Televisual Aesthetics: Audiovisual Spaces, Moods and Symbolic Meanings in Complex TV-Series
Since the success of 'complex TV-series' (Mittell 2015) both in popular culture and in academic discourses, a lot has been said about their specificities in creating multifaceted characters (e.g. Bruun 2016), sophisticated plots (e.g. Mittell 2015), and differentiated strategies to involve viewers cognitively and emotionally into their diegetic worlds. Thereby a major focus has been on narrative aspects: complex networks of plot lines on the global scale of a series' and the related dynamics of informing and engaging viewers for TV-characters - to just mention two relevant research issues. Obviously such elements also affect the style of a series: e.g. the connection of different plot lines and different spatio-temporal dimensions in a story by audiovisual blending, editing, flashbacks or flash forwards; or the creation of complex characters by offering different internal and external perspectives of them in vision and sound. Although audiovisual styles are the very medium of a narrative, it has been rather neglected for a long time. It is only for some years, that TV studies began to shed more light on the specificities of audiovisual styles in complex TV series (e.g. Nannicelli 2012; Jacob/Peacock 2013; Cardwell 2013). Instead of just transferring our knowledge of cinematic poetics on television, a new line of research is discovering the very specifics of complex televisual styles.
The paper intends to follow up on this current line of research. After a short recapitulation of some relevant results and observations in this discourse it will discuss the specific role of spatial aesthetics for complex televisual styles. As has been shown in single case studies (e.g. in Jason/Peacock 2013; Guffey 2014), the stylistic creation of audiovisual spaces is a key element to involve viewers into challenging diegetic worlds. Viewers are confronted with spatio-temporal structures in a TV narrative first of all by perceiving, experiencing and interpreting the spaces that frame a character's actions and expressions. Hence the styles of televisual spaces are the very medium of cognitive, affective and symbolic meanings.
After a more general outline of this research perspective, a specific focus of the paper will be on the aesthetic interplay of spatial atmospheres, moods, and symbolic meanings in single TV series. Following Plantinga (2014), cinematic moods can imply moral perspectives on a character. As will be shown, also in TV series spatial atmospheres of audiovisual spaces can imply "moral moods" that relevantly guide viewers cognitive and emotional evaluation of a character. This is equally true for other, more symbolic meanings, anchored in the narrative of a storyworld. - The stylistic, emotional and symbolic elements of televisual spaces will be analyzed both on the local scale of single episodes and on the global scale across the serial world. It will be discussed how the global dynamics of televisual spaces can result in varying, contrasting, diverging and ambivalent creations of recurring spaces, relevantly contributing to the viewers experience of complexity.
References
Bruun, Margrete 2016. The Antihero in American Television. London/New York: Routledge.
Jacobs, Jason, and Steven Peacock (ed.) 2013. Television Aesthetics and Style. London: Bloomsbury.
Mittel, Jason 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York et al. :New York Univ. Press.
Nannicelli, Ted 2012. "Ontology, intentionality and television, aesthetics", in: Screen 53:2, 164-179.
Plantinga, Carl 2014. "Mood and Ethics in Narrative Film" In Cognitive Media Theory, ed. by Ted Nannicelli, and Paul Taberham, 141-157. New York/London: Routledge.
Voice-over narration and subjectivity in serial television drama. An exploration of narratorial functions, subjective access, and narrative engagement
Short Abstract
Our paper explores how voice-over statements in recent serial television dramas like Dexter and Mr Robot may be analyzed within a cognitive framework, asking how voice-over commentaries affect our conceptual and emotional engagement with a character’s subjective experience of the unfolding events. In contrast to voice-over narration in classical Hollywood cinema (as described by Sarah Kozloff), we assume that voice-over statements in contemporary television create rather ambiguous blends of traditional narratorial devices and subjective access points to the minds of the central characters, and explore how this affects our perspective on the represented world.
Abstract
Over the last decades, an increasing number of serial television comedies and dramas have relied on voice-over narration as a dominant element in their narrative logic (e.g., My So- Called Life, Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, Dexter, House of Cards, Mr Robot). A closer look at the voice-over commentaries in Dexter (Showtime, 2006-13) and Mr Robot (USA network, 2015-) suggests that they create a very subjective and ambiguous level of narration that crucially shapes our engagement with these shows.
