ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the complex nature of film experience and develops a descriptively adequate account of the film viewer’s activity and agency within the perspective of Cognitive Film Theory and Film-Philosophy. It addresses the issue of film experience by combining Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy with Cognitive Film Theory. The book demonstrates that the relation between a film and its viewer involves the material conceptuality of abstract thought, which is tied to one's emotional involvement as well as empathic and simulation activities. It presents an experiential and film-philosophical examination of film experience and Film Theory, combined with the embodied/semantic analysis of specific case studies that describe damaged characters inhabiting traumatic filmic worlds. The book also presents an analytical model to address the peculiarities and the challenges of contemporary audiovisual culture.
