There is widespread agreement on the idea that film owes its popularity to realism. Watching moving images seems so close to real life perception that hardly any training let alone expertise is required in order to be gripped. Is this a correct assumption? We argue that regular film viewers have assembled tacit knowledge of how the world portrayed in film deviates from the real world and how they put this knowledge to use for understanding, categorising and enjoying movies. We illustrate the proposal with some recent empirical studies.

Ed Tan is professor of media psychology at the Universiteit van Amsterdam and the author of the now-classic "Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film" (1996), one of the founding texts of empirical research into cinema and emotions.

Venue / Ort: Goethe Universität Frankfurt | Grüneburgplatz 1 | IG-Farben Gebäude | Room / Raum 7.312
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Eine gemeinsame Veranstaltung des Max Planck-Instituts für empirische Ästhetik (Prof. Dr. Wilfried Menninghaus) und des Instituts für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft der Goethe-Universität (Prof. Dr. Vinzenz Hediger)