In the past, voice-over narration in moving images has been discussed mainly under a structuralist perspective, focusing on the status of the speaker in the ontological structure of a given narrative (see Kozloff 1988 for the most prominent discussion). However, the voice- over commentaries in Dexter, Mr Robot and possibly other shows are difficult to pin down in this framework. Realized in the first person and through the voices of the characters, they are clearly homodiegetic, but their overall status in the narrative remains ambiguous since they seem to oscillate between a range of different narrative functions: They exhibit backstory information (like a classical narrator), but also verbalize characters’ subjective responses to particular experiences in a highly idiosyncratic way (which suggests a more immediate representation of character thought). As a performative element, Dexter’s witty comments seem to address an implicit narratee, while Elliot Alderson’s voice in Mr Robot explicitly addresses the viewer in the second person, as his imaginary friend. But in contrast to many embedded narrators in classical Hollywood cinema, the on-screen characters are never introduced as frame narrators that talk to a specified, “surrogate” audience within the represented world (cf. Kozloff 1988, 50). According to our first intuition, then, the voice-over commentaries in Dexter and Mr Robot create a rather ambiguous blend of narratorial devices and subjective access points to the minds of the central characters.
Our paper explores how these voice-over statements may be analyzed within a cognitive framework, where the audiovisual narrative provides cues for the mental (re-)construction of a storyworld by the audience. As its central element, this mental model includes a character experiencing the events (e.g., see Herman 2009). On this basis, we ask how voice-over commentaries affect our conceptual and emotional engagement during the process of narrative comprehension. Drawing on work by Jens Eder and Murray Smith, we assume this centrally involves our mental access, imaginary proximity (Eder 2010), and sympathetic allegiance (Smith 1995) to and with the central character.
Furthermore, we assume that the interpretation of voice-over statements draws mainly on two types of generalized knowledge and mental architecture. Firstly, we assume that voice- over statements may cue communicative situation models. As Sarah Kozloff has shown, frame narratives in classical Hollywood cinema often establish confessional settings with “audience surrogates,” e.g., a courtroom with a jury (Kozloff 1988, 50). Although the status of voice overs in television remains much more ambiguous, their interpretation may involve the activation (or priming) of similar communication models. Secondly, we ask how voice-over statements relate to the specific story situation represented on the screen. Cognitive narratology suggests that relevant story events involve a character’s emotional reaction to incidents that disrupt “normalcy” (Hogan 2011). In this regard, we ask how voice-over statements contribute to our understanding of emotional episodes, or whether they highlight other dimensions of narrative meaning-making.
In our talk, we further evaluate the literature on subjectivity and engagement to flesh out an analytical framework that explores possible theoretical categories of voice-over in serial television. In close readings of Dexter and Mr Robot, we will then explore how different types of voice-over statements contribute to an understanding of the narrating character’s subjective mental perspective and thus influence our conceptual and emotional engagement with the unfolding narrative.
As a first working hypothesis, voice-over narration in serial television often seems to create a somewhat paradoxical situation, creating an imaginary proximity to and sympathetic allegiance with the central characters, but at the expense of increasing the distance to the represented world and the character’s social environment. For example, Dexter’s ironic voice-over commentaries often suggest his emotional detachment from the immediate moment, while Elliot Alderson’s statements in Mr Robot explicitly point to the factual unreliability of what we are seeing. This suggests a less immediate engagement with canonical emotion episodes on the micro-structural level of narrative comprehension, in favor of a closer allegiance at a higher level of comprehension, focusing on the characters’ conscious elaboration on their experiences, actions, and perspectives on the world.
References
Eder, Jens (2010). Understanding Characters. Projections. The Journal for Movies and Mind, 4(1), 16-40.
Herman, David (2009). Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hogan, Patrick Colm (2011). Affective Narratology. The Emotional Structure of Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska.
Kozloff, Sarah (1988). Invisible Storytellers. Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film. Berkley: University of California.
