Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504731
54 M PS E . O R G for the purposes of filmmaking at the time of this writing is Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja's "Embodied Cognition and Cinema, 2015." Coëgnarts and Kravanja claim that "the construction of sound meaning and visual meaning in film is embodied and rooted in bodily experience." Coëgnarts, M., & Kravanja, P., (2015). This contrasts with the conception of cognition as a mental-only operation. Mathew Cipa says, Coëgnarts and Kravanja have "revealed the artificiality of any divisions between embodied understanding and intellectual understanding." (Cipa, 2016). While meaning is rooted in bodily experience, it is important to keep in mind that meaning is ultimately still influenced by culture. Ibarretxe- Antuñano suggests that a physically grounded experience goes through a cultural filter and comes out as a physically culturally grounded experience. For this reason, our experience of a film, even in today's westernized world, is determined to an extent by our cultural context. Let's look at how a film BY JAVIER QUESADA MPSE BY JAVIER QUESADA MPSE Embodied Cognition and Cinema Embodied cognition, in short, postulates that the body is deeply integrated into cognition. In other words, that all of our thinking is grounded on the basis of our sensory-motor experience. The themes at the forefront of embodied cognition are that the characteristics and affordances of an organism's anatomy limit the concepts an organism can acquire, that is, "the concepts on which an organism relies to understand its surrounding world depend on the kind of body that it has." (Shapiro, L., 2010). And that contrary to disembodied theories of cognition, "the body or world plays a constitutive rather than merely causal role in cognitive processing." (Shapiro, L., 2010). Recent studies and research in embodied cognition in cinema have been yielding more information about how our experience of cinema is embodied. "Image-schematic structures like UP-DOWN, CENTER-PERIPHERY, and SOURCE-PATH-GOAL are not [ PA R T 3 O F A 5 - PA R T S E R I E S ] The Embodied Cognition of the Film Through Sound just skeletal patterns of perception, but are part of our value systems, and they engage our emotions and feelings. We acquired these values, and experience their feeling contours, just by living with the kinds of bodies we have. From infancy onward, for example, we learn what it feels like to 'look up' to another person." (Coëgnarts and Kravanja, 2015). Since cinema is an audiovisual medium, it is interesting to find out in which ways sound plays a role in our embodied experience of films. Other theorists like Warren Buckland have also made claims about the embodied nature of perception and cognition. Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson are pioneers in this area, they claim that "The peculiar nature of our bodies shapes our very possibilities for conceptualization and categorization." (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Meaning that all abstract conceptual thinking and imagination are based in our biology. The most resourceful compendium on embodied cognition and cinema