ABSTRACT
Let me begin by introducing my fellow colleague and interviewee, András Bálint Kovács, Professor at the Institute of Art & Communication, ELTE (Budapest), where he holds the Chair of the Department of Film Studies. He was born in 1959 in Budapest, Hungary. Because of his work on defamiliarization, he was invited to contribute to this book. On the one hand, he frequently uses modern items (films, directors and essays) as objects of research. His book Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950-1980, published by Chicago University Press in 2008 (Limina Award, 2009) is well known, and so are his writings about Tarkovsky and Gilles Deleuze. 1 On the other hand, he is a fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI), where he studies the narrative universals. 2 His ongoing research deals with the psychology of causal thinking while understanding cinematic narrative. In academic Film Studies, this kind of combination is unusual. When choosing modern artworks and authors as objects of research, scholars usually prefer aesthetic, deconstructionist, historical or cultural tools to analyze them, since Modernism is the main purveyor of non-familiar things in the field of culture and art. Cognitive Film Studies are supposed to provide tools to explain how the audience perceives familiar things on the screen. András Bálint Kovács is well aware of this paradoxical combination, since he has been, and still is, involved in epistemological debates (see his article on the book Imposture Intellectuelles). 3 This is a good opportunity to ask him some questions about this paradox in Film Studies (points 1 and 4), and about two mechanisms involved in the defamiliarizing process: narrative causation (point 2) and veridicality of knowledge (point 3).
