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Embodying movies. embodied simulation and film studies
Journal Title: PSICOBIETTIVO 
Author/s: Vittorio Gallese, Michele Guerra 
Year:  2014 Issue: 1 Language: Italian 
Pages:  22 Pg. 156-177 FullText PDF:  1173 KB
DOI:  10.3280/PSOB2014-001012
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Recent discoveries in neuroscience, among which that of mirror neurons (MNs), have strongly influenced the debate on spatial cognition, action, emotion an empathy, all aspects that in recent years have been deeply reconsidered within fil studies. This article focuses on the role embodied simulation (ES) theory - triggered by the discovery of MNs - plays in film experience. ES has been proposed to constitute a basic functional mechanism of humans’ brain. Because of a shared bodily representational format, we map the actions of others onto our own motor representations, as well as others’ emotions and sensations onto our own viscero-motor and sensory-motor representations. We wonder how relevant this mechanism is in our film experience reconsidering both classical and recent theories that to some extent have foreshadowed ES, and testing our hypotheses through the stylistic analysis of two sequences from Hitchcock’s Notorious and Antonioni’s Il grido.
Keywords: Embodied Simulation; Mirror Neurons; Film Style; Hitchcock; Antonioni.

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Vittorio Gallese, Michele Guerra, Embodying movies. embodied simulation and film studies in "PSICOBIETTIVO" 1/2014, pp. 156-177, DOI:10.3280/PSOB2014-001012

   

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