smith, murray. Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film. Oxford University Press, 2017, xiii + 294 pp., 32 b&w illust., $45.00 cloth.

Murray Smith's new book offers an elaboration and defense of scientifically informed theorizing about the arts and in particular film. Interestingly, this is also a defense of philosophical naturalism applied to humanistic film theory. Smith is ideally placed to provide such a defense, since he has an insider's knowledge and understanding of both the world of film theory and the world of philosophy. Any review of Smith's book is likely to be written by someone less ideally placed, a citizen in only one of these worlds and a mere tourist in the other. That this particular review is written by a philosopher is important to note. As a philosopher, and specifically as a philosophical aesthetician, I propose that Smith's book has to convince me of far less than if I were, say, a psychoanalytic film theorist. As Smith points out at the beginning of the book, naturalism is the long‐dominant methodology in philosophy in general, although he also claims naturalism has only recently risen to prominence in philosophical aesthetics. By contrast, naturalism is “virtually unknown in art and film theory” (p. 21). This raises an intriguing question about the intended audience for the book. If you ask the author (as I have done), he will insist that he wrote Film, Art, and the Third Culture for aestheticians. But there is fairly strong evidence in the book to suggest that the target audience is the film theorist and not the philosopher. On the one hand, the diverse methods of film theory are not described and analyzed in the book, only some of the basic assumptions underlying those methods. Smith cannot assume that philosophers know what film theorists do, but he can assume film theorists’ familiarity with their own practices, such that he does not need to point out to the film‐theory audience that their existing practices diverge from those of naturalism. On the other hand, Smith provides exegesis of philosophical problems and views and is careful to link his ideas with key figures in the history of philosophy or within contemporary debates. This feels like important contextualizing work for readers outside philosophy.

If the philosopher is not the primary audience, what then is she to make of the book? First, it has to be said that I do think Smith wants philosophers, specifically aestheticians, to read his Film, Art, and the Third Culture. There is plenty in the book to interest aestheticians, both in terms of general methodology and in terms of resources for understanding particular, and often puzzling, aspects of aesthetic experience. Moreover, philosophers may be in the best position to assess whether the target audience, the film theorists, should be convinced to expand their current practices (whatever those are) by adopting Smith's naturalized aesthetics.

In my review I would like to examine the precise role given by Film, Art, and the Third Culture to scientific evidence in understanding film engagement. There are points in the book where scientific evidence is used to considerable theoretical or philosophical advantage. But there are other points where the role of scientific evidence is unclear or an opportunity is missed for its full deployment in theorizing. Before I begin, let me briefly summarize the structure and themes of the book.

There are eight chapters and a conclusion. The first four chapters make up Part I of the book, which is concerned with the underlying principles of a naturalized aesthetics. The remaining four chapters make up Part II of the book, which provides a series of case studies related to the role of emotions in the arts and film in particular. Chapter 1 serves to frame the book as a whole by summarizing a number of historical and contemporary debates that help Smith characterize the core commitments of a naturalized aesthetics. These include commitments to so‐called thick explanation, theory construction over conceptual analysis, and attention to subpersonal as well as personal aspects of the mind. Chapter 2 introduces the model of triangulation for understanding the relation between different forms of evidence—neuroscientific, psychological, and phenomenological—and the role they play in the investigation of aesthetic experience. Smith demonstrates the effectiveness of triangulation for understanding the case of anomalous suspense and the relation between affective mimicry and imaginative empathy. Chapter 3 develops the model of triangulation by exploring the potential of neuroscience to illuminate our understanding of aesthetic experience. Smith uses the example of neuroscientific research on mirror neurons and the startle response in helping explain the conditions for generating suspense in films. Chapter 4 shifts focus to a different level of the triangulation model—from the role of neurological evidence to the role of phenomenological evidence. Smith aims to provide a “preliminary map” of the relationship between consciousness and film art. Moving on to Part II, Chapter 5 focuses on evolutionary theory and psychology. Smith considers whether an evolutionary perspective on emotions suggests particular answers to perennial questions in film theory, such as how to understand the Kuleshov effect. The chapter concludes with a discussion of affective mimicry, building on earlier chapters and aiming to “thicken” the explanation with the aid of both neuroscientific evidence and evolutionary theory. Chapter 6 provides a “biocultural account” of emotions and a demonstration of the value of psychological and philosophical theories of emotion for the interpretation of modernist cinema. Chapter 7 focuses on empathy in film as a function of the extended mind. Smith reviews and qualifies existing philosophical accounts of the kind of imaginative activity involved in empathy and links this work with evolutionary explanations of cultural development and the neuroscientific evidence for motor and affective mimicry. In the final chapter, Chapter 8, Smith contrasts a theoretical focus on basic or everyday emotions that are easily labeled with a critical focus on highly particular, shifting emotional states that can only be described obliquely. He suggests that the narrative form, and particularly narrative film with its range of audiovisual expressive techniques, is ideally suited to representing and evoking the dynamic particularity of emotional experience.