Smith, Murray (1995). Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Following Our Senses in the Dark: On Leviathan (2012) and the Embodied Fabula
Abstract
A product of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor & Paravel 2012) presents a fascinating new take on the documentary that leaves us ‘with only our senses to follow in the dark’ (Coldiron 2012, par. 2). Despite Leviathan’s lack of mainstream appeal it would be possible to perceive the film in relation to Tim Recuber’s (2007) concept of the ‘immersion cinema’, as representing a ‘new set of technological and aesthetic criteria in which sensory experience and the physical immersion of the spectator within the medium are of paramount importance’ (p. 321). Following Recuber, immersion cinema contains an ‘overemphasis on physical experience [that] creates passive consumers who pay to plug in to visceral thrills without, necessarily, any meaningful interaction with the film’ (p. 325). Eventually, such spectacles, following Recuber, ‘do effectively grab our attention, but their immediacy and sensationalism tend to divert that attention away from contemplation or discussion’ (p. 327).
Given that Leviathan does not invite the spectator to engage in neither inference-making nor schematic categorization, it would be tempting to perceive the film as not only affective but also non-cognitive. Yet, quite contrary to the argument raised by Recuber, I maintain that Leviathan through its bodily-sensorial appeal, Ernst Karel’s cacophonous sound mix, its extended use of GoPro-cameras to destabilize quotidian perception, and its lack of linear narrative sequencing or discursive clarity engages its spectators with a specific affect-laden mode of cognitive reflection. Assigning meanings to the estranged audiovisual imagery of Leviathan requires considerable cognition, yet this cognitive activity is intimately connected to how the film agitates corporal-visceral thrills. The film’s ‘cognitive-affectivity’ thus challenges a tendency to antagonize cognition and affect, which can be found in both classical cognitive narratology through the idealization of cognition as sufficient condition for narrative comprehension (e.g., Bordwell, 1985, 2008), but also in the categorization of affect as immediate, non-cognitive, and bodily autonomous responses to the images thus detached from their representational and narrative dimensions (e.g., Massumi, 2002; Shaviro, 2010).
Granted, Leviathan might not invite for cognitive reflection in the ‘cold’, ‘computational’, or cognitive-analytical sense that has dominated cognitive science until recently, yet the film’s strong focus on (destabilizing) bodily, perceptual, and spatial orientation, does not mean that it escapes cognition entirely. Instead, by subverting habitual perceptual orientation the film demonstrates how intimately cognition is connected to factors such as proprioception, sensorimotor integration, visual scanning, and affect modulations (cf. Antunes, 2016; Gallese & Guerra, 2012). To better capture the cognitive-affective dimension of Leviathan and cinema more generally, this paper suggests the concept of the ‘embodied fabula’.
As a description of the mental construction of the cinematic world, we might differentiate between a ‘computational’/analytical (i.e., based on logical inferences, information-processing, schemata application, hypotheses-testing, etc.) and an embodied (affective, emotional, proprioceptive, empathetic, sensorial, etc.) fabula. Whereas the former structures our perception of the ongoing events with the aim of (re)constructing causal-linear narrative sense, the latter engages with the cinematic events in an online, enactive, affective, cognitive, and embodied manner. Although both are fundamentally cognitive only the embodied fabula encompasses corporal-affective, emotional, sensorial, activities as central for a basic cognitive comprehension of the cinematic events.
Thus, unlike its cognitive-analytical counterpart, the embodied fabula does not limit narrative comprehension to the restricted sphere of ‘cold’, ‘computational’ cognitive activities such as inference-making, the testing of various hypotheses, schemata application, and a causal-linear reconstruction of events. Building upon embodied, enactive, and situated approaches within the cognitive sciences and neuroscience, the embodied fabula is an analytical tool, which attempts to understand how narrative comprehension rely upon the whole arsenal of cognitive, emotional, motor-active, and corporal-affective responses. While the analytical fabula is apt for discussions of textual, discursive, investigative aspects of narration, the embodied fabula has been designed to examine how the events are felt, sensed, or experienced.
