Videos by Todd Berliner
Paper recorded for the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image virtual conference, 9 Ju... more Paper recorded for the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image virtual conference, 9 June 2021. 4 views
Todd Berliner's commencement address to graduates of the arts and social sciences departments, an... more Todd Berliner's commencement address to graduates of the arts and social sciences departments, and 5000 guest attendees, at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, 11 May 2013. 3 views
Books by Todd Berliner
Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (Oxford University Press), 2017
Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The... more Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The American film industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among huge populations, translate into box office success. More than any other historical mode of art, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a mass scale. If the Hollywood film industry succeeds in delivering aesthetic pleasure both routinely and, at times, in an outstanding way, then we should ultimately regard Hollywood cinema as an artistic achievement, not merely a commercial success. Hollywood Aesthetic accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. The book addresses four fundamental components of Hollywood’s aesthetic design: narrative, style, ideology, and genre. Grounded in film history and in the psychological and philosophical literature in aesthetics, the book explains: 1) the intrinsic properties characteristic of Hollywood cinema that induce aesthetic pleasure; 2) the cognitive and affective processes, sparked by Hollywood movies, that become engaged during aesthetic pleasure; and 3) the exhilarated aesthetic experiences afforded by an array of persistently entertaining Hollywood movies. Offering a comprehensive appraisal of Hollywood cinema’s capacity to provide aesthetic pleasure, the book sets out to explain how Hollywood creates, for masses of people, some of their most exhilarating experiences of art.
Projections, 2020
Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema investigates the Hollywood film industry’s chief... more Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema investigates the Hollywood film industry’s chief artistic accomplishment: providing aesthetic pleasure to mass audiences. Grounded in film history and supported by re- search in psychology and philosophical aesthetics, the book explains (1) the intrinsic properties characteristic of Hollywood cinema that induce aesthetic pleasure; (2) the cognitive and affective processes, sparked by Hollywood mov- ies, that become engaged during aesthetic pleasure; and (3) the exhilarated aesthetic experiences afforded by an array of persistently entertaining Holly- wood movies. Hollywood Aesthetic addresses four fundamental components of Hollywood’s aesthetic design—narrative, style, ideology, and genre—aim- ing for a comprehensive appraisal of Hollywood cinema’s capacity to excite aesthetic pleasure. This article outlines the book’s main points and themes. As a précis, it is heavy on ideas and light on evidence, which is to be found in the book itself.
Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (University of Texas Press), 2010
In the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a creative surge, opening a new era in American cinema with f... more In the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a creative surge, opening a new era in American cinema with films that challenged traditional modes of storytelling. Inspired by European and Asian art cinema as well as Hollywood’s own history of narrative ingenuity, directors such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola undermined the harmony of traditional Hollywood cinema and created some of the best movies ever to come out of the American film industry. Critics have previously viewed these films as a response to the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s, but until now no one has explored how the period’s inventive narrative design represents one of the great artistic accomplishments of American cinema.
In Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner offers the first thorough analysis of the narrative and stylistic innovations of seventies cinema and its influence on contemporary American filmmaking. He examines not just formally eccentric films—Nashville; Taxi Driver; A Clockwork Orange; The Godfather, Part II; and the films of John Cassavetes—but also mainstream commercial films, including The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Bad News Bears, Patton, All the President’s Men, Annie Hall, and many others. With persuasive analyses, Berliner demonstrates the centrality of this period to the history of Hollywood’s formal development, showing how seventies films represent the key turning point between the storytelling modes of the studio era and those of modern American cinema.
Book Chapters by Todd Berliner
Routledge eBooks, May 2, 2023
Detour (1945) has long inspired independent filmmakers looking to make lasting cinema with almost... more Detour (1945) has long inspired independent filmmakers looking to make lasting cinema with almost no money. You can literally see Detour’s low budget in the barren sets and locations, limited set-ups, and the absence of stars—characteristic features of B-film production in the 1930s and 1940s. But the filmmakers clearly spent creative resources on many subtleties and flourishes in the storytelling, finding imaginative solutions to their financial problems. We can see in Detour’s aesthetic properties traces of the B-movie system that produced it. Budget constraints determined the film’s style, forcing unorthodox solutions to economic challenges. Poverty Row filmmakers sought creative ways to tell stories with little time for production and little money for sets, locations, and actors. Unlike their studio counterparts, they worked under loose supervision, targeted smaller audiences, and rejected glamour. In this environment, Detour is not so much an outlier as an exemplar of what could be achieved within the low-budget independent filmmaking apparatus of the studio era. Detour takes some characteristic traits of the B-film style of the period—a meandering plot, unusual characters, and a minimalist visual style—and transforms them into aesthetic virtues unavailable within the stylish style of a studio production.
