay deals with issues other than the psychological mechanisms or the psychology of film form namely the awareness offered by the photoplay. It was only natural to Münsterberg as a child of his time to designate the special awareness that film creates as the explanandum in psychological research, the mechanisms of film stimuli impinging on attention, perception and memory being the explanans . His characterisations of this conscious awareness, what it is like to watch theatrical films, or in other words the phenomenology of the film experience remains in my view as yet unparalleled. Apart from the sense of freedom that we have already discussed, they include attentional and affective experiences.

Münsterberg described enjoyment as the immediate effect of theatrical film, explaining it from the exceptional freedom of the imagination: "The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the form of our consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones. It is a superb enjoyment which no other art can furnish us" (Münsterberg, 1916 , p. 95). Light has been thrown on the remarkable fluency of the film experience noted by Münsterberg by current research in narrative procedures, and the mechanisms of continuity perception discussed in the previous section. Münsterberg also stressed that the enjoyment of photoplays depends on our experience of the film’s story as an emotionally meaningful world separate from reality: 'The photoplay shows us a significant conflict of human actions … adjusted to the free play of our mental experiences and which reach complete isolation from the practical world …' (p. 82). And finally, he singled out the role of focused attention in enjoyment. 'It is as if that outer world were woven into our mind and we were shaped not through its own laws but by the acts of our attention, …' (Münsterberg, 1916 , p. 39).

Twentieth century academic psychology did not develop much of a body of theory and research on human consciousness. Hence it is not surprising that alongside research into perception and comprehension one doesn’t find much work on the conscious experience of film. Measurements of perceptual, attentional, cognitive and affective responses in experimental psychology are extremely limited with regards to the contents of consciousness that they tap. Lab tasks enabling measurement are must be simple, e.g., identification, comparison or categorisation of visual stimuli, rather than free description or recall. Self-reports associated with such tasks must be quantifiable and take the shape of choice responses, simple intensity ratings or readily codifiable reports. Behavioural measures are farther removed from any contents of experience because these need to be inferred. Here, too, simple objective coding is a must. Descriptive and interpretative reports of the qualia and meaning of experiences afforded by film have been largely left to hermeneutic film criticism and phenomenologically oriented film philosophy in the humanities. Scholarship in these fields follows in the footsteps of Münsterberg. The present overview of the psychology of the film cannot go into it further; I refer to Sobchack’s ( 1992 ) volume on the phenomenology of the film experience. It opens with the proposition that film directly expresses perceptions, a proposition coming close to the observation in The Photoplay that the contents of the audience’s experience are perceptions, attention, thinking and emotion that are projected before them on the screen.

Absorption in film

Meanwhile, progress can be reported in understanding one aspect of the rich and complex film experience namely its intensity. Münsterberg observed that the film audience’s enjoyment is due to prolonged states of attention strongly focused on a fictional story-world, so strong in fact that the here and now escapes consciousness and it seems instead as if an 'outer world were woven into our mind'. Elsewhere we have proposed to refer to the experience of intense attention as absorption in a story-world (Tan et al., 2017 ), following Nell's ( 1988 ) groundbreaking description of "being lost in a book". Media psychologists specialised in research on media entertainment (Vorderer et al., 2004 , Bilandzic & Bussele, 2011 ) have developed a variety of measures capturing enjoyable absorption-like states afforded by narrative, television drama and video-gaming. We discuss four of these.

a. Narrative engagement (Bussele and Bilandzic, 2008 , 2009 ) is a pleasant state of being engrossed or entranced by the narrative as a whole as it is presented in a book or film, including the activity of reading or viewing it. Footnote 47 (Tele-)Presence (Schubert et al., 2001 ; Wirth et al., 2007 ; and others) refers to the embodied awareness of being in a virtual world: being there with your body, in other words absorption in a story-world. Footnote 48 The concept has its origin in research into the experience of virtual realities. Footnote 49 Attempts have been made to ground mechanisms of film-induced emotion on presence that is the audience’s basic and embodied awareness of being in the middle of the story-world as a witness to events befalling characters Anderson ( 1996 ); Tan (1994, 1996 ).

b. Green and Brock’s ( 2000 ) definition of transportation is the most frequently used conceptualisation of absorption in media-psychological research. It is considered a major gratification offered to readers of narrative and film viewers alike. It overlaps with presence in that it features a sense of being in the story-world, as well as a realistic and attentive imagery of details. The difference may be that as a metaphor transportation evokes associations with transition to or travel into the film’s story-world. Footnote 50 More than presence, the operationalisations of transportation entail personal relevance and participatory sympathetic feeling, amplifying the emotional quality of the experience.

c. Empathy is the common denominator for concepts referring to absorption in the inner life of fictional characters. Like transportation, it is seen as a major gratification in reading stories and watching drama and movies. Viewer empathy has been defined as perceiving, understanding and emotionally responding to character feeling in the seminal work on the subject by Zillmann (Zillmann, 1991 , 1996). Perceived similarity and sympathy for the character (grounded in moral attitudes) have been suggested and tested as determinants of spectator empathy in drama (e.g., Zillmann, 1996; 2000 ; 2003 ; 2006 ). Footnote 51 There is still a need to sort out possible forms of empathy specific to the canonical conditions of the cinema which may be quite different from situations in real life where we observe other persons. Footnote 52 Moreover, empathy with film characters can be less or more cognitively demanding. Footnote 53 Identification (e.g., Cohen, 2001 ) seems to stand for complete absorption of the viewer’s self by a represented character. Footnote 54 It can be argued that empathy is the rule in film viewing while identification is the exception (e.g., Zillmann, 1995; Tan, 1996 , 2013a , b ), as most mainstream film narratives are mainly geared towards provoking the former rather than the latter. According to Smith ( 1995 ) they use 'alignment' techniques that promote perspective taking and allegiance strategies that foster viewer sympathy for the character while the distinction between self and character is unaffected.

d. Finally, flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997 ) is the odd person out in the series of absorption-like experience concepts reviewed here, because it applies not only to absorption in movies, narratives or games, but to any activities that stand out for a certain intensity and intrinsic reward as well. The rather simple idea supporting the concept is that a pleasurable state is experienced when the challenges inherent in an activity just match the person’s capacities. In the canonical setup of mainstream film (and mainstream audiences) this balance is generally realised due to filmmakers’ skilful presentation of interesting story-events, and the overlap of it with attentional, perceptual and cognitive routines that film viewers have acquired in the real world. Mainstream movie continuity film style facilitates flow a great deal as it tedns to minimize challenges posed by transitions from one view or perspective to another. Smith's ( 2012 ) studies were discussed above as relevant to smooth continuity of visual attention, and I would also mention the research on comprehension of events by Schwann (2013; Garsofsky & Schwan, 2009 )

Obviously, these and other varieties of absorption are not mutually exclusive. Elsewhere we have presented qualitative empirical support for a dynamic interplay among the varieties of absorption (Bálint and Tan, 2015 ). Footnote 55

From the overview we may conclude that Münsterberg’s introspective psychology of the film experience is in large part echoed in the empirical observations gathered one century later. Viewers feel absorbed in another, exceptionally vivid reality, 'clothed in the [embodied] forms of our consciousness' (presence and transportation). Empathy is mentioned by Münsterberg as a prominent experience, and his notion of an unhampered stream of the imagination may correspond with the experience of flow. Focused attention is already in The Photoplay a major component of the film experience, that would later be investigated in research on bottom-up vs. top-down attention discussed above. Absorption, empathy and intensely focused attention can easily substantiate the enjoyability of watching films as Münsterberg already would have it. However, compared to Münsterberg’s conceptualisation of the typical film awareness, insights into how acts of imagination on the part of the spectatorcontribute to it have not advanced that much in the psychology of film. Footnote 56

A narrative simulation account of emotion in film viewing

Absorption is an affective state characteristic of the film expeirience. However, a description of the typical experience of narrative films is incomplete if more specific affective states are not considered. Watching movies has been identified with emotions. We go to the cinema to experience mirth, compassion, sadness, bittersweet emotions, thrill, horror, and soon in response to what we see and hear happening to characters and ourselves. Emotions of movie audiences have not received much attention since Münsterberg’s Photoplay . Twenty-first century film psychology has taken up where he left off, and a major step forward has been to regard the narrative structure of films as a fundamental starting point for explaining film viewer emotions. The narrative simulation account is, I think, dominant in today’s psychological approaches to the issue of why the cinema offers the intense and remarkable emotional experience that Münsterberg’s photoplays induced a century ago. Important work on emotion in media users has been done in media psychology, most on empathy with characters, but narrative induced emotion has not received much attention, as can be seen from a complete overview by Konijn ( 2013 ). Cognitive scholars in the humanities have highlighted different aspects of film narratives that induce perceptions of fictional events associated with intense emotional experiences (e.g., genre-typical film style: Grodal, 1997 , 2009 , 2017 ; Visch and Tan, 2009 ; narrative procedures, e.g., Smith, 1995 ; Plantinga, 2009 ; Berliner, 2017 ). I hope the reader will allow me to use my own work on the subject as an illustration. It is closely related to the cognitive - theoretical analyses just referred to. I have found a cognitive approach to emotion in general psychology fruitful for narrative modelling of emotion in film viewing. Footnote 57 Investigations of film-induced emotion have raisedthe issue of apparent realism : how can a clearly fictional world be taken for real to the effect of intensely moving emoting viewers? Oatley introduced a cognitive theory of narrative fiction as simulation ( 1999 , 2012 , 2013 ) that applies to film as a stimulus for possibly complex emotions. Narrative runs simulations on the embodied mind just as programs run simulations on computers. Footnote 58 I would add that filmviewers take part in a playful simulation in which the film leads them to imagine they are present in a fictional world, where they witness fictional events that film characters are involved in (Tan, 1995 , 1996 , 2008 ). Being a witness involves embodied perceptions of what happens in a fictional world, as well as in the imagination constructing and participating in events, without acting on these. In the process, events are taken for real for the sake of playful entertainment. This position is related to Walton’s ( 1990 ) well-known account of fiction as make-believe.

Frijda’s cognitive theory of the emotions (Frijda, 1986 , 2007) is the starting point for further explanation of emotional experiences in response to film. The theory posits that the emotion system has evolved for adaptive action in the first place. For example, the sight of a monster will spawn a strong urge to flee due to a basic concern for safety being jeopardised. Of course, film audiences do not run out of the auditorium. According to the cognitive theory of emotion, action responses are not fixed responses to emotional stimuli, but the result of appraisals of what they mean for a person’s concerns in light of the situational context. Playful simulation provides the contextual frame for the complex appraisal of apparent realism of film events. The appraisal has three stages: perceptual, imagination based and self-involved. Footnote 59

1. Many popular film stimuli provoke immediate and automated appraisals of concern relevance and ensuing emotional responses, due for instance to their nature of unconditioned stimuli in the real world. A snake popping out from the bush would be an example. Emotional appraisals in the cinema can be and often are empathetic. That is they include perspectives on events taken by film characters. Film technology in mainstream movies is used to emphasise emotional triggers; editing could strengthen the suddenness of the snake’s appearance, and photography could render fear releasers such as the typical movements of the snake more salient. Footnote 60 But popular films also present us with emotional stimuli that are immediately perceived as fake, for example a rubber prop snake. Due to the playful simulation frame further cognitive processing of perceptions takes place. In the first case, film viewers realise that just perceived events are not real but must be held true for the sake of a playful simulation. In the second, they realise that the fake stimulus is only a prompt, and comply with its invitation to hold the stimulus true and allow it to appeal to their concerns, also for the sake of playful simulation.

2. Once imagination takes over from perception, the reality status of stimuli is traded for believability. As part of the imagination fictional events are matched with higher order genre-specific narrative schemas, and then dealt with as possibilities in a particular world . As Frijda ( 1989 ) argued when he discussed the apparent reality of fiction: 'Seeing a fake snake approach a real person is not scary. But watching an imaginary snake approach an imaginary Jane is. The first is seen as unreal in a real word, and the second as real in an imaginary world. And this is how we appraise events in fiction. The fun of art is in the play with the duality' (p. 1546). Play with the possibility of events in the imagined world and entertaining as-if emotions can suffice for genuine emotion to arise. As I argued elsewhere (Tan, 1996 ) the appraisal of the possibility of events in a particular fictional world can and usually does lead to genuine emotion, because humans have been equipped with a capacity to have emotions in response to mental representations of counterfactual and imaginary events. Footnote 61

3. The genuine emotion can—but does not need to—open up considerations of the believability of fictional events in the real world. Moreover, it can lead to imaginations in which the viewer’s self is involved in the events or their ramifications. The appraisal of fictional film events is treated in more detail in Tan and Visch (2018). The search for film style and technology features that are conducive to particular emotional appraisals has only slowly lifted off. Cutting's computational content analyses were already mentioned There are scattered empirical studies e.g. of camera angle and editing pace by Kraft (1987) and Lang et al. 1995, respectively. Film technique manuals and critical anayles provide abundant intuitively convincing examples of how to produce emotionally appealing sequences. It is to be expected that computational film analysis will soon enable large scale studies of the use of style and technology in emoting scenes.

