Neurofilmology of the Moving Image. Gravity and Vertigo in Contemporary Cinema

Walking alongside an acrobat on a high wire suspended in mid-air; falling at breakneck speed towards a fatal impact with the ground; performing upside-down flips into the shoes of an astronaut drifting in the void... This book offers a journey without pause into the engaging adventure of contemporary film experience – a progressive abandonment of firm certainties and a drawing closer to the unfathomable. A journey in which we saw ourselves reflected in the characters that today’s cinema uses to engage us, above all through our corporeality.  Observing the contemporary film experience means attempting to study the attentional and emotional energy that traverses the ideal meeting ground between the film’s modalities of expression and the spectator’s modalities of reception and comprehension. The theoretical paradigm of Neurofilmology is a new interdisciplinary research program that observes the film experience by adopting an epistemological approach based on dialogue between film and media theory with both the experimental findings and the speculative tools of cognitive psychology and neurocognitive sciences. Neurofilmology embraces a methodological approach that combines the first-person observation typical of phenomenological philosophy and the attention to third-person inquiry typical of experimental psychology and behavioural neuroscience for film and media studies.