Précis 1

23 Nov 22
Projections: The Journal for Movies
and Mind (in press, 2023)
Précis of Movies on Our Minds

James E. Cutting

Movies on Our Minds (Cutting, 2021) provides structural analyses of popular, English-language cinema and
maps them onto biological and psychological bases. It progresses from the details of optics and screen
projection; through transitions and shots; on to scenes, montages, and syntagmas; and finally to larger narrative
units and the flow of patterns of elements across whole movies. It focuses on changes in all of those patterns
across a century, ascribing them to evolution. That evolution, akin to Darwinian evolution, is hallmarked by
patterns of reproduction with inheritance, variation, and selection of traits over time. Two forces appear to have
guided this evolution: the matching of elements of film form to predilections of the biology of our visual
systems, and their matching to predilections of our cognition, particularly as it has been shaped by visual
culture.

Movies on Our Minds discusses biological and psychological underpinnings that

constrain the physical form of popular movies. It summarizes and extends empirical research that
my students and I conducted over a dozen years, published in three dozen book chapters and
articles in professional outlets across cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, and film and
media studies. In those works, we focused on tracking the changes in popular, English-language
movies, eventually encompassing those released from 1915 to 2015. Overall, we analyzed three
hundred movies, shot-by-shot and often frame-by-frame, sampled from among the most popular
and across a wide range of genres. Many analyses were done by hand using digital players and
recording results on spread sheets. Many others were done by purpose-written computer
algorithms analyzing digital movie files. And some were done with hybrid techniques.

The descriptive purpose of the book is to mesh film form with psychological phenomena.
The theoretical purpose of the book is to provide a new framework for our understanding of
cinematic change. That is, I claim there is strong evidence for evolution in popular movies.
Moreover, this evolution is not far removed from biological evolution in its major precepts.
Darwin postulated four tenets of evolution: reproduction, heredity of traits, variation in traits, and
selection of traits. Although movies do not reproduce themselves, it is obvious that many are
produced, sometimes remade. It is patent that many movies are similar to others that have gone
before—sequels, prequels, franchises, spinoffs, and, more generally, genres of movies that share
many “trait”-like similarities. It is also evident that there is ample variation in these traits across
otherwise similar movies. But most importantly—and the focus of the research and data
discussed in the book—there has been continual selection of traits over time. Or, in obverse,
across successive cohort populations of popular movies, there has been a culling of many less
effective trait values, gradually altering film form.

Moreover, I claim, there have been two domains in this evolution—one focused on
matching images with the biology of our visual systems, and the other focused on optimal form
for cognition and on cultural changes that have affected our cognition. Some of these changes
have resulted from technological advances, others from style choices made by filmmakers.
 Précis 2

Although not exhaustive of those considered in my book, consider nine examples, classified into
four groups.

Evolutionary Changes Fit to Our Biology

Technological Changes Suiting our Visual Systems

1. Aspect ratios (the width of the image divided by its height) grew from the Academy
ratio of 1.37 in the 1930s to 1950s to modes of 1.85 and 2.35 by the 1990s and beyond. Over that
half century the “trait” of wider screens gradually replaced the “trait” of narrower ones. Wider
images better fill our visual fields and, in particular, stimulate our accessory optic systems. These
systems have the biological function of alerting us to self-motion (as with dollies and pans), even
though we may be sitting comfortably in a cinema chair. They also help determine where we
should look and how we should to respond to motion. In essence, they help us remain active and
reactive to cinema.

2. The gradual dominance of color over black-and-white cinema from the 1930s through
1970s not only naturalized images but also provided viewers with new information about scene
changes, helping them to segment the flow of the narrative. And with advances in color in the
last three decades has come high-dynamic range images, which further aid categorization of
objects and provide tonal (and likely, emotionally evocative) variations across scenes and
movies.