Back to emotion and action. As film viewers perceive film scenes to be projections on screen of a fictional world, they understand they cannot act, and their action tendencies are suppressed. Footnote 62 As importantly, one’s inability to act upon a fictional world is a strong trigger for emotional responses involving the imagination of action. Driven by sympathy, viewers desire that protagonists escape from a horrific situation. In their imagination they anticipate and hope that the protagonist is saved by someone or something and if need be by a fictional miracle. Footnote 63 Thus, they experience or exhibit a virtual form of action readiness (Frijda, 1986 ). Footnote 64 This readiness for action can be directly observed in film viewers from their "participatory responses" (Bezdek, Foy & Gerrig, 2013 ) - such as overt expressions of sympathy for a character (see also Tan, 2013b ). However, there is one thing that film-viewers as witnesses invariably do when properly emoted: eagerly watch the events on screen.

Following cognitive film theory further, I consider the emotional experience of film as the sum total of experience of the appraisal, internal and external bodily expressions and changes in action readiness integrated in consciousness in accompanying the sensory intake of units of film.

Film, interest and enjoyment

An account of `film - audience emotion is incomplete if it does not go into the question why we actually take the trouble of watching movies. Münsterberg already wondered how mature people can become so emotionally absorbed in fantasy worlds. Narrative films can be argued to address two basic emotional concerns in particular, curiosity and sympathy (Tan, 1996 ). All sorts of narrative fiction, including film provoke interest by presenting events with uncertain consequences. Thus, they address a basic curiosity , that is a need for novelty, knowing and exploration. Interest is the emotion that responds to appeals involving this concern. Interest in film viewing does have a real action readiness to it referred to above: watch eagerly. Because the response in interest includes spending and focussing attention to specific story-world events, its experience goes hand in hand with absorption. Mainstream film’s narrative is perfectly designed to support a characteristic systematic unfolding of interest as an emotion. Movies continuously present cognitive challenges that viewers know they can meet. Footnote 65 Silvia ( 2006 ) has shown in a greater number of studies that this is the condition for optimal interest. I have referred to the core appraisal of narrative interest as promise of rewarding outcomes , in terms either of desirability for a protagonist or mankind in general, or of coherence, completeness or elegance of a narrative’s structure, or both (Tan, 1996 ). In addition, the prospect of sought emotions, such as excitement, enjoyment and appreciation is as well part of the promise that ongoing film narratives constantly offer. Footnote 66 Interest is closely linked with enjoyment, the primary gratification that movies offer their audience. In the cinema interetst is pleasant because it is fun to entertain anticipations of as yet uncertain story-outcomes. Moreover, every outcome, even if it is unanticipated or unfavorable, is greeted with enjoyment because it answers one's curiosity. (In the case of sad, horrific or otherwise hedonically negative or mixed outcomes, "enjoyment" is not the proper label for the rewarding emotion. We return to the fun of unpleasant emotion in a later section).On a final note, interest in film viewing is a case of narrative interest as a broader category of emotions, but the sensory qualities of the medium are relevant for how interest feels. Curiosity to know is in part a desire for the closure of a propositional narrative structure, but in the cinema we do not only want to know but also to see and hear . The enjoyment of seeing a couple kiss or a heroine return after an odyssee of some sort is in the cinema incomplete when it is not shown. In the cinematic appraisal of interest, an anticipation of embodied completion of our narrative-led imagination is a major ingredient of the promise of reward.

Emotional responses to fiction film worlds

The second concern that movies touch upon is sympathy . That this concern is active throughout the reception of all traditional movies answers the question why film viewers care about damsels, hobbits or gorilla’s in distress. There is a fundamental human need for bonding with others and recognising whatever fictional character as someone 'like us' supposedly suffices for sympathy to arise. Footnote 67 Mainstream films activate the concern to the full as their sympathetic protagonists meet with ups and downs in on the way to their goals. Sympathy-based emotions like disappointment, regret, awe, mirth, suspense, hopes and fears, compassion and sadness occur in response to obstacles or their removal on the way to protagonists realising their projects. Footnote 68 Because these emotions arise in response to events (appraised as desirable or undesirable) in a fictional world, we refer to these emotions as responding emotions . Footnote 69 Some frequently experienced sympathetic responding emotions such as fear, sadness, compassion and being moved, can be empathetic , that is require mentalising a character’s inner life. Said more precisely, empathetic emotion requires that the viewer’s appraisal of any fictional events reflects the perspective of a character; the event is understood from a character’s imagined point of view and with her concerns, and feelings. In its most intense forms, sympathy can look and feel like self-indulgent sentiment . However, there is no point in condemning tears of sadness or joy as silly. The term sentiment is not necessarily pejorative. The appraisal of a character’s suffering or good doing can involve an acknowledgment of its superior measure, notably in relation to the self’s suffering or good doing. In my compassion with or admiration for a beloved character I can feel that her fate is really woeful compared to mine, or that her altruistic achievements make mine totally insignificant. Being moved , awe and having goose bumps are emotional responses accompanying such appraisals (Tan and Frijda, 1997 ; Tan, 2009 ; Wassiliwizky et al., 2017 ; Schubert et al., 2018 ) Footnote 70

However, not every responding emotion requires empathy or sympathy. Footnote 71 The sympathy concern does not only drive our siding with characters and responding emotionally to the ups and downs in their projects. As I proposed (Tan, 1996 ) it can make us invest affectively 'film-long' in characters, on top of going along in their hopes and fears, successes and failures. We are also witnesses of characters’ slower and more profound development into personae we would want them to be. The share of action or plot development relative to that of character differs from one genre to another. Footnote 72 Generally, action movies and especially comedies tend to allow for only minimal character development, whereas the drama genres may indulge into it. In these genres, viewer interest may depend in larger part on characterisation and character development.

Another class of emotions responding to the fictional world are 'spectacular' that is spectacle based . The spectacle of landscapes, buildings, natural objects and artifices, human or animal figures in motion, can surprise us and touch on a sense of beauty and invoke appraisals of harmony, elegance, or serenity. In some genres the spectacle of explosions, injury, cruelty disfiguration, etc. may incite disgust, fear raise emotions. Spectacle-based emotions do not rely on empathy of any depth, their stimulus being the mere view or sound of a fictional scene; they are neither dependent on sympathy. In more traditional terms, image and sound combinations of objects, events, and figures in the fictional world can be emotionally appraised as spectacular, beautiful, sublime, horrific, bizarre, absurd and so on. Amazement, enjoyment, awe (the wow-feeling), entrainment, being moved and aesthetic appreciation are apt labels for ensuing emotions. Like all emotional responses to fiction worlds, spectacle-based emotions can also arise when we read narratives, but in the cinema, they compete conspicuously with plot and character-driven interest and sympathy-based affective response. It seems like the viewer’s witness role is temporarily swapped for a spectator role. Footnote 73 The viewer can identify even further with patterns of motion or sequences of image and sound that lack reference to the film’s story-world. Viewers may contemplate lyrical associations of visuals, sounds, music and symbolic concepts in embodied consciousness as Grodal ( 1997 ) proposed. If story action imaginations give rise to emotions, lyrical associations are responded to with moods, e.g., nostalgic, tense or relaxed ones. The seemingly immediate representations on screen of emotions through camera movements and associative editing editing that Münsterberg described would be examples.

Emotion structure of narrative film

As a way to profile the dynamics of emotion across an entire film I proposed to represent these in a succinct model, the affect structure of a film (Tan, 1996 ). The model represents the course of interest and of responding emotions in time as predicted by theevents as they are subsequently presented by the film. Footnote 74 Generalising across titles, a most general hypothesis is that the level of interest during mainstream movies tends to rise globally. This is because on the way to protagonists’ goals, stakes tend to go up every novel complication. This will lead to increasing promise of reward roughly between the prologue and climax acts. Locally though, interest peaks and dips alternate over subsequent scenes, depending on genre and particular film. Figure 5 displays an example course of interest measured in viewers of the film In for treatment . In this study of emotions induced by a tragic drama on a terminally ill hospital patient, we found that an initial appraisal of the protagonist as increasingly suffering under the yoke of an oppressive hospital regime, was associated with a responding emotion of compassion. After the complication act, the protagonist’s acts of resistance against the hospital’s regime gave way to admiration due to an appraisal of the protagonist’s sense of self-determination. Both measures determined the level of interest measured continuously using a seven-point slider device (Tan and van den Boom, 1992). Affect structures can be more or less generic. That is, responding emotions are just like the plots, characters, and events that prompt these, characteristic for a certain genre. The study of genre-based emotion has been concentrated in research of undesirable effects of watching violence, sensation or horror in entertainment fare, see e.g. a volume edited by Bryant and Vorderer (2006). Psychological research into the role of viewer genre knowledge is on its way (e.g. Tan & Visch, 2009 ).

Continuous interest over the course of In for treatment; N  = 21; from Tan and Van den Boom (1992). Interest was registered every second using a slider rating device. Measurement was validated by self-report interest ratings. Numbers under the abscissa represent subsequent scenes. 1–6: prolog; 7–18: complication, 19–20 development; 24: climax followed by epilog.

The appeal of unpleasant emotions

A brief glance at the success rates of films featuring sad, violent or horrific content illustrates the appeal that unpleasant emotions can have to audiences at large. Münsterberg already objected to vicious effects of violent and repulsive imagery in 1910s photoplays, contents that he observed to be worryingly attractive. The psychology of the film holds various explanations in stock, but none as yet chosen. The best documented proposal is Menninghaus et al.’s distancing-embracing model that stipulates two complmentary mechanisms. One rids painful, disgusting or otherwise unpleasant aesthetic stimuli from an impact that would prevent any enjoyment or appreciation of the stimulus. The other allows for experiences that are 'intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful' (Menninghaus et al., 2017 , p. 1). The model is meant to explain the prevalence of negative emotion in all art forms, and harbours a great many classical approaches to the issue. Media psychologists have proposed what I think are regulation accounts of the pleasures of negative emotion. An emotion such as horror results from appraisal of monsters etc. as threatening and repulsive, but the emotion itself, too, can be subject to appraisal. Likewise, your crying in the cinema may induce embarrassment upon your realising that it is only a film you are watching. Footnote 75 Serious drama, the contents of which can be appraised as poignant or thought-provoking (Oliver and Hartmann, 2010 ), and more in particular independent arthouse titles that tend to provoke appreciation and elevation rather than enjoyment seem to compensate the most painful experiences they offer by a high instruction or (self-) reflection potential (Oliver & Bartsch, 2013 ). They offer continuous promises of broadening insights or revising one’s views of the world and the self, possibly only materialising to the full long after the show. In my own work I have pointed at the modulating effects of genre schemas (Tan & Visch, 2017) and narrative interest on negative emotions. Footnote 76

In closing the sections on film-induced emotion we need to note that the account of the cognitive appraisal of emoting events given here is simplified. Even straightforward film narratives can have complexities in terms, e.g., of plot lines, or character and narrator perspective that affect the intricacies of emotional events. I refer readers to Oatley’s ( 2012 ; 2013 ) discussion of in this sense more sophisticated appraisals of fictional events. More generally, film psychological research is needed into the use of more complex TOM heuristics in the comprehension of film narrative, and in emotional appraisals of film events.

The conclusion on the psychology of film awareness must be, I think, that the gripping nature of the film experience is as astonishing today as it was to early film audiences. Media psychologists have started to measure it, and cognitive film scholars have forwarded theoretical frameworks for an account of film viewer affect and emotion. But the phenomenology of film has not been expanded by film psychologists beyond the descriptions of what it is like to watch a movie provided in The Photoplay .

The psychology of film as art

Whether or not the awareness of film entails appreciations of artistry can only be a rhetorical question, but the psychology of the film has not explicitly addressed the subject. After Münsterberg and Arnheim hardly any psychologist considered film as an art form at all. And neither have general psychological aesthetics taken film into consideration. The psychology of narrative film as it developed since the 1990’s has addressed the aesthetics of movies, but rather implicitly. We have discussed psychologists’ efforts to explain the natural fluency in the perception of story-events that Münsterberg already found characteristic for the film experience. They pointed at the conventional use of continuity film style. Mainstream cinema’s narration has been demonstrated by cognitive film theorists to be at best marginally self-conscious (Bordwell, 1985 , 2006 ). That is formal features of a film’s composition, style and use of technology are non-salient and subservient to the viewer’s reconstruction of and absorption in a fabula . The viewer’s construction of a story-world is only discretely cued by the narration, and formal or stylistic patterns that do the job tend to escape consciousness to a more than considerable degree (see Tan et al., 2017 ). We could say, I believe, that the psychological aesthetics of popular film is as it stands, first and foremost about absorption , the intense and fluent imagination of being in a fictional world. And it should be added that a psychological aesthetics of forms other than popular narrative fiction film is missing. Available knowledge suffices to propose a psychology of the thriller, the romance drama or the coming-of age film, but not for a psychology of the documentary, the expressionist, the surrealist or the postmodern film, let alone of experimental, avant-garde and other museum film art forms. After all then, at present we are not far removed from Münsterberg’s speculation on the aesthetic experience of theatrical film as intense absorption due to the inner harmony of a film’s parts and conditional on only modest deviations from realistic photo-representations of the worlds that it plays.