With this chapter‐by‐chapter summary in hand, let us turn to an assessment of the book's assigned theoretical role for scientific evidence. First, consider two cases where scientific evidence is successfully shown to help solve a key problem in aesthetics. The first case is from Chapter 2 and involves the problem of anomalous suspense: why do we experience suspense on repeat viewings of a film like Speed (Jan de Bont and Sohanur Rahman Sohan, 1994) or on the first viewing of a film like United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006), when we already know what is going to happen? Smith points to neuroscientific evidence for the distinction between fast, bottom‐up cognitive processes and slower, top‐down processes and suggests that the former processes are automatically triggered by various compositional elements of a suspenseful film. If neuroscientists monitored the brain activity of viewers of suspenseful films, they could look for differences in the cognitive profiles of viewers with prior knowledge of the film's outcome and viewers without prior knowledge—in terms of the intensity of bottom‐up versus top‐down processing. Smith suggests that a strong contrast between the cognitive profiles of the two groups would count in favor of re‐describing anomalous suspense. A strong correlation between the two groups, on the other hand, could help explain the experience‐based reports of suspense had even by those who know the outcome (pp. 71–72). Note that Smith is not deciding the matter here, as to how we solve the problem of anomalous suspense. But he is suggesting a productive way forward. It is productive for a number of reasons. Smith's approach takes account of but does not rely solely on the phenomenological evidence for counting anomalous suspense as a form of suspense. At the psychological level, the approach tracks the perceptual and emotional effects of film composition—how particular devices, such as cross cutting and expressive close up shots, work on the suspenseful viewer. Finally, the approach brings in neuroscience and makes a suggestion for a specific research program to help determine the relationship between anomalous and standard suspense.

Smith is not suggesting that the neuroscience (or psychology) can supply conditions for an account of the nature of suspense or for an account of the role of suspense in our appreciation of a film. When we have a problem in aesthetics, like that of anomalous suspense, which involves a seemingly paradoxical aspect of experience, Smith shows it can help to draw on research that reveals the underlying cognitive activity and psychology of our experience. The way it can help is by revealing that what appears paradoxical—such as suspense about a known outcome—is in fact explicable, for example, when we understand that feelings of suspense can be triggered in a rapid and automatic fashion and in a way that is insulated from the processes by which we judge plot outcome. Later in the book, Smith has similar success applying his approach to a different paradox, the paradox of horror. In Chapter 7, Smith draws on Paul Ekman's work on emotional blending and suggests a solution to the paradox of horror that makes explicable and appropriate a combined and fully integrated response of fear, fascination, and disgust (p. 204).

