Cognition and Comprehension: Viewing and Forgetting in Mildred Pierce

Abstract

By and large, audiences understand the films they see.They can answer questions about a movie's plot, imagine alternative scenes ("What if the monster hadn't found the couple. . .?"), and discuss the film with someone else who has seen it.This brute fact of comprehension, Christian Metz asserted in the mid-1960s, could ground semiotic film theory."The fact that must be understood is that films are understood." 1 As semiotic research expanded in France, Britain, and the US, the search for explanations of filmic intelligibility took theorists toward comparisons with language, toward methodological analogies with linguistic inquiry, and across several disciplines.Yet these developments increasingly left abandoned the search for principles governing intelligibility.Theorists turned their attention to understanding the sources of cinematic pleasure by defining "spectatorship" within theories of ideology and psychoanalysis.The conceptual weaknesses and empirical shortcomings of the latter doctrines have become increasingly evident in recent years; it seems fair to say that interest in them has waned considerably, and several French partisans of psychoanalysis have returned to the "classic" structuralist semiotics of the 1960s and early 1970s. 2 The current "cognitivist" trend in film studies has gone back to Metz's point of departure, asking: What enables films-at least, narrative films-to be understood?But the hypotheses that have been proposed recently differ sharply from those involved in semiotic research.The emerging cognitivist paradigm suggests that it is unlikely that spectators apply a set of "codes" to a film in order to make sense of it.Rather, spectators participate in a complex process of actively elaborating what the film sets forth.They "go beyond the information given," in Jerome Bruner's phrase.This does not entail that each

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