¹ Rosen, Charles, ‘Who's Afraid of the Avant-Garde?’ The New York Review of Books 45:8 (14 May 1998)Google Scholar, 21.

² Pinker, Steven, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2002)Google Scholar, 416.

³ Schoenberg, Arnold, Theory of Harmony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), trans. Carter, Roy E., 421–2Google Scholar.

⁴ See Section 5 of Mathews, Paul (ed.), Orchestration: An Anthology of Writings (London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; Lerdahl, Fred, ‘Timbral hierarchies,’ Contemporary Music Review 2:1 (1987), 135–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ In this essay I follow Rosen and many others in treating the terms ‘modernism’ and ‘avant-garde’ as synonyms – though in certain contexts, they are not completely interchangeable concepts.

⁶ Lerdahl's phrase, but a charge he levels not against Klangfarbenmelodie, but rather against Schoenberg's twelve-tone method of composition: Lerdahl, Fred, ‘Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,’ Contemporary Music Review 6:2 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 97. In ‘Timbral hierarchies,’ op. cit., Lerdahl does make reference to arbitrarily constructed timbral syntaxes which are ‘rigorous but opaque to musical understanding,’ 137. But in this essay Lerdahl is making the case that a musically apprehensible timbral system, working with rather than against or in disregard of the natural constraints of human audio perception, is possible.

⁷ Carroll, Noël, ‘Towards a Theory of Point-of-View Editing: Communication, Emotion, and the Movies,’ Poetics Today 14:1 (Spring 1993), 123–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Carroll does not use the phrase ‘deictic gazing,’ but the expression is widely used to refer to this behavior, as it is by Per Persson in his development of Carroll's argument in Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, chapter 2. Note that Carroll's definition of ‘point-of-view’ is broad, encompassing all cases where an edited sequence shows the object of an agent's glance, but not requiring (as do some accounts of point-of-view) that the object is shown from the vantage point of the looking agent (as it is in the sequence from The Bourne Identity analysed here).

⁸ The phrase is Carroll's: ibid, 139.

⁹ ‘I do not assert that the emergence of point-of-view editing was mandated by human nature. There is, for example, no reason to reject the possibility that point-of-view editing might never have been discovered. Rather, my claim is that, given certain of our biological propensities, point-of-view editing, once discovered, was an extremely viable and compelling means of visual communication in general and of emotional communication in particular.’ Ibid, 138.

¹⁰ Jesse Prinz, ‘Culture and Cognitive Science,’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/culture-cogsci/, section 2.4, ‘Bio-cultural Interaction.’

¹¹ Peterson, James, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-garde Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994)Google Scholar, 43.

¹² Peterson, ibid, 1. Mekas' transformation from enemy to ally of the avant-garde is evident in his Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959–71 (New York: Collier Books, 1972).Google Scholar

¹³ Peterson, ibid, 44.

¹⁴ Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984), trans. Nice, Richard.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Recently voted the Most Memorable Moment of Managerial Madness: http://metro.co.uk/2011/04/21/kevin-keegans-love-it-newcastle-rant-at-sir-alex-ferguson-voted-most-memorable-moment-652654/

¹⁶ On the ‘scene of empathy,’ see Plantinga, Carl, ‘The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film,’ in Plantinga, Carl and Smith, Greg M. (eds.), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Baltimore: the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. The role of facial expressions of basic emotions in conveying emotional states in film also enters into Carroll's argument in ‘Towards a Theory of Point-of-View Editing,’ op.cit.

¹⁷ Another ubiquitous, realist practice involves the representation of each individual character in a narrative film with an individual performer. This too has been subject to occasional challenge by modernist innovation, as in Luis Buñuel's use of two performers to play a single character in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). For further discussion, see my Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 125–32Google Scholar. Here again the question arises as to whether the ease or difficulty of comprehension in the two cases arises from evolved predispositions, or enculturation, or some blend of the two.

¹⁸ See the Afterword in Paul Ekman's edition of Darwin, Charles, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 3^rd Edition (London: HarperCollins, 1999)Google Scholar. Ekman places particular emphasis on the work of Birdwhistell, Ray, Kinesics and Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970).Google Scholar

¹⁹ On Schneider, see Kuper, Adam, Culture: The Anthropologists' Account (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, 122, 125. Dupré, John, Humans and Other Animals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002)Google Scholar; reviewed by Sterelny, Kim, ‘Po-Bo Man?’ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 35:4 (December 2004), 729–741.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁰ Schoenberg, op. cit., 321.