However, as we write, everything seems set to embark on research in the film audience’s aesthetic appraisals of movies. We can rest assured that at present 'the inner parts' of mainstream film in terms of contents, style and technology have been well-described by film theorists such as those referred to above. They can help psychologists teaming up with computer vision and hearing specialists to develop computational analyses of 'the inner harmony between the parts'. As a favourable sign of the times we also note a growing interest in the implicit knowledge that the regular film audience has of patterned uses of film style and technology in various forms and genres (see, e.g., Visch and Tan, 2009 ). Moreover, the first attempts have been made to identify the psychological dimensions that underlie film audience aesthetic tastes. Footnote 77 Dimensions of what I called the Artefact emotions , that is the affective evaluations of films as aesthetic products will soon be identifiable from reviews by critics and the film audience at large that are already available in large data repositories. Footnote 78 Large scale highly data-intensive research can be accompanied by smaller scale laboratory studies of whether and how viewers attend to aesthetically relevant patterns of formal and stylistic features. Footnote 79

Concluding remarks

The agenda that Hugo Munsterberg set for the psychology of the film, explaining the film experience through revealing psychological mechanisms underlying it, and accounting for its aesthetic functions is after a century still leading. I believe that psychologists of film have over the century not added new questions, while the ones he posed have been shown to be complex or even resilient. Nonetheless the field has gradually expanded. After the 1970's growth accelerated and today we face what in modesty may be called a surge. Two film-psychological books, Art Shimamura’s Psychocinematics (2013) and Jeffrey Zacks’ Flicker: Your brain on movies ( 2014 ), have recently filled the void left after The Photoplay .

The review of psychological studies into the film experience presented in this contribution is highly selective. It was not meant at all to cover the entire field, if only because we selected achievements from the vast research area of moving images and their perception. This is why the essay is titled 'A psychology of the film' rather than 'The etc.'. Granted its basic limitations, an overview of a century of film psychology could conclude with a comparison with research agenda that was set in Münsterberg’s Photoplay . The typical gripping experience that mainstream movies offer the audience has now come to be characterised as a sense of being absorbed by and quasi-physically present in a film scene that feels like going on as smoothly and continuously as a scene in real life. Considerable progress has been made in understanding how the basic psychological functions attention, perception and memory contribute to viewers’ comprehension of film. An understanding has developed of how attentional, perceptual and cognitive mechanisms dovetail with the solutions and norms of traditional cinemascopy. In the conventional 35 mm theatre set-up, the dark environment where high-density projections extend over the limits of the foveal acuity field, screens are big enough to allow for sufficient stimulation of the peripheral motion-sensitive visual field and the spinning projector shutter makes for smooth stroboscopic movement. Moreover, the visual system is quite resistant against perspective transformations due to less optimal viewing points, probably through extracting invariants under transformation (Cutting, 1986 ). Mainstream narrative continuity film-style ensures a fluent perception and comprehension of a film’s story-world, action, characters and their inner lives. Emotional responses can be explained from the development of the story and the progress of protagonists’ projects.

And yet, a lot less effort has been spent in theoretically elaborating further on what the film experience is. There is a general disbelief that it would involve a mere recognition of events, situations, persons etc. as we know them in the real world. But what exactly the spectator’s imagination contributes to the typical awareness of the film is still mysterious. And how filmic events, and the ways they have been staged, acted, framed, photographed and edited exactly influence and prompt acts of imagination on the part of audiences, has only in part been understood.

Meanwhile, the supply of "photoplays" has immensely multiplied and diversified since 1916, but the mainstream narrative film has by far remained the most popular form. Today’s ubiquitous access to moving images through a multiplicity of screens has made it more urgent than ever for psychologists to understand the experiences associated with extremely different cinematic devices. They range from handheld phones to giant 3-D multiplex screens and surround installations in museums. Canonical set-ups of the cinema also tend to diverge because of networked interaction technologies seeking application in the production, distribution and exhibition of motion pictures. Psychologists of the film can use their current understanding of how audiences experience mainstream cinema as a basis for differentiating what film semiologists call 'dispositives': clusters of production, exhibition and reception practices characterised by specific expectations, attitudes and competences of their end users. Footnote 80

The psychology of film is rapidly developing into an interdisciplinary field. Münsterberg’s psychological study already reflected inspiration from fields far removed from experimental psychology such as the then conventional practice of the photoplay as well as from Aristotelian poetics of the theatre play. In the same vein, current psychologists of film as we have seen, improve their understanding of the perception and cognition of film in a collaboration with experts in the analysis of narration in the fiction film. Advances in current models of film viewer attention featuring narrative cuing are profoundly informed by (historical) film analyses. Footnote 81 Scholars in cognitive film studies, such as those collaborating within the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image are steadily producing in-depth analyses of film at work conjointly with the viewer’s mind. Footnote 82 The same goes for the (more modest) advances made in psychological models of film-produced emotion. Further collaborations with specialists in machine-analysis of image and sound can be expected to add to an objective identification of formal and stylistic film structures, also beyond the domain of traditional mainstream film, 'in the wild' of cyberspace, and in experimental art cinemas.

The technology of measuring psychological responses to film structures (perception, attention, memory and affect) has also developed tremendously since Münsterberg founded the perception lab at Harvard. Gaze tracking, fMRI and TMS have been added to the psychophysical and cognitive response registrations. Integration of large scale image analysis data with behavioural measures obtained in the lab or as 'big data' is the next step in the development of film psychology. The study of integral responses to units of film extending beyond a few seconds entailing entire actions, events, scenes and acts, or even films as a whole, requires new response recording devices and data models. Perhaps it will be feasible within a decade or so to append large emotional response datasets obtained from social media and filmdatabase metadata to computational content analyses described above. We will then be able to categorise films into meaningful clusters, e.g., genres and subgenres based on relations between themes, plots, film style and emotion profiles. Small scale lab experiments can tell us more about what exactly the mind adds to the image on screen and the sound from cinema loudspeakers remains. Let me single out as the leading issue the question how bottom-up and top-down mechanisms interact in producing the film experience. Footnote 83 Diversification of the set-up of in-depth studies is also necessary following the multitude of conventional set-ups of film viewing on various screens and in on-line or 'live'(?) exhibitions.

And just as in 1916, a select but growing minority of researchers in academic, empirical psychology want to understand why and how it is we perceive and what it is like to enjoy movies. They want an understanding because first they are movie-loving psychologists and second they find film a challenging testing ground for fundamental models of attention, perception, memory, imagination, emotion and aesthetics.

A more detailed discussion of the functions in photoplay viewing can be summarised thus: As regards the perception of film scenes, Münsterberg argued that in the cinema depth is seen without spectator’s taking it for real, that movement is perceived not without the spectator’s mind adding the quality of smooth motion to merely seeing a succession of positions. For example, apparent movement of in fact stationary lines is '… superadded by the action of the mind, to motionless pictures' (1916, p. 29). Attention in the cinema concentrates the mind on details that acquire an unusual vividness and become the focus of our impulses and feelings. Close-ups objectify this weaving 'of the outer world into our minds' (p. 39). Attention is characterised by a series of subsequent shifts in its object. Shifts are provided by scene or action details made salient by spatial mise-en-scène, notably actor expression (movement and gestures), and mobile framing. Memory is used at any moment to remember events presented earlier in the film. Just as attention and perception are an instrument of the imagination, memory enables the fusing of events in our consciousness that are physically apart. Münsterberg’s view of the emotions showed similarities with James’ theory on the subject, as it stressed their embodied character; emotions cannot do without behavioural and physiological expressions. Münsterberg proposed that emotions that film audiences experience are portrayed on screen. The viewer’s imagination transforms what they see into their own felt emotion: The 'horror, pain and the joy' that spectators go through are 'really projected to the screen' (p. 53). In addition, he introduced a distinction between what we would refer to today as emotions based on empathy with characters on the one hand, and on the other emotions responding to the scenes they are in.

Münsterberg’s observation of how film expresses the basic psychological functions has been compellingly argued by Baranowski and Hecht’s ( 2017 ) in their excellent review of Münsterberg’s Photoplay .

Even if what we call today automated responses do have a place in the psychological functions, perception, attention, and memory are according to Münsterberg in the end acts of the mind, and imagination is even more so.

The aesthetic experience is grounded in a Kantian conception emphasising the completeness of the work of art in itself, and an explicit denial of the contemplant’s desires or practical needs in it.

This in turn requires that we 'enter with our own impulses into the will of every element, into the meaning of every line and colour and tone. Only if everything is full of such inner movement can we really enjoy the harmonious cooperation of the parts' (p. 73).

This probably not in the least due to the stability of the experimental and social have been on the agenda of the psychology of film ever since. The functions and mechanisms of the mind that experimental research focuses on have globally remained the same, and the interest in aesthetics has not waned.

Constancies in visual perception are disrupted due to the optical and mechanic qualities of film. Examples in point include reduced depth, absence of colour, object shape and volume distortions due to insufficient information on object size or camera’s distance.

A famous example is the ballet sequence in René Clair’s Entr’Act (1924). Filmed through a glass plate on which the dancers move, they are seen from a most unusual angle, at least compared to the canonical views that theatre audiences have, i.e., from below, and from an as unusual distance, i.e., from nearby. So close indeed that their robes fill the entire frame, and the spectator is struck by their expanding contours in the 2D plane of the screen.

To be sure, his treatment of the perception of movement, dynamics and expression in works of all arts, seem to be modelled after the organisational principles the mind uses in shaping the film experience.

Cutting has often convincingly argued that stroboscopic motion is a better label than apparent motion. His definition is 'a series of discrete static images can sometimes render the impression of motion'(Cutting, 2002 , p. 1179)

Why and how we see motion has been as basic to the study of visual perception as questions of perception of colour, depth, and shape. Helmholtz proposed that what we need to explain is how retinal images that correspond one-to one, i.e., optically with a scene in the world are transformed into mental images, or percepts that we experience. In the case of apparent motion, we need to understand in addition how a succession of retinal images are perceived as one or more objects in motion.

By smooth is meant that no transitions or flicker are seen, and no blurring of superposed images occurs. The problem of apparent motion in film has been formulated in this way by the Dutch perception psychologist and filmmaker Emile van Moerkerken in an unpublished chapter written in 1978 . The issue of why and when flickering instead of smoothly projected images are seen has been technically resolved through trial and error. Cinematic projectors need to present at least 24 frames per second if flicker is to be avoided, and higher frequencies, for instance 72 fps are even better (e.g., Anderson, 1996, pp. 54–59). These frequencies are above the human perception system’s critical fusion frequency, at least for the conventional luminance ranges in cinematic projection.

In the late nineteen sixties the organisation of the cortical cell complexes for visual perception in layered columns were identified by neurophysiologists Hubel and Wiesel ( 1959 ). Cells in Brodman areas 17 and 18 were found sensitive to different aspects of motion (e.g., orientation and spatial vs. temporal resolution), while integration into forerunners of motion perception is assumed to take place in areas V4 and MT.

Luminance and colour identification have been shown to interact with the more motion dedicated complexes in delivering impressions of motion, while the phenomenon of perceiving depth from movement has been very well documented.

For example, form-invariant apparent motion—that seems to require somewhat less elementary integration has been shown attributable to specialised MT cells for slower and faster motion (O’Keefe and Movshon, 1998 ). And as another example, Anstis (1980) discovered a system based on comparison of subsequent locations for apparent horizontal motion of a single dot, and another one for the perception of wave-form motion of an array of dots.

For example, it has been reported that test participants accurately perceive velocity of motion of a grating pattern only when they pay attention to its details (Cavanagh, 1992 ).

As another example, tension in a static work of art is perceived due to the brain’s synthesis of forces from implied movements, such as outward-directed tensions perceived in symmetrical geometric shapes. These can be observed in 'gamma movement', Arnheim, 1974 , p. 438.

The presentation times are short (flashes), say two-hundred milliseconds. The objects differ between the two presentations only in spatial position, we refer to these as A1 for object A in position 1, and A2. Depending on the interval between presentations apparent motion can be seen. With a briefest interval simultaneity of objects A1 and A2 is seen; less brief (appr. 100 Ms) makes us see 'pure motion'; that is 'objectless movement'; with still briefer intervals (appr. 60 Ms) we see 'optimal movement' of the object A1 to A2; and with briefest interval partial movement.

Wertheimer believed that perceived motion patterns reflected a short-circuiting between cells in the brain that were successively stimulated.

For example, among Korte’s laws, proposed in 1915, was a rule stating that the ratio of spatial distance between shapes and the interval between successive presentations was constant for the perception of 'good motion', clearly a Gestalt-like pattern. This coupling of the two features obtained in controlled studies, is surprising until today because purely mechanistic intuition would have it that increases in spatial distance would need 'compensation' by briefer inter-stimulus intervals to preserve smooth apparent motion. A related discovery, reported by Kolers (1972, p. 39 also militates against light-hearted use of an analogy with mechanics: Decreasing the spatial distance between successively presented shapes does not necessarily result in better movement.