Routledge eBooks, Aug 14, 2023
This chapter studies the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood cinema’s approach to storytelling and e... more This chapter studies the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood cinema’s approach to storytelling and explains the ways in which Hollywood movies both facilitate and complicate the process of story construction. The chapter presents a theory of Hollywood storytelling aesthetics—supported by research in experimental psychology and illustrated with examples—that viewers take pleasure not just in narrative unity and easy understanding, as previous scholars have argued, but also in narrative disunity and cognitive challenge. Viewers take calm, spontaneous pleasure from Hollywood’s time-tested storytelling principles, especially principles of clarity and causality, that ease mental activity and satisfy the viewer’s desire for logical story resolution and immediate understanding. Viewers, however, take exhilarated pleasure from moments of narrative incongruity, convolution, and ambiguity—moments that stimulate free association, creative problem solving, insight, and incongruity-resolution. This theory of Hollywood storytelling aesthetics helps explain how Hollywood balances narrative unity and disunity, wedding classical storytelling principles with moments of cognitive challenge in order to generate pleasure for mass audiences.
Puzzling Stories: The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Literature, Film & Television. Ed. Steven Willemsen and Miklós Kiss, 2022
In three parts, this essay explains how artworks, including mass artworks, create aesthetic pleas... more In three parts, this essay explains how artworks, including mass artworks, create aesthetic pleasure through cognitive challenge. Part 1 argues that many theorists regard cognitive challenge as central to aesthetic value. Artists, however, tailor those challenges to the coping potential of their intended audiences. Part 2 argues that even mass audiences enjoy cognitive challenges, which stimulate creative problem solving, incongruity resolution, insight, and stress relief. Part 3 illustrates how Hollywood balances the pleasures of cognitive challenge against competing pressures for easy comprehension by mass audiences. The Philadelphia Story (1940) creates moderate challenges through slightly misshapen narrative structures and inconsistent information.
Puzzling Stories: The Aesthetic Appeal of Cognitive Challenge in Literature, Film & Television, 2022
This chapter sets out to explain how artworks create aesthetic pleasure through cognitive challen... more This chapter sets out to explain how artworks create aesthetic pleasure through cognitive challenge. My argument addresses both explicitly puzzling works and, in a more elaborate discussion, less challenging artworks designed to please mass audiences.
The argument falls into three parts. First, philosophers and psychologists often regard cognitive challenge as a key factor in aesthetic value, even when the challenge results in confusion and stress. Many valuable artworks create unpleasant experiences, and we cannot separate the value of the works from the negative emotions they instil in us. We can even describe such experiences as ‘pleasurable’ if we regard pleasure as a broad category of intrinsically rewarding emotional experiences. Emotional rewards vary among different perceivers, however, and artists tailor the intensity of their artworks’ challenges to the coping potential of their intended audiences.
Second, although theorists often distinguish mass art by its lack of cognitive challenges, research in cognitive psychology suggests that average perceivers find cognitive challenges stimulating, even exhilarating, and that lack of challenge leads to boredom. Cognitive challenges generate pleasure by creating opportunities for creative problem solving, incongruity resolution, insight and stress relief. Mass artforms, however, must balance their cognitive challenges against the competing pressure for easy comprehension by mass audiences.
Finally, we can understand how mass artworks negotiate that balance through a case study drawn from the definitive mass artform, Hollywood cinema. Seemingly simple and straightforward, The Philadelphia Story (1940) creates moderate challenges through slightly misshapen narrative structures and occasionally inconsistent information, even though the narrative may seem perfectly designed and effortlessly understood.
Oxford Scholarship Online
Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The... more Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The American film industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among large populations, translate into box office success. More than any other historical mode of art, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a mass scale. If the Hollywood film industry succeeds in delivering aesthetic pleasure both routinely and, at times, in an outstanding way, then we should ultimately regard Hollywood cinema as an artistic achievement, not merely a commercial success. Hollywood Aesthetic accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. The book addresses four fundamental components of Hollywood’s aesthetic design: narrative, style, ideology, and genre. Grounded in film history and in the psychological and philosophical literature in aesthetics, the book explains: (1) the intrinsic ...
