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The main objective of this dissertation is to characterize the shot change by cut in the cinematographic edition as an articulator of the filmic discourse. To achieve our goal we focused on analysing the cognitive mechanisms of the spectator while is watching a film, through the analysis of their neuronal responses registered by electroencephalogram. Characterizing the shot change by cut as a filmic articulator through the spectator's neuronal reactions requires verifying that, at the same time that neuronal reaction patterns are produced due to the perception of the input of the cut event, these patterns also should reflect differences depending on the kind of shot change perceived by the spectator. In this way, we managed to define a general pattern of neuronal reaction for the recognition of the cut event by the spectator that also shows modulations depending on the specific articulation shape, defined by the characteristics of variation between the plane before and after the cut.
The film studies from its origins was focused in the articulative nature of the shot change as one of the main cinematographic technics related to the creation of meaning, reaching to compare the cut to the syntax of language (Sklovski, 1928; Eisenstein, 1949a). This theoretical postulate continued advance until the 1960s, when there was a great theoretical discussion about how cinematographic message is articulated. On the one hand Mitry (1963) defended the existence of a properly cinematographic language, where the cut supposes the articulation between its units, while on the other hand Metz (1968) rejected all possible existence of its own language, rejecting the possibility proposed by Mitry. This essential theoretical divergence to know the nature of the film structure has not been resolved and to this day, theoretical proposals continue to be divided based on the acceptance or denial of cinema as language. The present investigation does not aspire to resolve this conflict, but it does hope to put a first stone in its resolution from the new empirical methodologies of cinematographic analysis offered by neurocinematics, analysing whether the change of plane by cut supposes an articulative element in filmic discourse.
Neurocinematics (Hasson et al., 2008) develops an empirical methodology based on the analysis of the spectator's biometric measurements while observing the film, following the principles of cinematographic cognitive ecologism (Anderson, 1998). In our research, we analysed the ERD/ERS from the electroencephalographic registered from 21 spectators while observing 4 film fragments whit different aesthetic characteristics and that contain a wide range of shot changes by cut in a continuity editing sequence. Through the study of the neuronal responses we can conclude that the shot change by cut triggers neuronal reactions in the spectator in the Theta and Delta frequency bands, especially in the parietal zone. Also it is possible to differentiate these spectator neuronal reactions depending on the variation of factors such as the shot scale difference or the camera angle variation between the shots before and after the cut. With the results obtained, we can conclude that effectively the cut acts as an articulator of the filmic message, mainly involving the hippocampus, region of the brain related to the coding processes, the spatial-temporal perception and the short-term and long-term memory processes (Ben-Yakov & Henson, 2018; Howard & Eichenbaum, 2015). The results obtained allow us to establish a direct relationship between the mechanisms of the human cognitive system that allows us to understand the shot change by cut with the theory of the cinematographic articulation defined by Burch (1969), based on the concepts of spatial découpage and temporal découpage.