During the eighties, film studies gradually adopted ‘new’ methodologies from cultural studies and the social sciences, which displaced the speculative ideas of film theory. Rather than construct hypotheses and models about the general structure and spectators' experience of film, film studies has moved toward the ‘something else’ enumerated by Janet Bergstrom. However, a number of film scholars, in both Europe and North America, have persisted with film theory's most difficult conceptual problems, which they tackle from the perspective of cognitive science. This book is a report on the knowledge generated by these cognitive film theorists. But because this knowledge is fragmentary and incomplete, I have endeavored to expand and develop it in new and unforeseen ways.

However, for the most part, I do not report on the knowledge generated by the well-known cognitive film theorists in North America (David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, Edward Branigan, Joseph Anderson, among others) but discuss the much lesser known film theorists working in the cognitive tradition in Europe – particularly Francesco Casetti, Roger Odin, Michel Colin, and Dominique Chateau.