First, the physiological account resting on 'prewired' neurocircuitry cannot do without integrative operations at a higher level of mental processing involving integration across separate cortical modules. Even if such operations are prewired, they represent contributions of the mind. Second, as importantly, the impact of visual stimulus features has on the perception of movement, and especially more complex forms, have been shown sensitive to control by the will within certain bounds. Third, figural processes in apparent motion appear to be extremely plastic, defying explanations by stimulus factors, as the example of induced motion illustrates.

As an illustration, even a somewhat forgotten proposal by Van der Waals and Roelofs ( 1930 ) according to Kolers, seems to go. They proposed that in apparent motion, the intervening motion is constructively interspersed in retrospect that is, only after the second presentation of the Koler object. And after Kolers' volume on apprent motion, several proposals have been forwarded on possible mechanisms. For example Kubovy and Gepshtein ( 2007 ) demonstrated in two experiments that spatial and temporal distances act either in trade-off or coupled to one another to provide for smooth apparent motion; the one at low speeds and the other at high speeds. None of the proposals have been accepted as the final solution, also because different definitions of the factors or the criterion for motion have been used.

Michotte (1946) attempted with some success to capture configurations of moving objects that would be perceived as instances of causation , a mentally represented concept. For example, block A is seen to 'push' block B forward if A approaches B (that is standing still) with an appropriate speed, and contact time. Alternatively, B will be perceived to 'depart' if some time in contact has elapsed before B moves away from A. In fact, Michotte’s experimental phenomenology was influenced by Brentano who was a major inspiration to the early Gestalt psychologists as well. Another great contribution by Michotte to the psychology of the film was that he was one of the first to analyse the problem of the apparent reality of cinematic scenes that Münsterberg and Arnheim had signalled. His diagnosis was that we see non-real objects, that is shapes projected on the screen. However, we do perceive—physiologically—real movement of these, and this is a condition presumed to be decisive for perceiving reality. Heider and Simmel are known for their demonstration of the inevitability of event, person and story-based schema-based inferences that viewers of simple animated geometric figures tend to make (Heider and Simmel, 1944).

Note that objects are not part of an optic array, as the latter refers to the metrical organisation of patterns of light.

There are certainly limits to the likeness of the dynamical optical flow offered by film images to real world ones. First, the flow is interrupted by cuts, and second the projected image in the cinema constrains the optic flow in a variety of ways. (Thanks to one the anonymous reviewers).

The discussion of Hochberg and Brooks’ psychology of the film is based on an earlier essay (Tan, 2007 ).

Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996a ) provided wonderful examples of the intricate aesthetics of camera movement when filming a human figure in motion, examples that require frequent analyses of filmed dance, or to film dance oneself, as Brooks has done indeed. Movement may be seen where there is actually none, apparent reversals of direction or apparent stasis may all occur, even in parallel. Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996b ) demonstrated that complex movements need to be ‘parsed’ by viewers into components depending on factors such as fixation point and even viewer intentions. Direct realist explanation of the film awareness would soon stumble on degrees of stimulus complexity too high to capture in optical array invariants; input from other cognitive structure-based mechanisms capable of selecting candidates for 'pick-up' would be necessary.

Hochberg ( 1986 ) stated that in some cases only the most complex cognitive efforts could explain an understanding of shot transitions, that could only be conveyed through literary analysis. Here he was probably referring to cases in artistically highest end productions.

For example, Hayhne (2007) criticised Hochberg’s stipulation that mental schemas used in understanding shot transitions cannot be spatially precise or complete. She quoted evidence of the use of self-produced body movements following a mental map with extreme precision.

According to one such theory (the so-called Event Indexing Model, Magliano, Miller & Zwaan, 2001 ) viewers of film like readers of stories generate embodied cognitive models of (story-) situations. These mental models represent sequences of events, people and their goals, plans and actions, in spatiotemporal settings. The situation model is continuously updated while the film proceeds. Updates follow upon the identification of changes in story-entities (e.g., movement of characters or objects), time, causality and intentionality.

This synthetic response by the viewer can be taken as the actual recognition and categorisation of an event or action. Neuroscience research has identified areas of the brain involved in recognising—and 'simulating' actions such as grasping an object, or exhibiting a facial expression, e.g., Hasson et al. (2004).

As an example study, Garsoffky et al. ( 2009 ) demonstrated that the recognition of events by film viewers improved when framing objects or events across shots adheres to viewpoints that are common in real world perception. Other studies tested the notion that movies adhering to this style present viewers with simplified event views that they can readily integrate in an available event schema (e.g., Schwan, 2013 ).

The cueing of attentional shifts to the target portion of screen B can assume distinct forms, such as through match on action, establishing and shot/ reverse shots, and point shot. The attentional shift has carried the conscious experience across the discontinuity in views. The theory is documented by numerous analyses of scene perception, in which analysed shot contents are overlaid with dynamic gaze maps. The model can explain how violations of continuity principles result in less efficient gaze behaviours. Artistically motivated violations are taken seriously, but dealt with as atypical for the canonical set-up.

Bezdek et al. ( 2015 ) report a study in which participants were shown a film scene at the centre of fixation while checkerboard patterns were flashed in the periphery of vision. The results of fMRI analyses showed that activity of peripheral visual processing areas in the brain was diminished with increasing narrative suspense of the scenes, whereas activity in areas associated with central vision, attention and dynamic visual processing increased.

In one experiment, viewers were presented with a sequence from Moonraker in which James Bond jumps out of a plane and can be expected to fall 'safely' onto a circus tent. This high-level event schema-based cognitive expectation was enhanced in one condition but not in another, through providing a written context before the sequence was shown. It turned out that providing context knowledge led to the critical inference and to less surprise, pointing at the functionality of high-level attention cues. However, gaze behaviour did hardly differ between the high-level cued vs. non-cued viewers. Moreover, effects predicted from a tyranny of film analysis of the sequence—that is where viewers looked and what, were much stronger than the subtle effects of high-level cognitive processes.

The computation of visual salience can easily be extended to the case of film by replacing the input image by a series of frames and the output by an array of saliency maps. Furthermore, low-level features such as colour and orientation need to be integrated over successive images into dynamic ones, e.g., changes in orientation, and into motion features.

See: http://bitsearch.blogspot.nl/2013/05/saliency-maps-and-their-computation.html#!/2013/05/saliency-maps-and-their-computation.html (accessed 31 Jan 2018).

For example, an international group from the universities of Brescia and Teesside has recently shown able to predicts movie affect curves that is, dynamic patterns of emotional responses, from low-level features such as colour, motion and sound, while taking into account the influence of film grammar (e.g., sequences of varying shot-types) and narrative elements (e.g., script or dialogue analysis classifications). The analysis of the grammatical and narrative features can be supported by the computer but are not entirely machine-executably algorithmic. The emotional responses were measured using physiological and self-report measures (Canini et al., 2010 ).

In his earlier widely acclaimed work in general visual perception, Cutting continued the Gibsonian ecological approach to the perception of real world scenes, attempting to find formal extraction and coding principles sustaining the direct pick-up of behaviourally relvant information. See, e.g., Cutting ( 1981 ), in which ecological tenets regarding the perception of events based on invariant structures in the information offer of the visual stimulus. This line of research also included cinematic perception. An example is his study on the perception of rigid shapes when viewers are seated at extreme angles vis-à-vis the centre of projection, e.g., front row side aisle (Cutting, 1987 ).

In the essay Cutting lists the cues in the optical array that sustain the perception of distance in the real world, and then elaborates on how filmmakers manipulate depth cues in order for the audience to perceive scenes exactly the way the narrative requires them to.

Following the convenient overview in Brunick et al. ( 2013 ) they are for duration average shot duration in seconds; for temporal shot structure the distribution of shot durations; for movement the degree of difference between pixels in adjacent frames (zero when frames are identical means no movement); for luminance the degree of black vs white of images; and for colour the distribution of hues and degrees of saturation of frames.

For example, in the analyses just mentioned Cutting et al. established in their Hollywood sample an increase of movement between 1905 and 1935 and could relate this finding to film-analytic accounts of stylistic changes supporting growing emotional impact of movies. As another example, consider the well-documented finding that shot duration tends to decrease across the history of popular film. Salt (2009) reported a linear decrease of average shot length. Cutting and Candan ( 2015 ) could use his data and added nuances to the general linear decrease trend that they replicated. One was that different slopes for shot classes obtained, especially in the post 1940s’ Hollywood films, another that shot scale, in particular increasing use of wide angle shots, contributed considerably to the decrease in shot duration.

The climax works towards the minimum as the narrative tends to progress here presenting focused events without disruption, while its scope is wider and shifting in the set-up and epilogue acts. Consistently, during the climax movement is more frequent while shots also tend to be darker compared to the remaining acts. The set-up and epilogue contrast most conspicuously with the climax, while complication and development exhibit steady in-between values for the low-level feature parameters.

They do not manifest physically, but their indexing is perceptually straightforward. One is time shifts, a structural feature. It decreased over the time of a film, in line with the film-narratological notion that a film’s action thickens towards a deadline. Three other higher-level features were more semantic in nature. Character appearances dropped after the set-up. Action shots were most numerous at the end of the set-up and the beginning of the climax, while conversations levelled down during the climax.

Cutting’s ( 2016 ) interpretative qualifications illuminated the stylistic distinctions among the acts. They are most informative and any summarisation would be detrimental to the value of the analyses. To give just one example For example: 'The development also has several characteristics in contrast to the complication: its shot durations are a bit longer (Study 1), it has more noncut transitions (Study 2), and it is dimmer (Study 4) so that by its end the luminance falls to the psychological and literal “darkest moment” for the protagonist' (Cutting, 2016 , p. 24). I encourage the reader interested in the stylistic comparison of the acts to reading the original article.

An example is an analysis by Cutting et al. ( 2011 ) of 150 historical films were indexed as to movement and shot duration. They observed a decrease of movement with decreasing shot durations, and reasoned that a basic perceptual mechanism could be at the basis of this correlation: people can only follow so much movement in a duration-limited view. The researchers then analysed newer films that far exceeded the maximum movement-to- shot duration ratio, and it was found from the public discourse around the titles that viewers could not cope with the overload stimulation.

Dimensions captured in the instrument include comprehension of the narrative, a sense of being in the story-world, emotional responses to story-world events and characters, and attentional focus on story-world details. The remaining experience concepts refer to experiences of entertainment or story-worlds excluding awareness of a narrative or any other constructions underlying these.

Hinde ( 2017 ) has recently presented evidence showing that self-reported presence is positively related to response latencies in a dual attention task in which participants were required to respond to a distractor signal while watching a movie. This result supports the notion of absorption and loss of awareness of the real world.

Variants of presence stress embodied apparent reality of the portrayed world, and the loss of awareness of mediation. Loss of awareness and apparent reality point to the illusion of being absorbed by the story-world. Presence seems the most immediate experiential outcome of natural or real-world scene perception and event comprehension mechanisms. It was implied in Gibson’s summary of the awareness of film: 'We are onlookers in the situation, …, we are in it and we can adopt point of observation within its space'.

In this respect, the concept of transportation builds on Gerrig’s ( 1993 ) seminal work on the experience of narrative worlds. Transportation requires a 'deictic shift' (Segal, 1995) from the real to the story-world (Segal, 1995 in Bussele and Bilandzic, 2009 ). When the narrative ends the spell is broken and the audience returns into the previously inaccessible real world.

In line with general psychological research on empathy, a distinction has been made between embodied simulation of film character feeling and a cognitively more demanding forms of empathy with characters (e.g., Tan, 2013a , b ). Complex forms of empathy that require TOM cognition presuppose that there is an awareness of the distinction between self and other. The highest degrees of absorption by characters (measured by items such as 'I became the character') seem characterised by a complete fusion of the viewers’ self with the character and are properly referred to as identification (e.g., Cohen, 2001 ). In this case, viewer emotion is identical with character emotion.

For example, cinematic techniques of selective or emphatic framing of character expression can lead to stronger mimicry or embodied simulation on the part of the viewer than observation of a person in the real world would allow (e.g., Coplan, 2006 ; Raz et al., 2013 ).

The less demanding forms are based on automated embodied simulation or mirroring, for instance mimicry. Complex forms involve mentalising, or reasoning supported by general Theory of Mind schemas and inferencing. The most demanding occur when the film’s narration withholds information about a character’s inner life in relation to story-events as in some arthouse films (Tan, 2013a , b ). Mentalizing has like cognitively less demanding forms of empathy been shown to be affected by film style. Rooney and Bálint ( 2018 ) recently demonstrated that close-ups of the face stimulate the use of TOM in the perception of characters.

Identification has been empirically observed and isolated from other forms of absorption by Cohen (2001); Tal-Or and Cohen ( 2010) ; Bálint and Tan (in press).

In an attempt to qualify what it is like to be absorbed in a film, Bálint and Tan (2015) synthesised a summarising dynamic image schema, from a study of film viewers’ reports on their own experience of absorption while watching a film. Image schemas are culturally shared embodied cognitive structures that have been identified by cognitive linguists and are hypothesised to underlie cognition and experience and are more specifically used in metaphorical thinking and use of language. The schema entails the viewer’s self-travelling into the center of the story-world. The self exerts forces to remain inside the story-world, and is taken there in some cases notably by the author. In Bálint and Tan’s study, readers of novels turned out to use the same image schemas to describe their experience as film viewers.