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017
Chapter 2 illustrates an aesthetically productive balance between easy understanding and cognitiv... more Chapter 2 illustrates an aesthetically productive balance between easy understanding and cognitive challenge in classical Hollywood cinema with extended analyses of His Girl Friday and Double Indemnity. These films combine classical narrative, stylistic, ideological, and genre properties with artistic devices that complicate formal patterning and thwart audience expectations.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017
Chapter 3 studies the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood cinema’s approach to storytelling. It exam... more Chapter 3 studies the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood cinema’s approach to storytelling. It examines the cognitive processes at work when a film cues spectators to construct a film’s story in their minds, and it explains the ways in which Hollywood movies both facilitate and complicate the spectator’s process of story construction. The chapter offers a new theory of Hollywood storytelling aesthetics—illustrated with examples from whodunits, screwball comedies, twist films, and mysteries—that film viewers take pleasure not just in narrative unity and easy understanding, as previous scholars have argued, but also in narrative disunity and cognitive challenge. With support from experimental psychology, the chapter argues that viewers enjoy narratives that stimulate moments of free association, insight, and incongruity-resolution.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017
Chapter 4 illustrates the theory of narration presented in the previous chapter, offering an exte... more Chapter 4 illustrates the theory of narration presented in the previous chapter, offering an extended analysis of an unusual narrative pattern in Red River, which violates Hollywood’s cardinal rules regarding narrative unity, probability, causality, and story logic. Disunity in this classical Hollywood narrative adds variety to our filmgoing experience; stimulates our imagination, curiosity, and creative problem-solving processes; and liberates our thinking from the burdens and limitations of good sense.
Oxford Scholarship Online
Chapter 5 investigates the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood’s stylistic norms, as well as pleasur... more Chapter 5 investigates the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood’s stylistic norms, as well as pleasures afforded by a handful of noteworthy stylistic deviations. The chapter examines the ways in which Hollywood film style both supports a film’s storytelling function (by enhancing clarity and expressiveness) and offers aesthetic pleasures independent of storytelling (decoration and stylistic harmony). A film’s style may also compete with story (e.g., Touch of Evil), with genre (Leave Her to Heaven), or even with itself (Goodfellas) for control of a film’s mood and meaning. Such stylistically dissonant works inspire cognitive play as we adjust to stylistic cues that harbor disparate attitudes and meanings.
Oxford Scholarship Online
Illustrating some of the points made in chapter 5, chapter 6 offers an extended analysis of some ... more Illustrating some of the points made in chapter 5, chapter 6 offers an extended analysis of some complex tendencies in Raging Bull’s cinematography, editing, and sound devices. The film tests the limits of the classical Hollywood style and sometimes crosses over into avant-garde practice. Raging Bull offers an illustrative case study of the boundaries of Hollywood’s stylistic systems.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017
Chapter 7 examines the ways in which a film’s ideological properties contribute to aesthetic plea... more Chapter 7 examines the ways in which a film’s ideological properties contribute to aesthetic pleasure when they intensify, or when they complicate, viewers’ cognitive and affective responses. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which the ideology of a Hollywood film guides our beliefs, values, and emotional responses. In ideologically unified Hollywood films, such as Die Hard, Independence Day, Pickup on South Street, and Casablanca, narrative and stylistic devices concentrate our beliefs, values, and emotional responses, offering us a purer experience than we can find in most real-life situations. By contrast, ideologically complicated Hollywood films, such as Chinatown, The Third Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Dark Knight, advance their worldviews in a novel, ambiguous, or peculiar way, upsetting our appraisals of events and characters and complicating our intellectual and emotional experiences.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017
Chapter 8 demonstrates the ways in which ideological constraints in studio-era Hollywood shaped t... more Chapter 8 demonstrates the ways in which ideological constraints in studio-era Hollywood shaped the aesthetic properties of an entire body of crime films, now commonly known as film noir. The ideological restrictions of the Production Code Administration posed creative problems that noir filmmakers solved through visual and narrative contortion. The contortions created challenges for audiences, who had to decode and make sense of films that may not show complete clarity or coherence in their storytelling. Film noir remains aesthetically engaging because it operates near the boundaries of classicism without sacrificing classical Hollywood’s accessibility and formal unity.
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017
Whereas chapter 8 demonstrates how ideology can complicate a film’s artistic design, chapter 9 sh... more Whereas chapter 8 demonstrates how ideology can complicate a film’s artistic design, chapter 9 shows how a film’s artistic design can complicate its ideology. Starship Troopers illustrates the commercial risks, and the aesthetic excitement, of a Hollywood film whose formal properties muddle up its ideological content. The film’s unconventional use of genre devices leads to ideological complexities that pose challenges for spectators trying to make sense of the film’s form and meaning. Starship Troopers employs the conventions of the Hollywood war film and the war film satire in ways that make the film’s worldview incoherent. The film’s mercurial form limited its success in a mass market but exhilarated cult audiences engaged by the film’s unusual design.
Oxford Scholarship Online
Hollywood makes quintessential genre films, and chapter 10 tackles the aesthetics of genre filmma... more Hollywood makes quintessential genre films, and chapter 10 tackles the aesthetics of genre filmmaking. It demonstrates the ways in which genre eases viewers’ grasp of narrative information and offers the pleasure of returning, as experts, to familiar scenarios. The chapter also explains the ways in which genres develop novel and complex aesthetic properties that counter a culture’s growing genre expertise. To fully exploit the pleasures of genre filmmaking for a mass audience, a genre film must fit recognizably within its genre, offering easy recognition, but it must also differ enough from previous films to make it moderately challenging for average spectators. Star Wars offers an exemplary instance of Hollywood genre filmmaking: The 1977 blockbuster found the optimal area between unity and complexity, familiarity and novelty, easy recognition and cognitive challenge for a mass audience.
