thinking about catalin’s provocative questions, i find myself wondering particularly about one detail . . . catalin asks both for examples and for theoretical treatments of a number of cinematic elements including “- the omission of key narrative plot points, so that the audience ‘fills in the gaps’ ” – and i think that even beginning to address the question requires a preliminary distinction . . .  

 

that’s because every narrative, however rudimentary and however small the event that it narrates, always leaves out certain details . . . every sequence that does not take place in real time obviously leaves out moments; when we see the protagonist get into a red sedan in the country in shot one, and get out of what looks like the same red sedan on a city street in shot two, we take it for granted that she travelled the distance between the two spots but we were not shown the trip  . . . even the simplest declarative sentence [e.g., “i had a cup of coffee”] leaves out central details [that the drinker picked up the cup in his hand], details that the reader or viewer automatically supplies . . .

 

now these are, i suspect, not among those narrative elements that catalin would consider “key plot points” – but they nonetheless depend on an audience protocol of filling in gaps . . . this seems to me a very different cognitive process than one that requires the audience to solve a puzzle at it were . . . for in the former cases the audience has no sense of there being a problem to solve, so automatic is the gap-filling . . . in the latter cases there is a process of something we might call imaginative projection, quite missing from the former – and thus, speaking as a novice in these matters, it seems to me that the filling in of these gaps, gaps that leave out key narrative plot points, is less a perceptual process and more of a conceptual process, and that it is essentially a willed act and quite far from automatic

 

i’m not entirely sure how relevant this distinction may be in the long run, but the work in cognitive approaches that i’m familiar with seems to lean heavily on the perceptual and not the conceptual

 

am interested in hearing what others make of this distinction

 

mike   

 

 

 

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