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Community Corner

"Why do we watch movies?" – A talk by James E. Cutting, Susan Linn Sage Professor of Psychology at Cornell University

One can argue that movies grip popular culture more firmly than anything else. Why? Movies are an excellent medium in which to tell stories; they are typically well-fit in their structure to the human mind; they allow us unparalleled experience in reading the mental states of others; and they allow for parallel (auditory and visual) narrative threads that can enrich storytelling.

James E. Cutting is Susan Linn Sage Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a graduate student at Yale University. He taught at Wesleyan University before arriving at Cornell in 1980. For 30 years he studied the perception of visual space and motion in the laboratory and used computer graphics to present viewers with possible and impossible environments for their judgments. This eventually led him to the study of photography, then to art, and then to popular movies. His work in art is captured in his 2006 book Impressionism and its Canon, and his work on movies has begun to appear in scholarly journals over the last five years. 

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