Blending unconventional film theory with nontraditional psychology to provide a radically different set of critical methods and propositions about cinema, Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations looks at film through its communication properties rather than its social or political implications. Drawing on the tenets of James J. Gibson’s ecological theory of visual perception, the fifteen essays and forty-one illustrations gathered here by editors Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson offer a new understanding of how moving images are seen and understood.
Focusing on a more straightforward perception of the world and cinema in an attempt to move film theory closer to reality, Moving Image Theory proposes that we should first understand how cinema communicates information about the representation of the three-dimensional world through properties of image and sound.
“The editors have assembled a distinguished cast of empirical researchers and film theorists to explore, within a naturalistic framework, the ways moving images mesh with our minds. Every essay teems with insights and fruitful suggestions for further reflection and experiment.”—David Bordwell, from the Foreword
About the Author
Joseph D. Anderson is the chair of the Mass Communication and Theatre Department at the University of Central Arkansas. The director of the Center for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, he is the author of The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory.
Barbara Fisher Anderson, managing director of the Center for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, is coauthor of “The Case for an Ecological Metatheory” in Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies.
Product Details
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press; 1st edition (February 1, 2005)