It is noteworthy that Münsterberg considers the activity of the basic functional mechanisms perception, attention and memory as consisting of 'acts', rather than responses as it would become common in mainstream experimental psychology, see, e.g., p. 57. 'Imagination' refers to acts resulting in 'products of the active mind' (p. 75) in particular memories, associations and emotions added to perceptions as 'subjective supplements' (p. 46).

For an overview of current cognitive emotion theories see Oatley and Laird ( 2013 ).

Through procedures such as suggestion and juxtaposition of fictional elements and perspectives, and due to strong coherence of elements, simulations are as engaging as to allow for recipients’ explorations of social situations, involving the self. This results in emotions ranging from the more basic to the social and culturally sophisticated type.

The stages correspond to Oatley’s ( 2013 ) direct, imaginative and self-related modes of appraisal in film-induced emotion.

There is some literature on the affective potential of mainstream film techniques. See for example experiments on camera angle and image composition on emotional appraisal of objects and characters such as weakness, tenseness, dominance or strength reported in Kraft ( 1991 ), and an overview of formal and presentation features of media messages in relation to their emotional effects by Detenber and Lang ( 2011 ).

This capacity has the obvious adaptive advantage of learning proper responses to critical situations before they are met in the actual world. The same point has been made by Currie ( 1995 ); see also Currie and Ravenscroft ( 2002 ). See also Tan ( 2008 ) on pretense play as exercising emotions and adaptive responses in film viewing. My position on the issue of the authenticity of emotion in response to fictional narrative is opposed to Walton (1990) who proposed that make-believe worlds can only induce 'as-if emotions'.

Neuropsychological accounts of film viewer emotions, such as those by Grodal (2009) and Zacks’ ( 2014 ) emphasise suppression of actions such as fight or flight, by prefrontal circuits following appraisals, e.g., of threats or provocations. In my related application of the cognitive theory to film viewing, viewers can experience a tendency to flee as an initial tendency, due to automated mimicry or simulation.

An attempt to measure virtual forms of emotional action readiness in response to several film genres was reported in Tan ( 2013a , b ).

In the end virtual action responses in the cinema should be understood as an example of the situatedness of emotion in general. (See Griffith & Scarantion, 2009 ). The conventional set-up of the cinema positions spectators as witnesses to fictional events and appraisals, experiences, expressions and action readiness take shape according to the cinematic situation.

In the end, viewers know on the basis of their narrative and genre schemas, the film will provide answers to extant questions they have underway.

Needs of mood management and the occurrence of emotions that help to improve moods have been shown to explain preference for entertainment products such as movies (Zilmann, 2003).

Sympathy for mainstream protagonists is probably rather immediately induced by our felt similarity and familiarity with them, and more especially in terms of moral values (Zillmann, 2000 ).

The nature of the events and their outcomes corresponding to ups and downs in the life of a protagonist vary from one genre to another. For example, the action heroine meets with assaults on her life and deals blows to her stalker; the romance protagonist with separation and reunion. See also Zillmann’s theory of the enjoyment of drama.

I have introduced these emotions earlier (Tan, 1996) under the heading of Fictional World emotions or F emotions, because they are responses to events in a fictional world. F emotions include empathetic and non-empathetic emotions. Non-empathetic emotions can either be based on sympathy, for example, when we fear that a bomb will explode to the harm of a protagonist, or not based on sympathy. Awe induced by the sight of a sublime landscape would be an example. F-emotions are defined in opposition to A emotions. The latter category consists of responses to the film as a human-made artefact instead of a fictional world produced in the viewer’s imagination.

The point has been made in Tan and Frijda ( 1997 ) and Tan ( 2009 ), and more recently underscored in psychophysiological research using film by Wassiliwizky et al. ( 2017 ). Schubert et al. ( 2018 ) refer to the emotion as kama muta a socio-relational emotion of feeling closeness when an intensification of communal sharing relations is appraised. In the study just referred to such moments had been analysed in film fragments.

An example is the fear we have when we watch a horror monster in a view not aligned with any character’s, or without a character being in the neighbourhood of the monster.

See, for example, study of interest during character vs. action development oriented films Doicaru (2016, Ch. 2).

See for empirical comparative analyses of absorbed modes of witnessing drama and detached modes of spectatorship in watching nature documentaries Tan ( 2013b ).

Films are segmented (from larger to smaller units) in acts, scenes and events. All subsequent events induce interest. Every scene offers answers or matches to anticipations induced earlier, leading to enjoyment. Enjoyment tends to reinforce interest—as it stimulates intake and rewards past efforts. Every scene, too, induces novel questions and affective anticipations, keeping interest at least alive.

Some researchers of media entertainment refer to such regulatory reappraisals as meta-emotions (Bartsch et al., 2008). Positive gratifications may be derived from such reappraisals and associated emotions. Viewers of sad drama may appreciate their own moral stance that transpires through their experience of a character’s losses and suffering from injustice. Horror lovers may like the emotion because they explicitly seek it, and younger male audiences of extremely violent films have been shown to test, and pride themselves on their coping abilities (Hill, 1997). A related act of emotion regulation is male viewers’ display of protective attitudes towards their female company during horror shows (Zillmann and Weaver, 1997).

In Tan ( 1996 ) I proposed that, in contrast to aversive situations witnessed in real life, popular fiction scenes on separation, isolation, violence, terror and horror and so on are due to their being part of a story always signal that we are in medias res ; the narrative is to be continued, we are curious to know where it is heading, and it is virtually impossible to completely abort expectancies and imaginations of a turn to the positive. Entertaining these is in itself not unpleasant, especially when viewers are open to the possibility that they can learn from the unpleasant events.

Doicaru (2016) reviewed general models of aesthetic appreciation as to their suitability for explaining aesthetic appreciation of film. She reported a validation study of a measurement instrument in which five general factors were identified that may be used to describe dimensions of aesthetic appraisal in film viewing. They were Cognitive stimulation, Negative emotionality, Self-reference and Understanding. A corpus of films from different genres and aesthetic categories (e.g., mainstream, arthouse and experimental were used, and according audiences were involved.

Movies can move us not only in our role of witnesses of events in a fictional world, but also as artefacts made by filmmakers with some formal intention in mind; appreciation of visual beauty etc. are an example. They have the construction of the artefact as their object, and need to be distinguished, as artefact emotions from emotional responses to witnessed events in fictional worlds. They are aesthetic emotions because they involve appraisals of artefact features, such as form, style, use of technology and implied meaning. Untrained audiences can recount their artefact emotions: Professional critics can add elaborations of the appraisals they made while viewing. They have as their object the complex of film form, use of style and technology and intended or unintended meanings. We can further our understanding of appraisals in Artefact emotions using such intuitions available in critical film analyses. They are massively represented in internet user groups like Youtube and Metacritics. Machine learning algorithms are now being developed to extract and categorise emotions from film forums, and differentiate both films and target audiences, see, e.g., Buitinck et al. ( 2015) .

A few example studies on effects of foregrounding procedures in narrative film and their effects on cognitive strategies and aesthetic appreciation can be found in Hakemulder ( 2007 ) and Bálint et al. ( 2016 ).

The concept has developed over the past three decades, see Casetti ( 2015 ). I have freely summarised meanings to fit the purpose of sketching a research agenda for psychologists.

The large project started by Bordwell et al. (1985) on the historical poetics of American mainstream cinema, already have provided psychological research into the mechanisms underlying the film experience with major concepts and reference norms for conventional structuring of film narratives and their stylistic parameters. Among these are continuity, spatiotemporal segmentation and stylistic emphasis.

Interested readers should regularly consult the society’s scholarly journal Projections .

In the role of top-down influences I emphatically include the Münsterbergian acts of imagination on the part of the spectator.

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Difference Between Good and Bad Representation in Film

Indigo Mapa '21 , Staff Writer October 15, 2018

“Representing” is defined as “ the action of speaking or acting on behalf of someone.” Today, representation is a crucial element of film. “Bad” representation is especially important to avoid in the filmmaking. Often, we struggle to define what good and bad representation looks like.

Well, what is good and proper representation? It starts with thorough research and an understanding of what is being placed onto the big screen and projected into the public eye. For those involved in the filmmaking process, attempting to represent something that they do not identify with can be difficult. “Good representation” occurs when a person or culture is portrayed realistically, not purely based on stereotypes. A film with excellent representation is Crazy Rich Asians . The film received praise for its exceptional representation of the Asian culture and race. The film featured an all-Asian cast, a rare occurrence in Hollywood. This brought tears of joy to many Asians around the world when it was announced. Because of valuable personal experience, the actors were able to best convey their culture. Crazy Rich Asians “raised the bar for Asian representation in entertainment” (Selby). Though the film became a milestone for Asian-Americans and minorities in general, it still missed some important aspects in the Asian culture. Darker-skinned Asians were not portrayed equally in the film. Light-skinned Asian actors portrayed the wealthy and famous, while those with darker complexions appeared to portray workers and lower-class citizens. Though most likely unintentional, this can be pinpointed as some bad representation in the film. We continue to see that the films with good representation do not necessarily have the best representation. Nonetheless, Crazy Rich Asians is a clear milestone where representation is concerned.

Unfortunately, inadequate representation is common in film. It is difficult for an underrepresented group in society to have to watch films that poorly represent their group and thus perpetuate minority status. Because good representation can be so difficult to achieve, those involved in the filmmaking process wonder whether or not underrepresented groups should continue to be represented in film at all. But, when it comes along, good representation is incredibly valuable and should, therefore, be strived for rather than no representation whatsoever.

A particular audience that is under-represented in films is the community of people with disabilities. Me Before You , a film about a wealthy man who got into an accident and becomes paralyzed, falls in love with a woman who takes a job as his caretaker. The actor, Sam Claffin, portrays a character with a disability, yet he has never struggled with one himself. In Me Before You , Claflin’s character later dies via assisted suicide, simply because the character does not want to be a burden to his love interest/caretaker. This does not accurately represent the disabled community. In fact, it stereotypes them in suggesting that they want to be put out of their misery. People with disabilities should rather be portrayed by actors that experience a disability rather than abled actors. It is in the hands of those behind such films to ensure that disabled people are not portrayed as deserving only of pity.

Change can start with these films, where we can start to accurately represent the underrepresented members of society and bring about greater change. Though the industry is slowly improving and creating new innovative ways to represent minorities, there are still many films that are ignorant when it comes to representation.

Works Cited

“PORTRAYAL OF MINORITIES IN THE FILM, MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES.” HOPES Huntington’s Disease Information , web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/mediarace/portrayal.htm.

Powell, Robyn. “Opinion | What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Disabilities.” The Huffington Post , TheHuffingtonPost.com, 7 Mar. 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-powell-what-hollywood-gets-wrong-about-disabilities_us_5a9ef0ffe4b0d4f5b66b1882.

White, Abbey. “How Can TV and Movies Get Representation Right? We Asked 6 Hollywood Diversity Consultants.” Vox , Vox, 28 Aug. 2017, www.vox.com/culture/2017/8/28/16181026/hollywood-representation-diversity-tv-movies.

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Representations of Masculinity

​ Are men the latest victims of media misrepresentation? [interview]  (Meghan Casserly, Forbes Magazine, 2012) 

How do media images of men affect our lives?  (Sam Femiano and Mark Nickerson, Center for Visual Literacy) 

How the media define masculinity  (Media Smarts) 

The depressing depiction of men in the media  (Nicole Johnson, Good Men Project, 2011) 

When the media misrepresents black men, the effects are felt in the real world [newspaper article]  (Leigh Donaldson, The Guardian, 2015) 

Why are men on TV always such fools? [newspaper article]  (Dominic Utton, The Telegraph, 2014) 

GREVEN, DAVID. " Contemporary Hollywood Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film. " Cinema Journal, vol. 48, no. 4, Summer2009, pp. 22-43. EBSCOhost.

AFRICAN American men in motion pictures

Men in Motion Pictures

Masculinity in Popular Culture

Representations of Femininity

7 ways women and girls are stereotyped, sexualized, and underrepresented on screen  (Dana Liebelson and Asawin Suebsaeng, Mother Jones, 2012) 

Beauty and the Beast: is Disney's empowerment mission on track? [newspaper article]  (Andrew Pulver, The Guardian, 2016) 

Girls on screen: how film and television depict women in public relations [magazine article]  (Jane Johnston, PRism Journal, PRaxis, Bond University, 2010) 

Portrayal of women in the media: TV drama  (Cheryl Ni, Media Representation Group) 

Sexist screen representations of women start in the script  (Radha O'Meara, The Conversation, 2016) 

This is why it’s so hard to fight for gender equality in Hollywood [multimedia]  (Alyssa Rosenberg, Washington Post, 2015) 

Working women on television: a mixed bag at best  (Neda Ulaby, National Public Radio, 2013) 

Kirby, Philip. " The Girl on Fire: The Hunger Games , Feminist Geopolitics and the Contemporary Female Action Hero. " Geopolitics, vol. 20, no. 2, Apr-Jun2015, pp. 460-478. EBSCOhost.