The embodied fabula therefore marks a film-analytical attempt to incorporate into our conceptual toolbox the current trend within the cognitive sciences and neuroscience to bring perception and action together and to think cognition in embodied, enactive, affective, and situated terms. The embodied fabula broadens the scope of the fabula such that it chimes with our current understanding of cognition as emerging out of its nonlinear, dynamic, and complex interrelations with – rather than operating in isolation from – affective, emotional, perceptual, proprioceptive, and motor-active processes. Trying to understand Leviathan in purely affective terms would clearly be a mistake, yet the film evidences the necessity to rethink the cinematic spectator as embodied and situated in the cinematic universe or ‘world’ crafted by the film (cf. Yacavone, 2015) rather than as a cognitive, analytical, and computational processing of information about this world.
In this talk we are interested in what ways the theory of affordances could enrich our understanding of the skillful technique of editing in creating narratives/meaning in film. Affordance theory comes from James J. Gibson’s work where Gibson (Gibson 1979) argued in favor of direct perception: we pick up information from the environment in relation to our own possible actions, i.e. the environment offers us action possibilities. Editing technique on the other hand shows skillful actions in creating meanings. What we are suggesting is to describe the way affordances create or motivates narratives for the audience. We especially focus on the notion of social affordances: i.e. we understand the actions of others in relation to how we can interact with them. Following J. J. Gibson’s view, we take affordances in broad terms and situate them with a notion of “a rich landscape of affordances”, a conceptual framework in which affordances are not limited to motor skills but considered in terms of rich and varied abilities in sociocultural practices (Kiverstein & Rietveld 2014).
About the Session
In this session, we will discuss the development and piloting of an interview guide that can/will shape our investigation of the ways in which filmmakers use mental imagery in their filmmaking process. Previously, our investigations focused on creative and interpretive artists working in other art forms. We interviewed artists working alone—primarily visual artists. We also focused on artists working within an ensemble process: actors and directors, choreographers, and musicians.
For this first stage of a proposed larger study, we focused primarily on filmmaking students and emerging professionals. (These subjects are working almost independently and they take all the roles: the directors/camera persons/editors of their films.) We explored with these subjects how they use their own storehouse of mental images as important sources for their films. We discussed visual, kinesthetic, tactile, auditory, and aural images and how each subject retrieved, manipulated, and modified these image. We also spoke about the essential oscillation between internal image and external transformation.
Interestingly, at this stage of our investigation, it seems that a large percentage of our subjects do believe that their stored images (retrieved consciously or retrieved through dreaming or meditation) drive their work. As they are creating their film, they constantly oscillate between the stimulating image and the one they see before them through the camera lens. As they experiment with the various aspects of the elements of film, they return to the stimulating image to add details. As they expand their experiences, these young artists hope to work within a team and find other artists who can both respect their process and add to their film. As our work progresses, we intend to interview subjects who are cinematographers and editors.
We particularly encourage members of filmmaking teams to attend our session and share their ideas about imagery and the filmmaking process. Our goal is to fine tune our interview guide, begin interviews with professional filmmakers (directors, cinematographers, and editors), and to publish our findings in a series of research-based articles, as well as write a trade book geared more toward the general public. (The work with actors and directors morphed into a text book entitled Creative Drama and Imagination: Transforming Ideas into Action that focused on how to use mental imagery in conducting creative drama activities with young people ages six through fourteen.
Please talk to us at the end of the session if you would like to be interviewed for our book.
Previous neuroscientific studies suggest that observing human action activates motor and mirror neuron areas in the brain and has a role in creating empathy. Empathy, in turn, has been linked to identification and identification to the spectator’s enjoyment of the movie. The presentation discusses theories, hypotheses, and ideas related to an upcoming doctoral study about the role of handedness in this process.
In this talk, I present the results of my doctoral thesis about brain activity during movie viewing measured with magnetoencephalography (MEG). I briefly present the basics of MEG and advantages of studying brain activity in naturalistic experimental settings, as well as results and methodological advances of our work. Using movies as stimuli helps us understand sensory and cognitive brain processes of our everyday life. Here I will describe what we have discovered about the brain using Maya Deren’s movie “At Land”.
