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This chapter examines the connection between disturbing aspects of the settler-colonial experience and the perpetuation of the Gothic mode in Australia. It argues that colonial and postcolonial Gothic texts are defined not only by characteristic settings and themes, but also by the figure of the outsider traversing a land unlike their home. As John Scott and Dean Biron claim in their insightful article on the Australian Gothic, ‘Being removed from a familiar environment and transported into another setting is a constant theme’. Here geographer Edward Casey’s concept of atopos, a Greek word meaning ʼno place, ' or ‘strange’ relates to the sense of estrangement that accompanies the experience of place in Australia’s Gothic landscapes. Accordingly, this examination of the recurring figure of the outsider, immigrant, convict, or traveller who is alienated, exiled, or stranded in an alien landscape investigates how atopia relates to a uniquely Australian sense of place in Gothic narratives.

The screen is the material and imaginative interface where biology meets technology. It is the nexus between science and fiction, where technological and ethical concerns surrounding synthespians, representations of replicants, and manifestations of synthetic biology come into play. This analysis of digital imaging and cinematic imagining of virtual actors and synthetic humans in films such as Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) examines the ethical implications of digital embodiment technologies and cybernetics. I argue that it is necessary to bring together science and the arts to advance understandings of embodiment and technology. In doing so, I explore commonalities between ethical concerns about technobiological bodies in cultural and scientific discourse and developments such as the creation of virtual humans and “deepfake” digital doubles in screen media.

With Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker as its case study, this article explores misconceptions about the relationship between imagery and imagination.

Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture makes a significant contribution to cognitive film theory and philosophical aesthetics, expanding the conceptual tools of film analysis to include perspectives from neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Smith probes assumptions about how cinema affects spectators by examining aspects of experience and neurophysiological responses that are unavailable to conscious, systematic reflection. This article interrogates Smith’s account of emotion, empathy, and imagination in cinematic representation and film spectatorship, placing his work in dialogue with other recent interventions in the fields of cinema studies and embodied cognition. Smith’s contribution to understanding the role of emotion in screen studies is vital, and when read in conjunction with recent publications by Carl Plantinga and Mark Johnson on ethical engagement and the moral imagination, this new work constitutes a notable advance in film theory.

The concept of empathy has special significance for the study of cinema as a narrative art form because, from its inception, empathy has been seen as an integral aspect of how people engage with art and come to understand the inner life and emotions of others. Deriving from the German word “Einfühlung,” the term “empathy” dates back to the aesthetic criticism of art historian Robert Vischer in 1873. It was later taken up by psychologist Theodor Lipps (1903) and others in the hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions to refer to “feeling into” an aesthetic object, a natural vista, or another person’s subjective experience in order to develop an experiential understanding of other minds and works of art (see Chapter 7, “Empathy in the aesthetic tradition”). The epistemological function of empathy is an enduring focal point for research about empathy’s role in understanding both art and human experience.

The Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2016) invites epistemological reflection on what Christian Metz terms “film language” by invoking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that language structures the way we think and behave. Amy Adams plays Dr Louise Banks, a linguist who attempts to communicate with an advanced alien species that uses a semasiographic language resembling intricate mandalas with no beginning or end, no linear sequence, and no relationship to spoken sounds. “They use non-linear orthography,” Banks states, “Do they think like that too?” As she learns their language, Banks begins to dream in alien graphemes and to experience the world and its temporal structures in ways facilitated by this novel linguistic form. This paper investigates how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may apply to the audiovisual language of film, considering how the rhythms of editing and the embodied address of sound and image might elicit experiential modes of knowledge that augment cognition and narrative comprehension. From very early in the history of cinema, narrative structure has dominated. As Philosopher Paul Ricoeur argues, the cause and effect logic of narrative is fundamental to organising human understandings of selfhood, behaviour, and events. Furthermore, in narrative film the codes and conventions of editing, cinematography, and sound also structure the way we think and these aesthetic techniques are at the same time informed by the way humans perceive, experience, and understand the world. Drawing on the phenomenological work of Vivian Sobchack and the contributions Walter Murch and Mark Kerins have made to editing and sound theory respectively, this paper takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as a starting point for an epistemological approach to cinema as a conduit for understanding others and their stories.

The long-form television drama series Hannibal (Fuller 2013–2015) thematises the embodied imagination and the elicitation of empathy and ethical understanding at the level of narrative and characterisation as well as through character engagement and screen aesthetics. Using Hannibal as a case study, this research investigates how stylistic choices frame the experiences of screen characters and engender forms of intersubjectivity based on corporeal and cognitive routes to empathy; in particular, it examines the capacity for screen media to facilitate what neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese terms intercorporeality. As a constitutive aspect of intersubjectivity and social understanding that works through embodied simulation, intercorporeality invites a reconceptualisation of empathy and its association with ethical motivation and insight. Hannibal also introduces cannibalism as a dark metaphor for the incorporation of another into oneself, reflecting on empathy's ill-understood potential for negative affect and unethical consequences.

This article sets up a neurophenomenological approach to understanding cinema spectatorship in order to investigate how embodied engagement with technologies of sound and motion can foster a sense of experiential realism. It takes as a starting point the idea that the empirical study of emotive, perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes involved in film spectatorship is impoverished without a phenomenological account of the lived experience under investigation. Correspondingly, engaging with neuroscientific studies enriches the scope of phenomenological inquiry and offers new insights into the film experience. Analysis of diverse films including Interstellar, Leviathan, San Andreas and The Thin Red Line reveals how technological innovations dating from Hale’s Tours (pre-1910) to contemporary D-BOX and Dolby Atmos systems have enhanced the audience’s sense of immersion and corporeal investment in the film experience. Building on the research of Vivian Sobchack and Vittorio Gallese, I argue that aesthetic techniques including the use of low frequency sound effects and wearable cameras facilitate shared affective engagement and a form of embodied simulation associated with kinaesthetic empathy and augmented narrative involvement.

Use of eye tracking data to explore the relationship between sound and vision in two selected sequences from Monsters, Inc. and Saving Private Ryan.

Media and Society explores the relationship between the media, their institutions and the world we live in, examining how they are connected and how society and the media affect each other. The book analyses representations of the world found in films, television, advertisements, news and online to understand the impact of the media in the contemporary world. The sixth edition explores several themes throughout the text, including the contradictory nature of the media and the psychological concerns of the media, to provide clear explanations of complex theories and ideas.