This is the fifth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.
Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, has conducted experiments in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information. It would seem that the human brain is to a certain extent programmed to acquire information, especially about the immediate physical environment -- logical enough since such information, about sources of sustenance and about external threats, would be crucial to the survival of the species.
Lee Gomes, writing in The Wall Street Journal (linked on Boing Boing), reports this about Biederman's research:
Dr. Biederman first showed a collection of photographs to volunteer test subjects, and found they said they preferred certain kinds of pictures (monkeys in a tree or a group of houses along a river) over others (an empty parking lot or a pile of old paint cans).
The preferred pictures had certain common features, including a good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery. In one way or another, said Dr. Biederman, they all presented new information that somehow needed to be interpreted.
When he hooked up volunteers to a brain-scanning machine, the preferred pictures were shown to generate much more brain activity than the unpreferred shots. While researchers don't yet know what exactly these brain scans signify, a likely possibility involves increased production of the brain's pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids.
"A good vantage on a landscape and an element of mystery" strike me as qualities of all powerful cinematic images -- providing we expand the word landscape to include interior spaces. "A good vantage" implies sufficient clues to read the space of the environment represented, while "an element of mystery" implies an image that is complex, that doesn't yield up its information too quickly, that requires investigation.
A cinematic image whose primary function is to deliver narrative information, as opposed to a spatial illusion, is not going to engage our imagination in a powerful way. A cut between two informational images whose primary function is to establish another piece of information is likewise not going to be deeply satisfying. An example of this would be a cut between a close-up of a woman looking at something and a close-up of what she's looking at. If the two shots in question were not themselves intrinsically engaging, the relationship between them would be purely narrative, purely expository. The shot of the woman looking at something would not create genuine mystery, only an informational question -- and once the question was answered (by the close-up representing her POV) the interest of the images would be exhausted.
There might be meta-cinematic qualities to the two images -- if the woman turned out to be looking at a knife, we might wonder what role the knife will play in the story -- but this would not reflect on the essentially cinematic qualities of the images.
In all this, of course, I am simply recapitulating André Bazin's theory of the role of montage in cinema, but I think Biederman's research offers a psychological support to Bazin's thinking. The deep-focus shots of Welles and Ford, the long scenes that play out without directing our attention to specific elements through editing, give us both "good vantage" and "mystery" -- they engage deep levels of consciousness that seem to be fundamental to human perception. And, like Biederman's "preferred images", they create a pleasure that may well have a pre-programmed neurological basis.