3. The resolution of film improved from the 1910s to the 1980s, stepped back a bit with
digitalization in the 1990s, only to improve again with 4K (4048 horizontal pixels) and soon with
8K images. Thus, pixel resolution has begun to match receptor resolution in the foveae of our
eyes. Moreover, digitalization has increased the brightness range of images by removing the
half-cycle of darkness between analog frames. Somewhat ironically, these trends have allowed
the overall images to become darker, gradually dropping in overall luminance from 1935 to
2010. This darkening contributes to increased contrast differences in the image, making brighter
objects and characters easier to discern against their darker backgrounds. Although our eyes can
see cotast-ratio differences of as much as 10,000:1, over the last century popular movie displays
have gone from ratios of near 200:1 to 4000:1. In addition, pre- and post-production digital
enhancements from the 1990s to the present have allowed the creation of natural-looking
environments, characters, and actions that could never have been produced in the real world.

Style Changes Suiting Our Visual Systems

4. Cinematography has increasingly placed important information in the center of the

image, usually characters but also critical objects shown in inserts. This centering has been
manifested in at least two ways. First, silent movies into early talkies and through to the 2000s
have increasingly used shots of single characters, placing them in the middle of the screen. This
parallels what we do normally with our visual systems, looking at people with our foveae and
allowing our peripheral vision to fill up with environmental context. Second, from the 1920 to
the 2010, mean shot scales gradually went from a near long shot (the character seen from near
the ankles up) to a near closeup (the character seen from upper-chest up), suggested in Figure 1.
 Précis 3

Figure 1: Details from shots in ten movies illustrating mean shot scale across release years. Holding image height
constant, the details are centered and laterally trimmed to equalize image width, nullifying aspect-ratio differences.
Mean shot scales are determined from the data of Barry Salt (see Cutting and Armstrong, 2018). These movies are
all action films: The Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo et al, 1920), The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh et al, 1930), Santa Fe Trail
(Michael Curtiz et al, 1940), The Flame and the Arrow (Jacques Tourneur et al, 1950), Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick
et al, 1960), Beneath the Planet of Apes (Ted Post et al, 1970), Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back
(Irvin Kershner, 1980); Die Hard 2 (Renny Harlin et al, 1990), Mission: Impossible II (John Woo et al, 2000), and
Inception (Christopher Nolan et al, 2010)

The latter brings information about the eyes and mouth of characters within our parafoveae,
allowing the emotional responses of characters to be registered in a single fixation (Smith, 2013).

5. Movie images have become less cluttered. One decluttering process concerns the
number of characters in the frame, mentioned above, which has gradually diminished from a
mean of about 2.5 in the 1940s and 1950s to a mean of about 1.3 in the 1990s to 2000s. This
gives viewers fewer things to look at and aids their extraction of the information provided by
filmmakers. Another trend with the same aim is that movie images have simply become cleaner.
Objects and textures have been removed from many scenes, and particularly from around the
faces of characters.

Evolutionary Changes Associated with Cognition and Cultural Change

All the while popular cinema has better accommodated our visual proclivities, it has also
adjusted to our cognitive abilities and to our cultural milieu. One ability paramount to narrative
understanding is segmentation (e.g., Zacks, 2020). We parse the movie stream into constituent
parts, typically into scenes, sequences, and larger narrative parts, but also thematically related
shots into montages, and subscenes into groups that I call syntagmas. This segmentation process
aids memory, and memory facilitates understanding.
 Précis 4

Style Changes Suiting Our Cognition

6. Scenes are central elements of popular movies. Since the 1940s, but less so before,
movie scenes have typically begun and ended with longer-duration shots. Long-duration shots at
the beginning of a scene allow the viewer to accommodate a change in location, in characters,
and/or in time frame. Long-duration shots at the ends of scenes likely provide information for
upcoming scenes, sometimes called dangling causes. Shot scales also typically vary across a
scene. Beginning shots are longer-scaled, show more background with characters generally
smaller. Mid-scene shots typically move in on the characters, so that their faces fill more of the
screen, and ending shots often move away. Data shows that shot scale, shot duration, as well as
color changes are the most salient information associated with viewers’ segmentation of scenes.

7. Reaction shots have always been part of popular cinema, but conversations have
changed dramatically. Between the 1940s and the 2010s conversations have gradually gotten
shorter, but also more plentiful. Strikingly, they have increasingly ended with reaction shots—
shots of a nonspeaking character reflecting on the conversation just finished. This is a strong cue
for the viewer to try to understand the mental state of the character and what she might do next.
In addition, most reaction shots now have catch lights—reflections in the eyes that help give a
sense of mental and emotional life.