Sexism in Mass Media

Representations of Class

Representations of Disability

Loftus, Charlotte. " Sages, Villains, and Seers ." Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, no. 69, Winter2016, pp. 45-47. (EBSCOhost)

12% evil  (Laurence Clark, Ouch! It's a disability thing, BBC, 2007) 

Disability and the media: disability in films  (David Gale, Disability Horizons, 2012) 

Disability in film: is cinema finally moving with the times? [newspaper article]  (David Cox, The Guardian, 2012) 

Disabling imagery and the media: an exploration of the principles for media representations of disabled people (Colin Barnes, British Council of Organisations of Disabled People, 1992) 

Media and people with disabilities: are we represented accurately?  (Sandy Murillo, Sandy's View, Chicago Lighthouse, 2015) 

Meekosha, Helen. " Superchicks, Clones, Cyborgs, and Cripples: Cinema and Messages of Bodily Transformations. " Social Alternatives, vol. 18, no. 1, Jan. 1999, pp. 24-28. (EBSCOhost)

PEOPLE with disabilities in motion pictures

PEOPLE with  disabilities in mass media

Attitudes  toward  Disabilities

Representations of Race

American Sniper perpetuates Hollywood’s typical Arab stereotypes  (Michael Green, The Conversation, 2015) 

Common portrayals of Aboriginal people [Canada]  (Media Smarts) 

Finally a movie that captures what it's like to be Asian American [Lilting]  (Elaine Teng, New Republic, 2014) 

Hollywood stereotypes: why are Russians the bad guys?  (Tom Brook, BBC, 2014) 

How to get the African films we all should see onto our screens  (Lindiwe Dovey, The Conversation, 2016) 

Native Americans: negative impacts of media portrayals, stereotypes  (Farah Qureshi, Journalist's Resource, 2016)

Portrayal of minorities in the film, media and entertainment industries [race]  (Yurii Horton, Raagen Price and Eric Brown, Ethics of Development in a Global Environment, Stanford University, 1999) 

Racism, ethnicity and television  (Encyclopedia of Television, Museum of Broadcast Communications, 2016) 

TV and film have mixed portrayals of immigrants [newspaper article]  (Jason Ruiz, New York Times, 2012) 

Ramasubramanian, Srividya. " Using Celebrity News Stories to Effectively Reduce Racial/Ethnic Prejudice ." Journal of Social Issues, vol. 71, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 123-138. EBSCOhost.

R ace in Motion Pictures

Immigrants in Motion Pictures

STEREOTYPES (Social psychology) in mass media

• Film, Representation and the Exclusion of Aboriginal Identity: Examples from Australian Cinema

Representations of Family

Family on television  (Encyclopedia of Television, Museum of Broadcast Communications, 2016) 

Far flung families: the representation of the diasporic family in contemporary cinema  (Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain) 

Hollywood's portrayal of family life is too airbrushed, the reality is far more gritty. Depiction of motherhood is more real in 1970s films [newspaper article]  (Elizabeth Day, The Guardian, 2014) 

Representation of modern families in kid-friendly entertainment  (The Next Family, 2016) 

Television and family - the social uses and influence of television on families  (Alison Alexander and Yeora Kim, Marriage and Family Encyclopedia 

What does Hollywood teach us about love?  (Dave Boehi, Family Life, 2005) 

Representations of Teenagers

Adolescence and the portrayal of teens in film and television  (Sean Faulkner, 2013) 

Does American Teen reinforce high school stereotypes? [newspaper article]  (Ella Taylor, Phoenix New Times, 2008)

Generation multiplex: the image of youth in contemporary American cinema [excerpt]  (Timothy Shary, University of Texas Press, 2002) 

Modernism, cinema, adolescence: another history for teen film  (Catherine Driscoll, Screening the Past, 2011) 

Movie teens: how accurately are they portrayed?  (Nicki Burnier, student, Dundee Crown High School, Films 4 2, 2004)

The Hunger Games: representation of teenagers  (Neill Ford, Scribd, 2014) 

Representations of LGBQTI People

I'm a lesbian and I want to see more people like me in film and TV too [magazine article]  (Claire Pires, Teen Vogue, 2016) 

Queer representation in film and television  (Media Smarts) 

Teenage Kicks review – a compelling new voice in queer Australian cinema [film review]  (Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian, 2016) 

Transgender representation in the media  (Jessica N Jobe, Eastern Kentucky University, 2013) 

Victims or villains: examining ten years of transgender images on television  (GLAAD) 

Chung, Sheng Kuan. " Media Literacy Art Education: Deconstructing Lesbian and Gay Stereotypes in the Media ." International Journal of Art & Design Education, vol. 26, no. 1, 01 Feb. 2007, pp. 98-107. EBSCOhost.

H omosexuality in Motion Pictures

Homosexuality on Television

LGBT  people in mass media

Representations of the Military

Beyond G.I. Jane: a look at the portrayal of women armed services members in modern military movies  (Abra Burkett, American University, 2014) 

Cinematic war: more truthful than your video journal  (Kate Preston, Duke University, 2012) 

Glorification of the military in popular culture and the media [excerpt]  Laura Powell, Chapter 8, Good intentions : norms and practices of imperial humanitarianism, 2014)  

Missing in action: why are there so few cultural portrayals of women in combat? [magazine article]  (Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Atlantic Monthly, 2015) 

Portraying the military in film and on television: who’s telling our stories?  (Rachel A Brune, Task and Purpose, 2014)

Screens of terror: representations of war and terrorism in film and television since 9/11  (Philip Hammond, Academia)

There’s a divide between civilians and soldiers, partly because of Hollywood [newspaper article]  (Stephanie Merry, Washington Post, 2015) 

Stachowitsch, Saskia. " Professional Soldier, Weak Victim, Patriotic Heroine ." International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 15, no. 2, June 2013, pp. 157-176. EBSCOhost.

Military Films

WAR in motion pictures

Families of Military Personnel 

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Minorities and representation in TV and film in the United States - statistics & facts

Diversity in hollywood, being seen on the (small) screen, key insights.

Detailed statistics

Distribution of employees in the motion picture and video industries 2023, by gender

Distribution of movie directors in the U.S. 2011-2023, by gender

Share of employees in the U.S. broadcasting industry 2023, by ethnicity

Editor’s Picks Current statistics on this topic

Cinema & Film

Employees in the motion picture & video industries in the U.S. 2023, by ethnicity

Distribution of speaking characters on broadcast TV in the U.S. 1997-2023, by gender

Further recommended statistics

• Premium Statistic Distribution of employees in the motion picture and video industries 2023, by gender
• Premium Statistic Employees in the motion picture & video industries in the U.S. 2023, by ethnicity
• Premium Statistic Distribution of employees in the broadcasting industry 2023, by gender
• Premium Statistic Share of employees in the U.S. broadcasting industry 2023, by ethnicity

Distribution of employees in the motion picture and video industries in the United States in 2023, by gender

Employees in the motion picture & video industries in the U.S. 2023, by ethnicity

Distribution of employees in the motion picture and video industries in the United States in 2023, by ethnicity

Distribution of employees in the broadcasting industry 2023, by gender

Distribution of employees in the broadcasting industry in the United States in 2023, by gender

Share of employees in the broadcasting industry in the United States in 2023, by ethnicity

• Premium Statistic Distribution of movie directors in the U.S. 2011-2023, by gender
• Premium Statistic Film writers' gender distribution in the U.S. 2011-2023
• Premium Statistic Distribution of lead actors in movies in the U.S. 2011-2023, by gender
• Premium Statistic Distribution of speaking characters in film in the U.S. 2002-2023, by gender
• Premium Statistic Distribution of male & female characters in top-grossing films 2023, by ethnicity
• Basic Statistic Identity of LGBTQ characters in LGBTQ-inclusive movies in the U.S. 2022
• Basic Statistic Share of LGBTQ-inclusive movies released in the U.S. 2022, by network

Distribution of movie directors in the United States from 2011 to 2023, by gender

Film writers' gender distribution in the U.S. 2011-2023

Distribution of movie writers in the United States from 2011 to 2023, by gender

Distribution of lead actors in movies in the U.S. 2011-2023, by gender

Distribution of lead actors in movies in the United States from 2011 to 2023, by gender

Distribution of speaking characters in film in the U.S. 2002-2023, by gender

Distribution of speaking characters in highest-grossing movies in the United States from 2002 to 2023, by gender

Distribution of male & female characters in top-grossing films 2023, by ethnicity

Distribution of male and female characters in top-grossing films in the United States in 2023, by ethnicity

Identity of LGBTQ characters in LGBTQ-inclusive movies in the U.S. 2022

Identity of LGBTQ characters in LGBTQ-inclusive movies released in the United States in 2022

Share of LGBTQ-inclusive movies released in the U.S. 2022, by network

Share of LGBTQ-inclusive movies released in the United States in 2022, by network

TV and video streaming

• Premium Statistic Female characters on broadcast network programs in the U.S. 2023, by ethnicity
• Premium Statistic Share of female staff on broadcast network programs in the U.S. 2023, by role
• Premium Statistic Distribution of speaking characters on broadcast TV in the U.S. 1997-2023, by gender
• Basic Statistic LGBTQ characters share on broadcast networks in the U.S. 2024, by ethnicity
• Basic Statistic LGBTQ characters share on cable networks in the U.S. 2024, by ethnicity
• Premium Statistic Share of females behind-the-scenes in TV streaming in the U.S. 2023, by role
• Basic Statistic LGBTQ characters share on streaming services in the U.S. 2024, by ethnicity
• Premium Statistic Ethnicity of lead actors in top 50 TV shows in the U.S. 2024
• Premium Statistic Share of most watched TV shows in the U.S. 2023, by ethnicity of actor

Female characters on broadcast network programs in the U.S. 2023, by ethnicity

Distribution of female characters on broadcast network programs in the United States in the 2022-23 season, by ethnicity

Share of female staff on broadcast network programs in the U.S. 2023, by role

Share of female employees in behind-the-scenes jobs on broadcast network programs in the United States in the 2022-23 season, by role

Distribution of speaking characters on broadcast and streaming programs in the United States from 1997/98 to 2022/23, by gender

LGBTQ characters share on broadcast networks in the U.S. 2024, by ethnicity

Distribution of LGBTQ characters on broadcast networks in the United States in the 2023-24 season, by ethnicity

LGBTQ characters share on cable networks in the U.S. 2024, by ethnicity

Distribution of LGBTQ characters on cable networks in the 2023-24 season, by ethnicity

Share of females behind-the-scenes in TV streaming in the U.S. 2023, by role

Share of female employees in behind-the-scenes jobs on streaming TV programs in the United States in 2022-2023, by role

LGBTQ characters share on streaming services in the U.S. 2024, by ethnicity

Distribution of LGBTQ characters on streaming services in the United States in the 2023-24 season, by ethnicity

Ethnicity of lead actors in top 50 TV shows in the U.S. 2024

Distribution of lead actors in the top 50 TV shows in the United States in 2024, by ethnicity

Share of most watched TV shows in the U.S. 2023, by ethnicity of actor

Share of the most viewed TV shows featuring lead actors in the United States in 2023, by ethnicity

Consumer perspectives

• Premium Statistic Households watching TV shows with lead actors of the same race in the U.S. 2023
• Premium Statistic Public opinion on diversity in movies/TV in the U.S. 2023, by ethnicity
• Premium Statistic Public opinion on diversity in movies/TV in the U.S. 2023, by gender
• Premium Statistic Public opinion on LGBTQ representation in movies/TV in the U.S. 2023
• Premium Statistic Multicultural consumers using curated streaming collections in the U.S 2023

Households watching TV shows with lead actors of the same race in the U.S. 2023

Share of households watching TV shows featuring a higher share of lead actors of the same ethnic group in the United States in 2023

Public opinion on diversity in movies/TV in the U.S. 2023, by ethnicity

Perception of diversity in entertainment, TV, and movies adults watch in the United States as of August 2023, by ethnicity

Public opinion on diversity in movies/TV in the U.S. 2023, by gender

Perception of diversity in entertainment, TV, and movies adults watch in the United States as of August 2023, by gender

Public opinion on LGBTQ representation in movies/TV in the U.S. 2023

Perception of LGBTQ representation in entertainment, TV, and movies adults watch in the United States as of August 2023

Multicultural consumers using curated streaming collections in the U.S 2023

Share of multicultural consumers using professionally curated collections and hubs on their streaming services at least occasionally in the United States as of April 2023, by theme

Further reports

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9 Movies With Good Representation You Can Stream Right Now

By brian oaster, february 12, 2019.

Images are powerful. Representation isn’t just a buzzword. It’s an age old problem that’s shaped our collective and individual perspectives.

Media stereotypes “contribute to perceptions regarding (and actions toward) one’s own and other racial/ethnic groups”, according to Oxford research . Poor representation “meaningfully impacts the cognitions, emotions, and behaviors of audience members” both within and outside of the communities portrayed on screen.

