Film, Art, and the Third Culture

Abstract

Abstract Sixty years ago C. P. Snow began his campaign against the 'two cultures'—the debilitating divide, as he saw it, between traditional 'literary intellectual' culture, and the culture of the sciences—urging in its place a 'third culture' which would draw upon and integrate the resources of disciplines spanning the natural and social sciences, the arts, and the humanities. Murray Smith argues that, with the ever-increasing influence of evolutionary theory and neuroscience, and the pervasive presence of digital technologies, Snow's challenge is more relevant than ever. Smith tackles this question in relation to the art, technology, and science of film in particular, and to the world of the arts and aesthetic activity more generally. In Part I he explores the general strategies and principles necessary to build a 'third cultural' or naturalized approach to film and art—one that roots itself in an appreciation of scientific knowledge and method. These strategies include 'thick explanation' (which combines everyday and scientific psychology) and the 'triangulation' of knowledge from experience, psychological theory, and neuroscientific data. In the second part of the work, Smith focuses on the role of emotion in film and the other arts, as an extended experiment in the third cultural integration of ideas on emotion spanning the arts, humanities, and sciences. Here Smith investigates, among other things, the role of facial expression in film in the light of Darwin's work on the emotions, and the dynamics of suspense, shock, and empathy in film in relation to contemporary neuroscience. While acknowledging that not all of the questions we ask are scientific in nature, Smith contends that we cannot disregard the insights wrought by taking a naturalized approach to the aesthetics of film and the other arts.

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