Moving Image Theory Ecological Considerations Edited by Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Fisher Anderson Foreword by David Bordwell   February 2005   cloth, 0-8093-2599-3, $65.00 253 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 47 illus. Film Studies   “The appearance of Moving Image Theory can only be welcomed. The editors have assembled a distinguished cast of empirical researchers and film theorists to explore, within a naturalistic framework, the ways moving images mesh with our minds. Every essay bristles with insights and fruitful suggestions for further reflection and experiment.” —David Bordwell, from the Foreword   “Cognitive film theory is a radical new way to understand film and filmmaking, and the ecological approach of Moving Image Theory goes even further. If cognitive film theory is seen as an attempt to make film an empirically accessible subject, an ecological approach transforms the way film can be studied empirically. This collection is vitally important and it is interdisciplinary in the best possible way.” —Tony Chemero, Franklin and Marshall College   Blending unconventional film theory with nontraditional psychology to provide a radically different set of critical methods and propositions about cinema, Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations looks at film through its communication properties rather than its social or political implications. Drawing on the tenets of James J. Gibson’s ecological theory of visual perception, the fifteen essays and forty-three illustrations gathered here by editors Joseph and Barbara Anderson offer a new understanding of how moving images are seen and understood, emphasizing cinema’s ability to convincingly portray reality.   Film studies have chiefly focused on critical interpretation of culturally symbolic expressions, but these now conventional approaches can be complex, confusing, and elaborate, often with no moorings in reality. Hinging on a more straightforward perception of the world and cinema in an attempt to move film theory closer to reality, Moving Image Theory proposes that we should first understand how cinema communicates information about the representation of the three-dimensional world through properties of image and sound. In place of interpretation and symbolic meaning, this anthology parses the boundaries between that in cinema which is culturally coded and that which is rooted more in the biology of perception.   Ecological psychology asserts we have evolved in an environment that has provided the things we need for survival and that we, through evolution, have developed the capacities to gain the information necessary to guide our actions in that environment. Applying this concept to film, contributors with backgrounds in computer animation, media research, psychology, philosophy, film studies, and other fields demonstrate film’s realistic attributes in time and space.   Going beyond conventional film studies, the essays contribute to an original, interdisciplinary way of viewing moving images. The result is an innovative articulation of how the information available in moving images is perceived directly by the audience, thus explaining why audience responses to moving images are universal and cross-cultural and also addressing many of the fundamental questions that have plagued film scholars since the middle of the twentieth century.   Joseph D. Anderson is Chair of the Department of Mass Communication and Theatre at the University of Central Arkansas. He serves as Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and is author of The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory.   Barbara Fisher Anderson is Managing Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image and coauthor of “The Case for an Ecological Metatheory” in Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies.   Available through booksellers everywhere or  directly from Southern Illinois University Press