Embodied Visions presents a groundbreaking analysis of film through the lens of bioculturalism, revealing how human biology as well as human culture determine how films are made and experienced. Throughout his study, Torben Grodal uses the breakthroughs of modern brain science to explain central features of film aesthetics and to construct a general model of aesthetic experience-what he terms the PECMA flow model-that demonstrates the movement of information and emotions in the brain when viewing film. Examining a wide array of genres-animation, romance, pornography, fantasy, horror-from evolutionary and psychological perspectives, Grodal also reflects on social issues at the intersection of film theory and neuropsychology. These include moral problems in film viewing, how we experience realism and character identification, and the value of the subjective forms that cinema uniquely elaborates.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Embodied Vision delves into a series of representations Fatehpur Sikri has been subjected to and concludes that its space is revealed more through perception than geometry.

"Exploring a dazzling variety of religious imagery, David Morgan shows how vision functions as an active, physical process, embedded in bodily experience and profoundly shaped by social practice. Morgan's bold, thoughtful interpretations will fascinate art historians and students of visual culture as well as historians of religion.” -Pepe Karmel, Department of Art History, New York University "The Embodied Eye is an important and truly groundbreaking book. It represents a substantive and quite fascinating extension of David Morgan's previous work- especially as it impressively shows us how 'seeing' is the primary medium of social life, and materially integrates the body of the individual and the body of the group. Morgan is unquestionably the pioneering theorist in the whole emergent field of Visual and Culture Studies as it relates to religion and art." -Norman Girardot, University Distinguished Professor, Lehigh University “Under David Morgan’s inspiring guidance, readers are taken on a dazzling journey through religious images that mediate worlds of faith. Embedding vision in the body, this book stands out with its thought-provoking approach to religious media as material and embodied interfaces that underpin the social construction of the sacred.” -Birgit Meyer, Professor of Religious Studies, Utrecht University

We rarely give thought to our bodies until faced with a physical challenge or crisis. We have somehow internalized the unbiblical idea that the immaterial aspect of our being (our soul or spirit) is inherently good while the material aspect (our body) is at worst inherently evil and at best neutral--just a vehicle for our souls to get around. So we end up neglecting or disparaging our bodies, seeing them as holding us back from spiritual growth and longing for the day we will be free of them. But the thing is, we don't have bodies; we are our bodies. And God created us that way for a reason. With Scripture as his guide, theologian Gregg Allison presents a holistic theology of the human body from conception through eternity to equip us to address pressing contemporary issues related to our bodies, including how we express our sexuality, whether gender is inherent or constructed, the meaning of suffering, body image, end of life questions, and how to live as whole people in a fractured world.

We are formed by the images we view. From classical art to advertisements and from news photos to social media, the images we look at mold our ideas of race, gender, and class. They shape how we love God and our neighbor. This practical guide helps us look closely at and understand how a wide variety of images make meaning as aesthetic and cultural objects. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt teaches us how to learn from art rather than critique it and how to respond to images in Christian ways, allowing them to positively transform us and how we love. The book includes twenty-three images, most in full color, that range from classical European paintings to Central African sculpture, from Chinese ink painting to political propaganda, and from stark anthropological photographs to unconventional installations.

Cinema is a sensuous object, but in our presence it becomes also a sensing, sensual, sense-making subject. Thus argues Vivian Sobchack as she challenges basic assumptions of current film theory that reduce film to an object of vision and the spectator to a victim of a deterministic cinematic apparatus. Maintaining that these premises ignore the material and cultural-historical situations of both the spectator and the film, the author makes the radical proposal that the cinematic experience depends on two "viewers" viewing: the spectator and the film, each existing as both subject and object of vision. Drawing on existential and semiotic phenomenology, and particularly on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack shows how the film experience provides empirical insight into the reversible, dialectical, and signifying nature of that embodied vision we each live daily as both "mine" and "another's." In this attempt to account for cinematic intelligibility and signification, the author explores the possibility of human choice and expressive freedom within the bounds of history and culture.