Seeing into Screens

Abstract

It can be argued that a great deal of eye tracking the moving-image research has concentrated on examining mainstream, narrative-driven film and television texts. As William Brown observes, eye-tracking research has up until now centrally placed an emphasis on mainstream Hollywood cinema and its predominant system of continuity editing, since this cinema elicits a synchronicity of response, or control over attention, in that viewers attend to the same parts of the screen at the same time – while also often failing to detect edits done in the continuity editing style… There is a seeming bias here towards mainstream, narrative filmmaking, the engrossing nature of which is lauded at the expense of other cinemas. (2015) This contention is supported by the fact that when we look at the body of work that exists on eye-tracking the screen, we see a dominant concern for exploring narrative and story, characterization, performance and movement, continuity editing and synchronous and diegetic sound (see Redmond and Batty 2015; Smith 2012; Robinson, Stadler and Rassell 2015). These are all elements central to the processes, drives and operations of narrative film and television.