ABSTRACT
In my contribution to this book, I aim at exploring the potential contribution of evolutionary-cognitive psychology in the study of defamiliarization in cinema. Interdisciplinarity being at the core of the study, an epistemological preamble is necessary before analyzing what cognitive psychology has to say about the question of perception. The findings will then be transposed to the question of perception of the cinematographic spectacle: before being able to know what may be defamiliarizing in a film, one has to wonder whether the whole cinematographic process itself is not defamiliarizing. Three sections will then be devoted to audiovisual ostranenie, based on three common distinctions in perception psychology:
defamiliarizations dealing with the processes of automatic recognition of visual forms (bottom-up);
defamiliarizations dealing with the routines associated with the exploration of the environment by the whole body;
defamiliarizations dealing with high-level cognitive processes such as opinions and beliefs (top-down).
