Communication

This essay examines the adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights (1847) by film director Andrea Arnold (Wuthering Heights, 2011). My main goal is to characterize the film style of this adaptation within the frame of a tendency in contemporary cinema in which the haptic and phenomenal appeal of human bodies and the landscape provide a new configuration of the materiality of the story world through the senses and experiential immersion of film spectators.

For decades, the audiovisual nature of the film medium has limited film scholarship to the strict consideration of sound and sight as the senses at play. Aware of the limitations of this sense-to-sense correspondence, Laura U. Marks has been the first to consistently give expression to a new and emergent line of enquiry that seeks to understand the multisensory nature of film.
Adding to the emergent awareness of the cinema of the senses, neuroscience, specifically multisensory studies, has identified autonomous sensory systems beyond the classic five senses: the vestibular (orientation and balance), proprioception (posture and body position), pain, and temperature perception. This essay investigates the principles of the multisensory film experience when applied to our sense of orientation and balance in film – the vestibular in film. Here I seek to outline the neural and physiological evidence supporting the idea that we can have access to the multisensory exclusively through sound and image, based on the nature of our perception and cognition.
I then apply this frame of reference to a new understanding of Gus Van Sant’s cinema of walking composed by the so-called death trilogy of Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005) plus Paranoid Park (2007). With this analysis I show how the vestibular sense can be a powerful aesthetic and cinematic mode of filmmaking, as well revealing of the sensuous nature of film.

This essay examines the concepts of originality and experientiality in film and compares Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Gus Van Sant’s homonymous shot-for-shot remake (1998) to argue for a change of paradigms from post-modernism to experientism. I seek to deconstruct the attributed importance of originality as an operational concept in film evaluation. Departing from the many meanings held by the concept of originality, I argue that the prevailing post-modern idea that all is a citation and there is nothing new because everything has already been created is no longer valid in the context of the current paradigm of filmic creation, a paradigm I call experientiality, or experientism–reflecting, the idea that everything has at least a minimum amount of originality based on experience. I build my case around a discussion of theoretical and historical groundings and an analysis of Gus Van Sant’s film Psycho (1998), a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). My purpose is to call for an end to the post-modern paradigm to invite readers to understand film creation not primarily in terms of the object but in terms of the audience experience.

Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) heralded the director’s return 20 years after the release of Days of Heaven (1978). The Thin Red Line is Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’ 1962 novel about the Battle of Guadalcanal, in which American and Japanese troops fought for control of the Guadalcanal Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The film has received as much passionate praise as criticism (see Michaels 2009). Several critics have castigated the film’s use of long, complex interior monologues that concatenate the voices of multiple characters.

This chapter examines the aesthetic and perceptual implications of the vestibular sense in Bergensbanen: Minutt for Minutt (The Bergen Train: Minute by Minute) (NRK 2009) and thermoception in Nasjonal Vedkveld (National Wood [Fire] Night) (NRK 2013). These documentaries explore a conception of film ecology in which landscape and nature are not simply represented audiovisually, but also elicit perceptual experiences as the primary cinematic appeal. By looking at issues of experientiality in the documentary film, the chapter seeks to promote an awareness within the field of cognitive film theory that the senses are as important to our understanding of film experience as emotions and empathy. This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Norway has a rich but largely unexplored history of continental and insular Arctic Cinema, or what I would like to call Norwegian Arctic Cinema (NAC). Little, if any, attention from Anglo-Saxon or even Norwegian film scholars has been devoted to mapping the films made above the Norwegian Arctic circle, specifically, in the continental counties of Nordland, Troms and Finnmark and the Svalbard archipelago. Only recently has systematic attention been devoted to mapping global Arctic Cinema and its transnational aspects beyond strict anthropological examinations of indigenous film, which are the fruit of the efforts of Anna Stenport and Scott Mackenzie,2 who first described the concept of Arctic Cinema. NAC in particular, however, has remained overlooked in its cultural importance and aesthetic contribution to Norwegian cinema.

What are the perceptual correlates behind our multisensory experience of film? In other words, what supports the claim that the perceptual experience of a film can fall into the realm of senses outside the classic five senses? Using 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example, this chapter puts forth some arguments as to why our perceptual experience of an audiovisual medium such as film might be considered multisensory.

Public relations has and, it appears, always has had an image problem. From public relations' protohistory, through the rise of the publicist and press agent, the history of the relationship between journalists and public relations practitioners remained rocky. Using the New York Times as a lens, this study seeks to examine, through a qualitative framing analysis (N = 106), how public relations was perceived and discussed by one of its most important audiences, the journalist, during the early years of the twentieth century. The study found that while the tasks and media used in the practice of public relations as framed by the Times may be accurate, the cultural context of the early 20th century called the very "doing" of public relations into question.

Objectives: Increasing blood pressure (BP) increases the risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD). Lower frequency music may lower BP and heart rate (HR), therefore, decreases the CVD risk. Methods: Participants were 16 high BP individuals aged 20 to 50 years. The protocol consisted of 2 visits (experimental & control). Music was tuned between 440 Hz and 432 Hz, and the frequencies changed every 10 minutes. HR variability, diastolic function, oxytocin, and amylase were recorded at each phase. An (ANOVA) was used to examine the effects of music. Results: Mental arithmetic significantly increased BP and HR (all ps<0.01). There were significant differences between the stress condition and all other conditions, all p’s < .02. There was a significant main effect for Music Order, F (1, 6) = 6.23, p = .047, ƞp2= .51, β = .55. Participants had lower HR listening to 432 Hz music (M = -7.20, se = 2.47) than 440 Hz music (M = -5.33, se = 2.71), t(7) = 2.53, p = .04, d ‘ = .41. Con...