Style Changes and the Flynn Effect

Two dramatic and wide-ranging changes in popular movies are, I claim, associated with
the Flynn Effect. This effect concerns the world-wide, increasing performance of average
individuals on intelligence tests. The most salient example is performance on Raven’s
Progressive Matrices. These tests present geometric patches (matrices) that change (progress).
Test-takers are given one pair of matrices that change along several dimensions, and below them
a single matrix. They then must pick from a variety of choices another matrix which, coupled
with the unpaired matrix, best matches the change in the first matrix pair. The test is not easy.
Nonetheless, a 90th-percentile performance on the test in 1940 gradually reduced to the 30th
percentile by 2000.

Does this mean people have gotten smarter? I think not, and James Flynn (2007) agrees.
Instead, we—and other human beings across the world—have gotten faster at extracting
information from visual displays. In a way, this should not be surprising. People in the early 21st
century are much more saturated with visual information than those in 1950, who in turn were
much more exposed than those in 1900, and so on for all peoples before. I claim that the Flynn
Effect is associated with several changes in popular movie form. Consider two:

8. The best known is the shortening of mean shot durations across whole movies. These
averaged between ten and twelve seconds from the 1930s to the 1950s, but then declined linearly
from the 1960s through the 2010s to about four seconds. My argument is that, if people are
generally faster at extracting information from visual displays, filmmakers appropriately
shortened the durations of shots. And our data show that all classes of shots have been gradually
shortened by about the same amount.
 Précis 5

9. Narration in popular movies between the 1940s and the 2010s has gotten more
complex. That is, it dodges around among locations, characters, and even time frames more
often. Viewers must extract and then hold more fragments of narration in mind as the movie
unfolds. This can be intellectually challenging and, I would claim, also pleasurable (e.g. Berliner,
2017).

Extinction

Finally, if evolution selects, it also culls. Movies on Our Minds outlines several examples
of such extinction. Briefly, consider three. Perhaps the most salient is the vanishing of a
hierarchical system distinguishing movie units. By the 1930s popular movies had generally
settled on cuts between shots within a scene, dissolves between shots that straddled scenes, and
fades separating shots of larger narrative units. This system declined through the 1940s to 1950s
and disappeared by the end of the 1960s. To be sure, fades and dissolves still occur, but almost
99 percent of all transitions are now cuts and have been since about 1975. Another case is the
split-screening of phonecalls, which died out in the late 1910s and has recurred only sporadically
since (e.g. Cutting, 2022). And another concerns scene structure. In the 1940s and 1950s major
characters often walked in and out of ongoing scenes, much as they do in theater. By the 2000s
they almost never did.

Summary

For these reasons and others, Movies on Our Minds suggests that popular movies are not
simply tools for capitalism, or for fashion, or for the teasing of the unconscious, or for
maintaining and subverting dominant social values and biases. Instead, they also have a complex,
discernable structure, where many of its aspects (call them “traits”) have evolved over a century
to better suit viewer engagement. However, just as biological evolution has not made animals
and plants “better,” cinematic evolution has not inherently made movies better. Instead, I claim,
it has made them easier to engage with.

References

Berliner, Todd. 2017. Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Cutting, James E. 2021. Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Cutting, James E. 2022. “Evolution of the Depiction of Telephone Calls in Popular Movies.” Projections 16 (2): 1-
26. doi: 10.3167/proj.2022.160201
Cutting, James E. and Kacie Armstrong. 2018. “Cryptic Emotions and the Emergence of a Metatheory of Mind in
Popular Filmmaking.” Cognitive Science 42 (4): 1317-1344. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12586.
Flynn, James. 2007. What is Intelligence? New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, T. J. (2013). “Watching you watch movies: Using eye tracking to inform cognitive film theory.” In
Psychoncinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura, 165–191. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Zacks, Jeffrey M. 2020. “Event Perception and Memory.” Annual Review of Psychology 71: 165-
191. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010419-051101