Oxford Scholarship Online
Chapter 11 examines the aesthetic value of novelty in a genre’s evolution by tracing the history ... more Chapter 11 examines the aesthetic value of novelty in a genre’s evolution by tracing the history of the convention that characters in Hollywood musicals spontaneously burst into song without realistic motivation. The convention emerged in 1929 and largely vanished by the end of the 1950s. The chapter studies how studio-era filmmakers developed novel conventions that exploited the aesthetic possibilities of song in cinema. The eventual loss of the convention created new constraints on the uses of song, but it also enabled new aesthetic possibilities. Post-studio-era filmmakers transformed the convention, exposed it, and reclaimed it in ways that added novelty to spectators’ aesthetic experience.
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Videos by Todd Berliner
Books by Todd Berliner
In Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner offers the first thorough analysis of the narrative and stylistic innovations of seventies cinema and its influence on contemporary American filmmaking. He examines not just formally eccentric films—Nashville; Taxi Driver; A Clockwork Orange; The Godfather, Part II; and the films of John Cassavetes—but also mainstream commercial films, including The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Bad News Bears, Patton, All the President’s Men, Annie Hall, and many others. With persuasive analyses, Berliner demonstrates the centrality of this period to the history of Hollywood’s formal development, showing how seventies films represent the key turning point between the storytelling modes of the studio era and those of modern American cinema.
Book Chapters by Todd Berliner
The argument falls into three parts. First, philosophers and psychologists often regard cognitive challenge as a key factor in aesthetic value, even when the challenge results in confusion and stress. Many valuable artworks create unpleasant experiences, and we cannot separate the value of the works from the negative emotions they instil in us. We can even describe such experiences as ‘pleasurable’ if we regard pleasure as a broad category of intrinsically rewarding emotional experiences. Emotional rewards vary among different perceivers, however, and artists tailor the intensity of their artworks’ challenges to the coping potential of their intended audiences.
Second, although theorists often distinguish mass art by its lack of cognitive challenges, research in cognitive psychology suggests that average perceivers find cognitive challenges stimulating, even exhilarating, and that lack of challenge leads to boredom. Cognitive challenges generate pleasure by creating opportunities for creative problem solving, incongruity resolution, insight and stress relief. Mass artforms, however, must balance their cognitive challenges against the competing pressure for easy comprehension by mass audiences.
Finally, we can understand how mass artworks negotiate that balance through a case study drawn from the definitive mass artform, Hollywood cinema. Seemingly simple and straightforward, The Philadelphia Story (1940) creates moderate challenges through slightly misshapen narrative structures and occasionally inconsistent information, even though the narrative may seem perfectly designed and effortlessly understood.
In Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner offers the first thorough analysis of the narrative and stylistic innovations of seventies cinema and its influence on contemporary American filmmaking. He examines not just formally eccentric films—Nashville; Taxi Driver; A Clockwork Orange; The Godfather, Part II; and the films of John Cassavetes—but also mainstream commercial films, including The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Bad News Bears, Patton, All the President’s Men, Annie Hall, and many others. With persuasive analyses, Berliner demonstrates the centrality of this period to the history of Hollywood’s formal development, showing how seventies films represent the key turning point between the storytelling modes of the studio era and those of modern American cinema.
The argument falls into three parts. First, philosophers and psychologists often regard cognitive challenge as a key factor in aesthetic value, even when the challenge results in confusion and stress. Many valuable artworks create unpleasant experiences, and we cannot separate the value of the works from the negative emotions they instil in us. We can even describe such experiences as ‘pleasurable’ if we regard pleasure as a broad category of intrinsically rewarding emotional experiences. Emotional rewards vary among different perceivers, however, and artists tailor the intensity of their artworks’ challenges to the coping potential of their intended audiences.
Second, although theorists often distinguish mass art by its lack of cognitive challenges, research in cognitive psychology suggests that average perceivers find cognitive challenges stimulating, even exhilarating, and that lack of challenge leads to boredom. Cognitive challenges generate pleasure by creating opportunities for creative problem solving, incongruity resolution, insight and stress relief. Mass artforms, however, must balance their cognitive challenges against the competing pressure for easy comprehension by mass audiences.
Finally, we can understand how mass artworks negotiate that balance through a case study drawn from the definitive mass artform, Hollywood cinema. Seemingly simple and straightforward, The Philadelphia Story (1940) creates moderate challenges through slightly misshapen narrative structures and occasionally inconsistent information, even though the narrative may seem perfectly designed and effortlessly understood.