²¹ Hogan, Patrick, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; Gardner, Howard, Art, Mind, and Brain: A Cognitive Approach to Creativity (New York: Basic Books, 1982).Google Scholar

²² Hogan, op. cit., 79.

²³ The leash metaphor was first deployed by Edward O. Wilson: ‘[G]enes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool. The brain is a product of evolution. Human behavior—like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact.’ Wilson, Edward O., On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 167.Google ScholarPubMed

²⁴ On this point, see Bloom, Paul, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like (London: The Bodley Head, 2010)Google Scholar, xiii. Bloom adds, on the same page: ‘Evolved also does not mean “stupid” or “simple.”’

²⁵ Bordwell, David, Foreword, in Anderson, Joseph D. and Anderson, Barbara Fisher (eds.), Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, xi, my emphasis.

²⁶ Gould, Stephen Jay, ‘Biological Potentiality versus Biological Determinism,’ in Ever Since Darwin (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1980) 251–9Google Scholar.

²⁷ Dawkins, Richard, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 206Google Scholar.

²⁸ Dennett, Daniel C., Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 344Google Scholar.

²⁹ Prinz, ‘Culture and Cognitive Science,’ op. cit., section 2.3, ‘Biases in Cultural Transmission.’ Note that caution must be exercised around the word ‘selection’ here: Hogan uses the term to refer to intentional choices made by individuals and groups, while authentic arguments regarding cultural evolution use the term to refer to a ‘blind’ process of retention. As I note below, however, these two phenomena – intentional and evolutionary selection – are not mutually exclusive.

³⁰ Huysmans, Joris-Karl, Against Nature (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2008), trans. and ed. King, Brendan, 237Google Scholar.

³¹ Gombrich, E. H., ‘The Logic of Vanity Fair: Alternatives to Historicism in the Study of Fashions, Style and Taste,’ Ideals and Idols: Essays on Values in History and in Art (London: Phaidon, 1979)Google Scholar, 61.

³² E. H. Gombrich, ibid, 65.

³³ Raffman, Diana, ‘Is Twelve-Tone Music Artistically Defective?’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXVII (2003), 86Google Scholar.

³⁴ Dutton, Denis, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar, 216.

³⁵ Huron, David, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006)Google Scholar, 333.

³⁶ The first quotation comes from Lerdahl, Fred, ‘Atonal prolongational structure,’ Contemporary Music Review 4:1 (1989), 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the second and third from ‘Cognitive Constraints,’ op.cit., 97 and 119; both essays originally published in 1989.

³⁷ These cases might also be compared with the question of human landscape preferences, as analysed by Davies, Stephen: ‘…whatever the role of culture in channeling and directing our preferences, there is a strong undercurrent of widely shared responses to natural environments.’ The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 99.

³⁸ Lerdahl, ‘Cognitive Constraints,’ op.cit, 119. Compare Bordwell's remarks on the ‘openness’ of a Gibsonian approach to filmic representation, notwithstanding its concern with the ecological constraints on perception. Moving Image Theory, op.cit, xii.

³⁹ Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982)Google Scholar, chapter 3: ‘there should be different experiments of living…the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when any one thinks fit to try them’ (x).

⁴⁰ A squwish is an infant's toy, comprised of small wooden beams and elasticated string, forming a polygonal shape. The shape can be pushed, pulled and distorted in various ways – but not utterly transformed.

⁴¹ Goldie, Peter, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 99, 101. Goldie contrasts his characterization of the ‘openness’ of emotional development with the relative lack of such openness with respect to instinctual responses like eye blinks. In a broader but kindred move, Dennett stresses the phenotypical plasticity of humans in his Kinds of Minds: The Origins of Consciousness (London: Phoenix, 1997)Google Scholar, 110.

⁴² The perspective here might be contrasted with the lack of openness in Pinker's account of aesthetic perception, which puts an emphasis on aesthetic practices that latch on directly to inflexible, low-level aspects of perception and cognition. Pinker, The Blank Slate, op. cit, chapter 20.

⁴³ Danto, Arthur C., Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1989)Google Scholar, xv.

⁴⁴ For an elaboration of this line of thought, see my ‘The Evolutionary Paradigm: the View from Film Studies,’ Style 42:2/3 (Summer/Fall 2008), 277–84.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Lerdahl, ‘Cognitive Constraints,’ op. cit, 118.

⁴⁶ Pinker, The Blank Slate, op. cit., 413.

⁴⁷ Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts, op. cit., 9–10.

⁴⁸ Lerdahl, ‘Timbral hierarchies,’ op. cit, 143.