Perceiving Causality in Character Perception: A Metaphorical Study of Causation in Film

ABSTRACT

This article aims to show how the metaphorical and metonymical portrayal of character perception in film can give rise to two distinct but interrelated percepts of causality in the viewer, namely (1) the percept that the viewer sees that an object perceived by a character causes the character’s perception of that object and (2) the percept that the viewer sees that character perception in turn causes a change of state in the perceiving character’s mind (e.g., knowing, remembering). We start our discussion with a brief epistemological overview. Thereby two questions are central: (1) How do people conceptualize perception and causality? and (2) When do people perceive causality in perception? Answers will be given, respectively, by considering insights from cognitive linguistics and experimental psychology. In the next section, then, we bring the theoretical discussion to the foreground of Film Studies by showing how the conceptual solutions, as suggested in the prior part, can manifest themselves in cinematic terms. It is through the forced movements of film making (e.g., framing, editing and camera movement), that, we will argue, the viewer is encouraged to see a causal relationship between (1) the object perceived and the character’s visual experience and (2) the character’s visual experience and the change of mental state in the perceiving character.

Notes

¹ Few studies to date have attempted to explore the role of metaphor in the audio-visual portrayal of characters’ mental states. In addition to our own writings on this subject, we refer the reader to Chattah (2015), Fahlenbrach (2008, 2014, 2016) and Ortiz (2011, 2014, 2015).

² The claim that an external object O is causally responsible for a subject S’s perceptual experience of O adheres to the Causal Theory of Perception as advocated by such analytic philosophers as Herbert Paul Grice ([1961] 1989), Peter Frederick Strawson (1974), and more recently John Searle (2015).

³ This question can be situated within a larger framework of studies that apply insights from CMT to the field of visual and multimodal discourse analysis. For a good state-of-the-art overview, see the contributions in Coëgnarts and Kravanja (2015a), Fahlenbrach (2016) and Forceville and Urios-Aparisi (2009).

⁴ Perceiving causality, however, does not always guarantee causality an sich. Consider, for example, the following succession of events: (1) a person is waiting for a bus, (2) the person sees the bus moving toward him, (3) the person waves with his arm, (4) the bus stops. Can we speak of causality with respect to the relation between (3) and (4)? Did the bus stop due to the person’s waiving hand, or did the bus stop because the bus driver was planning to stop anyhow notwithstanding the person’s waiving hand? This is undecidable.

⁵ Kim (2006, pp. 44–45) illustrates the “pairing problem” as follows: “A gun, call it A, is fired, and this causes the death of a person, X. Another gun, B, is fired at the same time, and this results in the death of another person, Y. What makes it the case that the firing of A caused X’s death and the firing of B caused Y’s death, and not the other way around? That is, why did A’s firing not cause Y’s death and B’s firing not cause X’s death? What principle governs the ‘pairing’ of the right cause with the right effect? There must be a relation R that grounds and explains the cause-effect pairings, a relation that holds between A’s firing and X’s death and also between B’s firing and Y’s death, but not between A’s firing and Y’s death or between B’s firing and X’s death. What is this R, the ‘pairing relation,’ as we might call it?”

⁶ We use the term “homospatial” here to denote whether or not both entities are simultaneously visible on-screen.

⁷ For a discussion of filmic examples within each category we refer to Coëgnarts and Kravanja (2015b).

⁸ This section can be related to our earlier work on character perception and time in film (Coëgnarts & Kravanja, 2015c).