When we move beyond solutions to paradoxes, however, the role of scientific evidence in film theorizing becomes less clear. Take the example, from Chapter 6, of a scene from the third film in Edgar Reitz's epic Heimat cycle, Heimat 3—A Chronicle of Beginnings and Endings (2014). We are given a fascinating emotional analysis of the scene. A character's subtly changing facial expressions are brought into evolutionary focus. The character's underlying emotions are interpreted in light of narrative events and according to a particular theory of emotion, mainly due to the work of Jenefer Robinson. Shot composition and editing, as well as scene blocking, are discussed as they affect the way viewers interpret characters’ emotions. And references to film style and cultural norms are used to explain the film's distinctive emotional tenor. But how do we get from this kind of analysis to a theoretical, or philosophical, account of aesthetic experience? Smith begins the section of the book containing the Heimat analysis with a question about the relevance of his “biocultural” account of emotion “to our experience and understanding of a work of film art” (pp. 165–166). The Heimat analysis is clearly meant to answer this question, and yet, on its own, I worry that it cannot do so. Still required is an argument for the relevance of an emotional analysis of a film scene to a general account of film engagement. We need to know why viewers’ recognition of characters’ emotions is an important part of their understanding and experience of a film as art. The Heimat analysis shows how the biocultural account of emotion can help with a certain kind of film analysis; it does not show how such film analysis contributes to a general account of film engagement.

Suppose we turned to constructing an argument for the importance of emotion recognition in film engagement. There is then a question about whether we need to know how emotion recognition works—by appealing to the science—in order to complete this kind of argument. I do not pursue this question here, since Smith responds to David Davies’s version of the question in the book (pp. 92, 103). Instead, I'll move on, assuming that scientific understanding of emotion recognition is going to contribute to aesthetic understanding. On this assumption, there is still an issue with the effectiveness of the Heimat analysis. It is not enough to cite research on emotion recognition in everyday life. For all we know, emotion recognition could work quite differently in the context of film. Thus my final concern is with the assumption that we can apply general emotion science to a film as long as we give some accompanying analysis of film composition. If the research on emotion in film is not available—although, as Smith acknowledges, there is more and more work being done in the area—then the speculative extension of the science needs to be fully acknowledged. Otherwise, Smith is in danger of relying solely on phenomenological evidence—how viewers experience the same kinds of emotions in film as in the everyday—and thereby compromising his commitment to the method of triangulation.

Triangulation, I would argue, becomes less important in Chapter 7 on empathy, where the richest philosophical work occurs in the offering of distinctions and the opening up of new possibilities within the debate. The chapter is framed in terms of the challenge of reconciling neuroscientific evidence in support of empathy and the role of empathy in a theory of the extended mind. This challenge is in fact easily overcome, and extended mind theory is mainly used as an alternate route to Dominic Lopes's view about art's expansionist function. Apart from the science, Smith situates himself within the philosophical debate about empathy and offers some helpful qualifications. These include the distinction between the “mindreading” and “mindfeeling” functions of empathy in art (p. 194) and an analysis of ‘having an imaginative grasp’ of another's situation (p. 183). Smith is a long‐time and important contributor to the philosophical and film‐theoretical debate on our engagement with film characters. This shows particularly clearly in Chapter 7, as new ideas emerge.

Given that this is primarily a book about methodology, the development of new ideas in aesthetics is not the focus. In the service of recommending naturalism, however, existing ideas in the sciences and philosophy must be made vivid and accessible. Smith's writing demonstrates considerable skill in its integration of informed scientific explanation, philosophical review, and application of a wide range of film examples—from classical and contemporary Hollywood as well as from European and Asian art cinema—with surprisingly productive comparisons such as between Ozu Yasujiro's The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1952) and the works of Stan Brakhage. I cannot tell film theorists what to read, and even if could, why would they listen to a philosopher? But I want film theorists to pick up this book because it offers them new and rich resources for reflecting on their practices and has just the right tone to solicit the reader's collaboration. Film, Art, and the Third Culture initiates a dialogue between natural scientists, philosophers, and film theorists, one that I very much hope will continue.