Abstract

The chapter ‘Vertigo. Towards a Neurofilmology’ offers an introduction to the book's contents and methods. The implementation of psychology of perception, philosophy of mind, and suggestions from cognitive neuroscience (in particular the role of ‘mirror neurons’ and the hypothesis of ‘embodied simulation’) has the capability to renew contemporary film theory and to reduce the distance between competing approaches (i.e. cognitivist and phenomenological film studies). ‘Neurofilmology’ adopts an enactive and embodied approach to cognition and provides interpretative tools for the exploration of contemporary cinema. Through a series of recurrent ‘aerial motifs’ in which the film character loses his/her equilibrium—acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift—the cinema offers an intense motor and emotional experience that puts the spectator's somatosensory perception in tension. At the same time, it provides compensation by adopting embodied forms of regulation of stimuli and a dynamic restoration of gravity and orientation (the so called ‘disembodying-reembodying’ dynamic).

Keywords: Neurofilmology, Embodied simulation, Mirror neurons, Spectator-as-organism, Enaction, Embodied cognition

While examining the dream of flight, we will find still more evidence that a psychology of the imagination cannot be developed using static forms. It must be based on forms that are in the process of being deformed, and a great deal of importance must be placed on the dynamic principles of deformation. The psychology of air is the least ‘atomic’ of the four psychologies that treat material imagination. It is essentially vectorial. Every aerial image is essentially a future with a vector for breaking into flight. If there is a dream that is capable of showing the vectorial nature of the psyche, it is certainly the dream of flight. The reason is based not so much on its imagined movement as on its inner substantial nature.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.