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Visual Disturbances

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

No booking required

 

Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) is delighted to present a screening of Visual Disturbances, a film written and directed by Prof. Eric S. Faden (Bucknell University, USA), one of the pioneers of audiovisual criticism.

Faden will join us to present his film and will participate in a discussion about it afterwards with, among other interlocutors, Prof. Catherine Grant (Birkbeck/BIMI), fellow video essayist and co-editor of [in]Transition, the peer reviewed journal that published the work. 

Visual Disturbances (47 minutes, 2018) is an essay film about cinematic blindness. It explores the psychological concept of inattentional blindness and applies it to cinematic perception.

Visual Disturbances proposes a new concept of film style, what Faden calls the “Invisible Cinema.” Unlike Hollywood classical style, which gently guides the audience’s gaze towards important narrative details, the Invisible Cinema features characters and objects that audiences fail to see--even if these characters or objects are in plain sight.

Visual Disturbances uses psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris’ concepts of inattentional blindness and change blindness to explore how audiences perceive and mis-perceive cinematic images. Moreover, this work suggests that filmmakers across film history have intentionally utilized the Invisible Cinema as a stylistic option.

In particular, this project focuses on the French filmmaker Jacques Tati and how his films purposely betray our perception.

To reveal this hidden film style, Visual Disturbances uses a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods. In particular, Faden wanted to demonstrate how several research methods can align to support an argument. Thus, this film mixed audience focus groups with historical and industrial research, original filmed material combined with formal analysis of existing films as well as cutting edge eye-tracking visualizations.

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Contact phone: 02076316115