From: email suppressed
Date: Tue Jul 06 2010 - 12:15:59 PDT
The eye also has movement sensitive faculties which has recently
helped explain why blind people can 'see' , not as a product of their
'sounding' techniques (in themselves impressive) but as a result of
this newly discovered opthalmic capability. I'll try and dig out my
source if anyone is interested . The researches were examining
advanced sounding techniques amongst blind people.
Hogge
www.bristol-channel.org
On 6 Jul 2010, at 19:44, email suppressed wrote:
> Yes, my understanding is that the question of how the illusion of
> movement occurs in cinema got taken up into the much broader debate(s)
> between psychoanalytic film theory and cognitive film theory. The
> former envisions a more passive spectator (i.e. one who is "sutured"
> by the processes of the "apparatus," which replicates the "dominant
> ideology" that "positions the subject" - makes subjects out of passive
> viewers who cannot avoid this happening to them, in other words). The
> latter - cognitive film theory - asserts a more active spectator,
> emphasizing all the ways we process and "fill in" the input from the
> screen. Critics of the persistence of vision explanation don't like
> the way it reduces the illusion of movement in film to brute
> physiology, and want to emphasize, instead, the "creative" (in a very
> broad sense of that term) input from the viewer's active cognitive
> processes.
>
> Per Nicky's email, I've always wondered if our ability to track
> movement (apparent movement) across still frames has something to do
> with vision being "discrete" rather than "continuous" (if that's what
> you meant by "sampled in packets" Nicky). If vision is indeed a
> sampling process rather than continuous, that might help explain why
> we can see motion in still images - we're primed to do so. But that's
> only IF vision is discrete, and the jury is still out on that. And
> btw, I'm no scientist, so please file this under sheer speculation.
>
> Jonathan Walley
> Dept. of Cinema
> Denison University
>
>
> Quoting "email suppressed>:
>
>> I think they are distinct issues, but the authors want to grind
>> their axes, so they do some polemicising early on in the essay,
>> before they settle down to looking at the issues around flicker
>> fusion, Phi, persistence etc. I posted the link because it does
>> deal quite usefully with how the illusion of movement has come to
>> be understood by psychologists and neuro-scientists as having
>> nothing to do with "persistence of vision", although there are
>> still debates going on within these communities about how various
>> movement phenomena occur. For example, the wagon wheel effect is
>> not peculiar to film but can be observed in ordinary objects in
>> continuous light, eg, car wheels appearing to go backwards and
>> forwards. One theory has it that this is because data is sampled in
>> packets, against another that says it's to do with different cells
>> in the visual cortex competing to register contrary motion stimuli.
>>
>> If you put this into Google: Schouten, J. F. (1967). Subjective
>> stroboscopy and a model of visual movement detectors, you will get a
>> link to a PDF of a paper on explanations for why the wagon wheel
>> effect can occur in continuous illumination.
>>
>> Nicky.
>>
>>
>> On 6 Jul 2010, at 17:56, malgosia askanas wrote:
>>
>>> I don't understand how the question of the mechanism whereby we
>>> have the illusion of motion when watching film segues into the
>>> question of "passive" vs "active" viewing. For example, "La
>>> Jetee" doesn't require any engagement of the mechanism for the
>>> illusion of motion. Does this mean that when we view it, we are
>>> condemned to passive spectatorship?
>>>
>>> -m
>>>
>>>
>
>
>
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