And let’s just face it: audiences are getting tired of stories by and about straight white men. I recently rewatched Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven for the first time since the flip phone days. It has not aged well. Casual racism and misogyny frame a celebration of rich, powerful, cishet white men lying through their arrogant teeth . It would flop today, and for good reason.

But the tides are turning. A quick scroll through Netflix suggests they’ve caught on more quickly than their competitors to audiences’ demand for stories representing marginalized and minority groups. Here are some picks for movies you can stream right now to get that representation you’re craving.

A movie about black trans women with real black trans women as the lead actors? Check! A comedy about sex workers that neither romanticizes nor minimizes the struggle? Check! Humane, sympathetic depictions of immigrant families? Check! And no Scarlett Johansson in sight. Tangerine is famous for being the first feature length filmed on iPhones, but it’s great because it gets audiences laughing with and cheering for some of the most marginalized people in America.

Stream it on Hulu .

Yalitza Aparicio, who leads in Roma as an indigenous woman working for a white Mexican family, was not an actor. She was a school teacher. But Roma has made the 25 year old Trique and Mixtec native of Oaxaca an overnight sensation. It landed her a cover spot for Vogue , and is sending waves of empowerment through indigenous communities. Aparicio’s grace and quiet power carry the narrative of the film, an elegant demonstration of the burden women of color are accustomed to carrying for everyone else.

Stream it on Netflix .

Sorry to Bother You

About halfway through the Sorry to Bother You , Detroit (payed by Tessa Thompson) says to Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) how “creepy” it’s getting when he code-switches to his “white voice”. But it’s the only way he can succeed in the crazy capitalist corporate culture that’s turning everyone into beasts of burden. Director Boots Riley’s vision of Oakland is surreal, but not too stylized to hit far from home. The story lampoons the police, union busters, ‘thought leaders’, and the digital elite. It is unapologetically communist black power in a pop art comedy can.

What Happened, Miss Simone?

Nina Simone didn’t set out to be a musician. As a young woman trying to help her family, going into the city to play at nightclubs was the only way she could earn money. Revolutionary to her core, Simone lived a tumultuous life and stands as a powerful figure in jazz history and the civil rights movement alike. This thoughtful, warts-and-all doco features new interviews with people close to Simone, like her daughter, alongside archival interviews with Simone herself, and some striking footage of the singer commanding audiences with her powerhouse presence.

Annihilation

A women-only team of scientists goes into a scary mind bubble to find out what is going on. Nobody knows what the hell happens , but the ride is thought provoking, mesmerizing and suspenseful. Unlike splashier attempts to nab those feminist dollars (looking at you Ocean’s 8 ), Annihilation quietly decentralizes male narratives without making a big thing out of it. Tessa Thompson kicks ass yet again, plus it has Scary Bears. When was the last time you saw a movie brazenly representing Scary Bears?

Now that Barry Jenkins’ screen adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk is courting the Oscars, it’s a good time to revisit his previous movie. Moonlight won three Academy Awards including Best Picture. Jenkins mixes grit and elegance with his sensitive, three dimensional portrayal of the vulnerabilities a man faces growing up gay and black. Enough has been written about this movie already, so if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s your chance. Stream it on Amazon Prime .

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

If you’ve ever wanted to take a bus across the desert with raucous drag queens in the 90s, but were afraid to ask, this is the movie for you. It features excellent early performances from Hugo Weaving and Guy Pierce, as well as Terrence Stamp as a trans woman. Although the actors are not trans, this classic of LGBTQ cinema might just get a pass because, well, it was the 90s, and positive representation of queers was more than we were used to getting back then.

Black Panther

Speaking of Oscars, it’s been about a year since Marvel stepped up its game and launched the worldwide sensation that redefined the boundaries of comic book movies. A Boys and Girls Club in Denver rented out an entire theater so the kids could see characters that “look like them, people doing the right thing”, according to BGC Site Director Steven Roland Jr. “It showed rough communities, and that’s the kind of communities our students come from. And I think them seeing those things with their eyes,” he said, “makes a big difference.” Denver Broncos Defensive End Zach Kerr showed up to support the event and watch the film with the kids. This is just one example of the kind of impact on communities that representation can have.

Dear White People

This one’s a show instead of a movie, but it’s based on the movie starring Tessa Thompson (yes, again—because she’s slaying). The Netflix original series puts Logan Browning in the lead role as a biracial woman on a campus that safe harbors racist frat boys. The series version gives the ensemble of characters more room to breathe, while maintaining the snappy comedic tempo of the original film. It’s funny, upbeat and accessible for adults of all demographics, but don’t expect it to tiptoe around the fragility of viewers lacking in melanin.

While it should give you a good start, this list is by no means complete. But that’s great news, because it means there are plenty more movies and shows with positive representation that you can stream right now (where did Crazy Rich Asians go? It was on one of these platforms a moment ago), and more coming out all the time. So get comfy. It’s time for BIPOC, popcorn and binging!

BIPOC Cinema film Hulu LGBTQ+ Movies Netflix POC Representation

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Brian Oaster

Brian is a Choctaw writer in the Pacific Northwest.

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MISS REPRESENTATION

Written and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom,  Miss Representation  exposes how mainstream media and culture contribute to the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence in America.

The film draws back a curtain to reveal a glaring reality we live with every day but fail to see – how the media’s limited and often disparaging portrayals of women and girls makes it difficult for women to feel powerful and achieve leadership positions.

In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the collective message we receive is that a woman’s value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality, and not in her capacity as a leader. While women have made great strides in leadership over the past few decades, the United States is  75th  among 193 countries when it comes to women in the national legislature. And it’s not better outside of government. Women make up only  7.4%  of Fortune 500 CEOs and  21%  of directors, executive producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films.

Stories from teenage girls and provocative interviews with politicians, journalists, entertainers, activists, and academics, like Katie Couric, Rosario Dawson, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Cho, Condoleezza Rice, Rachel Maddow, and Nancy Pelosi, build momentum as  Miss Representation   accumulates startling facts and statistics that will leave the audience shaken, but armed with a new perspective.

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In a society where media is the most persuasive force shaping cultural norms, the message that young women and men overwhelmingly face is that a woman’s value and power lie in her youth, beauty, and sexuality and not in her capacity as a leader. Help challenge this status quo by hosting a screening of Miss Representation . With the right screening resources, you can arrange a screening in a few easy steps. Total Running Time: 1h 25m

The media is selling the idea that girls’ and women’s value lies in their youth, beauty, and sexuality and not in their capacity as leaders. Boys learn that their success is tied to dominance, power, and aggression. We must value people as whole human beings, not gendered stereotypes.

WHAT OUR VIEWERS SAY

“It is an uphill battle…” “I would urge any parent, teacher – or media executive – to watch Miss Representation” Read more Gillian Tett Financial Times

“Students Speaking Up” Seventy-three percent of students said watching Miss Representation changed their opinion about the way in which women are represented in the media. After seeing the film, sixty-one percent of students reported speaking up when seeing or hearing something derogatory towards women. Read more REACT to Film Survey  

“More men need to be exposed to this film” “More men need to be exposed to this film. Too many men like myself have gone far too long without seeing both sides of the themes brought forward in Miss Representation. Time for us to wake up.” Read more   Employee at Charles Schwab Screening, Denver, CO

“A powerful experience” “Sharing Miss Representation with our employees was a powerful experience. The film… generated an active dialogue… and empowered our employees to speak out when they see things that need to change. This film raises critical issues facing our society today, and I would encourage other companies to become part of this important conversation.” Read more Tracy Layney VP of Global HR Strategy, Technology & Operations, Gap, Inc.

“It’s starting a movement” “This powerful movie [Miss Representation] is not only educational, it’s entertaining, sometimes shocking, and really quite inspiring. Since our screening, I’ve heard a viewer talk about starting a media literacy campaign in her local community, another plans to run for office, and countless others plan to share this film with their friends, families, and most importantly, teenage daughters and sons. It’s more than a movie; it’s starting a movement.” Read more Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk Atlanta Independent Women’s Network

“Striking and insightful” “[Miss Representation] really helped me to better understand many of the difficulties women face today. It provides striking and insightful examples of inequalities suffered by women from the perspectives of both men and women.” Read more Meelap MIT Student

Common Sense Media : “Earnest, illuminating documentary about women and the media.”

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How 'Moana 2' charted a course back to the big screen

by JAKE COYLE AP Film Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — When you look at some of the numbers, it’s hard to believe “ Moana 2 ” was ever going to be anything but a movie.

When the teaser trailer for “Moana 2” dropped in May, it was watched 178 million times in 24 hours. That’s more than “ Inside Out 2 ,” more than “Frozen 2,” more than any animated Disney movie before.

A veritable ocean’s worth of anticipation is awaiting the sequel to 2016’s “Moana,” all proof that one of the more dramatic pivots in recent Walt Disney Co. history is paying off, big time. “Moana 2” was originally intended to be a streaming series. Now, it’s steering toward being one of the fall’s biggest blockbusters. What can you say except you’re welcome?

When Bob Iger returned as chief executive of Disney in late 2022, one of his top priorities was shifting away from putting the studio’s most prized assets onto streaming. He wanted to put the focus back on the big screen — and all the ancillary benefits (including merchandizing and streaming) that follow after.

The series that directors David Derrick Jr. and Jason Hand had worked on for more than a year would become “Moana 2.” The movie, which also added Dana Ledoux Miller as a director and co-writer, was only announced earlier this year. It's opening Nov. 27.

“It became all hands on board,” Derrick says. “There’s a saying in Samoa: ‘All together or not at all.’”

Derrick and Hand, both veteran storyboard artists at Disney, had effectively done their job too well. Their work convinced Disney executives to put the studio’s full weight behind a theatrical film, even though a live-action “Moana” remained in development. (That movie, directed by Thomas Kail, is set to open in July 2026.)

“We developed the world, we developed the over-arching story that we’re still telling,” says Derrick. “We would screen it in our big theater the way we watch all of us our projects here. There was a groundswelling, unanimous concert of everyone saying this needs to be on the big screen.”

“It was always going to be big,” adds Hand. “It just kept on getting bigger.”

“Moana 2” was at the nexus of a major shift for Disney and for Hollywood in calculating how to weigh theatrical and streaming. Different studios have different strategies and those are still evolving. But after rushing to throw as much content as possible on streaming services, companies like Disney began to rethink their approach.

This year, Disney has regained its box-office swagger, led by a pair of $1 billion films in “Inside Out 2” and “ Deadpool vs. Wolverine.” “Moana 2” could make it three. But however well “Moana 2” does, it’s not likely to hurt its appeal once it begins streaming. The most popular film on Disney+ last year? “Moana.”

“We always felt that it deserved to be on the big screen” says Hand. “It’s the best way to tell a story.”

But the shift for “Moana 2,” which returns Auli’i Cravalho as the voice of Moana and Dwayne Johnson as the voice of Maui, wasn’t easy. First of all, that meant living up to the standard of the first film — one that Miller, who is of Samoan heritage, considers groundbreaking for its Pacific Islander representation.

“I knew as a writer that movie was going to change what was possible,” says Miller. “It was going to change the way when I walk into a room I was going to be able to pitch a story because people had a new understanding of what it meant to be of the Pacific.”

Miller, who founded the organization PEAK (Pasifika Entertainment Advancement Komiti) as a way for Pasifika people to find community in Hollywood, is also a writer on the live-action “Moana.” “My world has become all Moana all the time,” she says, laughing.

Both films, the directors say, developed alongside each other, with many connections and shared cultural consultants.

Set three years after the original film, “Moana 2” finds Moana again forced to head across the Pacific on an ocean adventure. But this time, she’s traveling with a crew, in a new canoe, and carrying new responsibilities. That includes her younger sister, Simea (Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda).

“The way the first film connected her to her past, she’s now connecting everyone to the future,” says Derrick. “So we added and created all these new characters when it was in series and we got to know them in a deep way.”

Hand compares the series development to a workshop for the new characters.

“Yes, it was a massive undertaking — probably more so than what we initially imagined,” Hand says. “But ultimately we were telling that same story. A lot of stuff that went by the wayside just naturally helped the story be its proper fighting weight.”

Now, Moana is joined by a wayfinding crew that includes the characters Loto (Rose Matafeo), an engineer; Kele (David Fane), a grumpy farmer; and Moni (Huallai Chung), a historian and storyteller.

“What people don’t realize is that the people in the Pacific found the last discoverable land on Earth,” says Derrick, who also has ancestral ties to Samoa. “They created the largest cultural ethnosphere in the world prior to westward expansion — one third of the Earth, all through the art and spirituality and science of wayfinding. So for me, it’s very important that each one of these crew members display that Indigenous genius that it took.”

Honoring such things tends to resonate much differently in a movie theater than it does on a television. The makers of “Moana 2” are still rushing to get their film ready for cinemas, with all the spectacle and music they can fit into it. But they know their young Polynesian protagonist will be seen big.

“When I watched the first film, I was pregnant with my first child," Miller says. "I thought to myself as I was watching it: The world will be forever different because of this movie. My child will never not know a world where they are not seen on the biggest stage.”

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Study Shows More Disability Stories Onscreen, but Few Disabled Actors

The study published Wednesday also showed that television is far behind film when it comes to representation of characters with disabilities.

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By Sarah Bahr

Let’s start with the good news: Significant depictions of disability on film and television shows have nearly tripled over the past decade compared with the previous 10 years.

Almost all of those titles, however, still don’t feature disabled actors.

That was the conclusion of a new study released Wednesday by Nielsen and the nonprofit organization RespectAbility, which analyzed the representation of disabled characters on film and TV shows released from 1920 to 2020 .

The titles came from a Nielsen database that includes more than 90,000 films and TV shows that premiered over the past century. Of those, 3,000 titles were tagged as having significant disability themes or content.

Films fared better than television — about 64 percent (1,800) of the depictions of disabled characters were in feature films, and 16 percent (448) were in regular series. (The remaining depictions were in other categories like short films, limited series, TV movies or specials.) The database also found a marked increase in the number of productions with disability themes, from 41 in 2000 to 150 in 2020.

According to the report, about one in every four adults in the United States has a physical or psychological disability.

A survey attached to the study also found that people with disabilities were slightly more likely to take issue with portrayals of disabled characters. Viewers with disabilities were 8 percent more likely than those who were not disabled to characterize a TV portrayal as inaccurate, and 7 percent more likely to say there is not enough representation of disabled characters onscreen.

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Imagen Awards President on How the Ceremony Aims to Improve Latino Representation 

By Todd Gilchrist

Todd Gilchrist

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 For nearly 40 years, the Imagen Awards have shone a light on Latinos in film, television and streaming media. 

But back in 1985, the first year for the ceremony, Imagen Foundation president Helen Hernandez remembers she and her team “trying to figure out who to honor, because there really wasn’t much out there.” 

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This year, Latino creatives earned 152 Imagen nominations across 30 categories. Netflix received 14 noms, including accolades for “Griselda,” “The Lincoln Lawyer” and “El Último Vagón,” as well as for “Cobra Kai” star Xolo Maridueña, who nabbed a nod for actor in a feature film for his role as Jaime Reyes in DC’s “Blue Beetle.” 

Mayan Lopez, co-creator, writer, co-executive producer and star of “Lopez vs. Lopez” and the daughter of comedian and actor George Lopez, says her parents had been involved with the Imagen Foundation since she was very young. Lopez was herself nominated this year for actress in a comedy TV show for the series. 

She describes her experiences at previous Imagen Awards as “electric,” saying that taking a stage for and by Latinos helps not just to celebrate but reinforce a thriving presence from their community across the entertainment industry. 

As in 2022, the awards ceremony will take place at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a Mexican American museum and cultural center near Olvera Street, one of the oldest parts of downtown Los Angeles. Hernandez describes the historic area as an “amazing place unto itself.”

“What better place to be than a facility that really celebrates our cultures, there at LA Plaza,” Hernandez observes. “It exposes a lot of people in the entertainment industry to another area of Los Angeles that they may not necessarily go to.” 

In addition to appearing on screen, Hernandez underscores that it’s important for Latinos to be represented in leadership positions across all aspects of entertainment  to ensure that their voices get heard. Hernandez says that having individuals behind the scenes to advocate for Latino talent in the industry is “when the change is really going to come” in terms of representation. 

She pointed to “A Million Miles Away,” starring Michael Peña as real-life astronaut José M. Hernández, as an example of movies that can inspire Latinos to continue having “ganas,” or more loosely translated, tenacity. “We just keep going,” Hernandez says of the Latino community. “Just like those kids in [feature nominee] ‘The Long Game,’ or the astronaut Hernández, he didn’t give up. And those kids didn’t give up.”

“But that’s any kind of a story,” she says. “It could be about anybody, and that’s what the message is: our stories are like everybody else’s.”

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Gippy grewal calls for sikh representation in cbfc amid kangana ranaut's emergency row: 'it is important...'.

Curated By : Yatamanyu Narain

Last Updated: September 06, 2024, 15:36 IST

Mumbai, India

In a recent interview, Gippy Grewal emphasized the need for Sikh representation on the Censor Board, amid Kangana Ranaut's Emergency row.

In a recent interview, Gippy Grewal advocated for Sikh representation in Censor Board amid Kangana Ranaut's Emergency controversy.

Punjabi cinema star Gippy Grewal has voiced his support for including a Sikh representative on the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), as Kangana Ranaut’s upcoming film ‘Emergency’ faces delays in receiving clearance from the board. Grewal emphasized the importance of having a Sikh member on the CBFC, particularly to ensure accurate representation of the Sikh community and its religious nuances in films.

In an interview with IndiaToday.in, Gippy emphasized the importance of having a Sikh member on the board, particularly to review films that depict the Sikh community and its religion. His remarks come shortly after the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) called for the inclusion of a Sikh representative in the censor board. While promoting his latest film ‘Ardaas Sarbat De Bhale Di’, which stars Jasmin Bhasin and Gurpreet Ghuggi and focuses on spirituality, Gippy shared his thoughts on the issue. The film, shot at Hazur Sahib, one of Sikhism’s most revered holy sites, holds deep religious significance.

Gippy pointed out that while the CBFC is capable of identifying general flaws in films, recognizing religious nuances requires someone with a deep understanding of the faith. He used his own experience as an example, explaining that before submitting ‘Ardaas’ for certification, he had the film screened by the Hazur Sahib management committee, who provided an NOC (No Objection Certificate). Only then did he submit it to the CBFC.

“Having a Sikh representation in the board is very important,” Gippy stated. “Jab ‘Ardaas’ bani, censor ke liye toh jani hi thi. Par vahan bhejne se pehle, humne ye film Hazur Sahib Prabhandhak Committee ko dikhayi. Censor vo cheezein dekhegi jo overall galat hai, par for religion perspective.” He added, “it is important for an expert member to see. Unhone hume NOC di, us NOC ko humne censor board ke paas attach kar ke bheja [We showed ‘Ardaas’ to the Hazur Sahib Prabhandhak Committee first and took an NOC from them before sending the film to the censor board. The board can check on the larger things, but it is important for an expert member to check the things from a religious perspective].”

He continued, “The actor added, “For those films, jinme Sikhism ka hai, community representation hai, Punjab ka representation hai, un filmon ke liye ye bahot zaroori hai. Like a lot of people shoot their films in Punjab, but they don’t know anything about Punjab [Having a Sikh representative in the board is important for films which talk about Sikhism, represent the community or represent the state of Punjab in any form].”

For the unversed, Kangana Ranaut’s directorial release Emergency has been postponed, reportedly due to rising controversies. The actor and Mandi Lok Sabha MP has said that the film’s approval was “stopped” because CBFC members got “threats.” A new release date hasn’t been set yet.

The controversy started brewing when Emergency trailer was released a few weeks ago. It showed Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a Khalistan leader, promising to support Indira Gandhi’s party for a separate Sikh state. Irked by it, the Shiromani Akali Dal in Delhi then sent a legal notice to the CBFC, asking to stop the film because of its portrayal of Sikhs.

• censor board
• Gippy Grewal
• Kangana Ranaut
• regional cinema

• Gippy Grewal demands Sikh representation on CBFC amid Kangana Ranaut's 'Emergency' controversy

Gippy Grewal demands Sikh representation on CBFC amid Kangana Ranaut's 'Emergency' controversy

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The TOI Entertainment Desk is a dynamic and dedicated team of journalists, working tirelessly to bring the pulse of the entertainment world straight to the readers of The Times of India. No red carpet goes unrolled, no stage goes dark - our team spans the globe, bringing you the latest scoops and insider insights from Bollywood to Hollywood, and every entertainment hotspot in between. We don't just report; we tell tales of stardom and stories untold. Whether it's the rise of a new sensation or the seasoned journey of an industry veteran, the TOI Entertainment Desk is your front-row seat to the fascinating narratives that shape the entertainment landscape. Beyond the breaking news, we present a celebration of culture. We explore the intersections of entertainment with society, politics, and everyday life. Read More

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Actor Gippy Grewal pushes for Sikh representation in censor board amid 'Emergency' row

In an exclusive interview with us, punjabi superstar gippy grewal supported the idea of having a sikh representative in the censor board. his statement comes days after the gurdwara committee demanded a ban on kangana ranaut's 'emergency' and highlighted the importance of including a sikh member on the board..

Listen to Story

• Gippy Grewal said there is no "harm" in including a Sikh representative
• The current censor board doesn't have any member from the Sikh community
• The censor board refused to give a certificate to 'Emergency' after the Sikh community's objections

Actor Gippy Grewal, known for his works in the Punjabi cinema, supported the idea of including a Sikh member in the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). In an exclusive interview with IndiaToday.in, the actor highlighted that it's important to have a Sikh representative in the board, especially to review films featuring the members of the Sikh community and showing their religion. His statement comes days after The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee demanded inclusion of a Sikh member in the censor board.

Gippy was promoting his latest film 'Ardaas Sarbat De Bhale Di', when he made the statement. The film, which also stars Jasmin Bhasin and Gurpreet Ghuggi, is about spirituality and has been shot at Hazur Sahib, one of the most reverred holy places in Sikhism.

"Important to have an expert"

Gippy said, "Having a Sikh representation in the board is very important. Jab 'Ardaas' bani, censor ke liye toh jani hi thi. Par vahan bhejne se pehle, humne ye film Hazur Sahib Prabhandhak Committee ko dikhayi. Censor vo cheezein dekhegi jo overall galat hai, par for religion perspective, it is important for an expert member to see. Unhone hume NOC di, us NOC ko humne censor board ke paas attach kar ke bheja [We showed 'Ardaas' to the Hazur Sahib Prabhandhak Committee first and took an NOC from them before sending the film to the censor board. The board can check on the larger things, but it is important for an expert member to check the things from a religious perspective]."

The actor added, "For those films, jinme Sikhism ka hai, community representation hai, Punjab ka representation hai, un filmon ke liye ye bahot zaroori hai . Like a lot of people shoot their films in Punjab, but they don't know anything about Punjab [Having a Sikh representative in the board is important for films which talk about Sikhism, represent the community or represent the state of Punjab in any form]."

"They don't do justice with the Punjabi language"

"I'll tell you from my own experience. A lot of music directors have called me to Mumbai to sing Punjabi songs. And I am talking about the biggest of these directors, not the less popular ones. They often call me. I go there, and then I realise I can't sing those songs. I come back and when they ask me, I have to tell them that 'you asked me to sing a Punjabi song. Where is Punjabi in all this?' Adding ' balle balle ' to a song doesn't make it a Punjabi song. Now, those songs are neither Punjabi nor Hindi. Many times, in such cases, they are not able to do justice with the language. And that is also one of the reasons why I believe in the importance of having a Sikh member in the censor board," he explained.

The actor, who is known for his performances in the movies 'Carry on Jatta', 'Manje Bistre' and 'Warning', among others, concluded by saying there's "no harm" in including a Sikh member on the board. He said, "You'll ask me, 'what's the benefit of having a Sikh member in the committee?'. I'll ask you 'what is the loss?'. It will, 100 per cent, help make things better. At least in those cases where they are representing Sikhs, talking about the community or commenting on religion."

View this post on Instagram A post shared by 𝗚𝗶𝗽𝗽ð˜Æ 𝗚𝗿𝗲ð˜Ä𝗮𝗹 (@gippygrewal)

"Having a Sikh representation is extremely important. It's better to take that approval from the representatives and avoid going through the struggle of facing objections. It's better to let the scrutiny happen before you go to the board. If a film is representing a sect or a community, it is important for everyone that it is seen beforehand to remove any flaws or mistakes. It is good for everyone. Neither the producers face losses, nor society gets disturbed," he explained.

Ghuggi also added how the sensibilities taught by Sikhism might get lost in reviewing the films in the absence of the right representative. "The values and ideals that you are taught under Sikhism are different. It is important for one to understand them thoroughly and then represent them in a film. The approval of the representatives of the community is absolutely required so that nobody gets hurt later," he concluded.

Earlier this year, an official note from the Shiromani Gurdwara Committee was posted on social media platform X, stating that they have requested the board multiple times to think about including a Sikh representative. However, the note added that their requests and demands have fallen on deaf ears. The committee wrote a note, asking the government to ban Kangana Ranaut's 'Emergency', which they labelled as an "anti-Sikh" film.

The film has now been postponed after CBFC revoked its certificate following several petitions from the members of the Sikh community against the film's content, especially the portrayal of Sikh characters. Published By: Vineeta Kumar Published On: Sep 6, 2024 Read more | Why 'Tumbbad' is the most iconic blend of folk, fantasy and horror

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Ever since, Tevlin has traveled the world as an advocate for Down Syndrome, with her latest ad campaign for World Down Syndrome Day attracting over 150 million views globally in under a week. Awarded the prestigious Cannes Lion Gold this summer, the campaign for CoorDown, “Assume That I Can,” calls for an end to the biases and stereotypes inflicted upon people with Down Syndrome and invites others to support their full potential.

Outside of her advocacy and work as a performer, Tevlin has hosted red carpets, talk shows and podcasts. At present, she boasts more than 670,000 social media followers and counting. Her successes are reflective of someone with the will to defy expectations, who was once told she might never walk or talk, but loves proving people wrong.

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