NECS CONFERENCE 2026 • MONTPELLIER01 / 21
Ruggero Eugeni · Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
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www.ritmi.net
NECS Conference 2026
The Invisible Rhythm
Movement Experience Through Rhythmic Organization in Audiovisual Representational Texts
SpeakerRuggero Eugeni
InstitutionUniversità Cattolica
del Sacro Cuore
Date19 June 2026
Gaudin, 2024
Section 1 • Neurofimology

Introducing Neurofilmology

Neurofilmology is a research framework that investigates viewers’ experiences when engaging with audiovisual media.

It emerges from a dialogue between film semiotics—particularly its pragmatic and interpretive strands rather than its structuralist and generative approaches—and contemporary cognitive neuroscience.

The name refers to the French-Italian tradition of Filmology of the 1940s and 1950s, as Neurofilmology seeks to recover and update a productive dialogue between the humanities and the sciences of the mind (D’Aloia & Eugeni, 2014; D’Aloia, 2021; Eugeni, 2023)

Section 1 • Neurofimology

Neurofilmology: a timeline

Neurofilmology publications timeline collage
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
Section 1 • Neurofimology

A formal model of media experience

Neurofilmology revisits and updates the original project of film semiotics, namely, the attempt to understand both “the fact that films are understood” (Metz, 1968) and “how films are understood” (Odin, 1990).
Accordingly, the central component of Neurofilmology is a formal model of media experience.
Section 1 • Neurofimology

A formal model

Formal model table with arrows
Section 1 • Neurofimology

Methodological pluralism

We have a variety of methods for attaining knowledge about human beings, and… some of these methods are associated with the humanities while others are more at home in the sciences, although they often overlap and meld into each other. The difference between the humanities and the sciences is therefore primarily methodological [and] does not lie chiefly in the object of inquiry. Thus, some questions about the meaning-making practices of human beings will be appropriately answered by humanistic methods, others by scientific methods (including natural-scientific ones), and others still by some combination thereof… We should therefore be methodological pluralists who choose the appropriate method depending on the research question we are posing (Turvey, 2025).
Section 1 • Neurofimology

Neurofilmology: a theoretical–empirical framework

From an epistemological and methodological perspective, Neurofilmology argues that direct integration among disciplinary approaches—as advocated by theories of consilience (Wilson, 1998), the three cultures (Kagan, 2009), or triangulation (Smith, 2017)—often risks generating ambiguities and reductionisms.
Instead, it maintains that individual empirical approaches should operate autonomously while remaining aware of their specific potentials and limitations (disciplinary, ideological, technical, technological, etc.).
Accordingly, Neurofilmology presents itself as a theoretical–empirical framework for the study of cinematic experience. Within this framework, theory functions as a meta-empirical tool that provides epistemological orientation for empirical research, while empirical findings, in turn, refine and enrich theoretical models.
Section 1 • Neurofimology

Neurofilmology as a meta-empirical theory

  • Epistemological and ontological premises
  • Model of viewers’ experience
  • Programs of research
Formal model table
  • The theoretical model of spectator’s experience as a framework for (re)organizing research projects and findings
  • Neurofilmology as a meta-empirical theory
Socio-anthropological surveys
Semiotic analysis
Micro-phenomenological analysis
Behavioural and micro-comportamental experiments
Neurological experiments
Section 2 • METRO_ART

METRO_ART

Movement Experience Through Rhythmic Organization in Audiovisual Representational Texts

OBJECT

METRO_ART addresses, in systematic terms, the issue of rhythmic experience experienced by the spectator of representational (i.e., non-abstract) audiovisual texts and aims to build a theoretical model supported by neurocognitive data.

FUND

PRIN 2023-2025 (National Interest Research Projects - ITALY) cod. 2022MRWN2K - European Union Next generation UE
SH5_4 Visual and performing arts, film, design and architecture

Section 2 • METRO_ART
"
All aspects of art have an essence, and this essence must be sought in rhythm. But rhythm in art is expressed and achieved by different means. In theatre, it is expressed through the actor's gestures and voice; in cinema, through editing. Consequently, the arts differ from one another in their specific methods of conquering matter, in their own means of achieving rhythm.
Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov (circa 1920), quoted in Guido, 2007, p. 15.
"
In La Roue, when Sisif launches the locomotive onto the buffer stop, I was able to alternate the images like verses, eight-four, eight-four. Four-two, four-two… This allows us to achieve a true rhythm… Later, we will be able to compose perfect cinematic poems, with their rhymes falling at regular intervals, like drops, through the repetition of images.
Abel Gance, Interview with André Lang, La Revue hebdomadaire, 1923
"
Motifs are only a means to serve rhythm; they are merely light, shadow, form, movement. There are no longer any objects. The visual music of editing runs in its own sphere alongside the conceptual content.
Bela Balasz, L'esprit du cinéma (1930), Paris, Payot, 1977, p. 222
Section 2 • METRO_ART
"
I look for an exact rhythm between one framing and the next... It's a question of rhythm and, for me, that's the main thing: the beat.
Orson Welles, Entretiens avec André Bazin et Claude Bitsch, Cahiers du cinéma, n. 84, 1958.
"
Rhythms. The omnipotence of rhythms. Only what is caught in rhythms is sustainable. Bending content and form and meaning to rhythms.
Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe, Paris, Gallimard,1975
Section 2 • METRO_ART

Cinematic rhythm: between meter and flow

Not everyone [in film theory] speaks of the same "rhythm" … [However,] in the end, the main dialectical distinction around cinematographic rhythm is that which separates: on the one hand, the "Platonic" paradigm of a filmic rhythm thought of as a visual analogy of musical rhythm and governed by a meter (more or less regular); on the other hand, the "Heraclitean" paradigm of a filmic rhythm thought of above all in the specificity of the visual-sequential form of the moving image, as the proper organization of a flow. Jean Mitry (1997) is undoubtedly the author who has best expressed this passage from one rhythmic paradigm to another (Gaudin, 2024).
Section 2 • METRO_ART

Rhythm is … a body thing.

Rhythm is … a body thing. Our bodies navigate rhythmically in order to survive and thrive in our rhythmic universe. We participate in the oscillations of natural and human-devised contexts by oscillating with them. It is therefore also unsurprising that we shape the rhythms of movies with the same materials from which we and our rhythmic contexts are made — time, energy, and movement. The tools with which we shape rhythms are dictated by the affordances of these materials: timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing are the operations afforded by moving images to shape the rise and fall of narrative, affective, aesthetic, and embodied experiences (Pearlman, 2018 See also Pearlman 2016).
Section 2 • METRO_ART

Theoretical premises

Rhythm is a formal property of movement. Rather than distinguishing between rhythmic and non-rhythmic movement, it is more accurate to speak of different rhythmic forms (as “shapes of movement”: Schonig, 2022; or as “modes of being in the sensible and of the sensible”: Torlasco 2021) . In this sense, rhythm is primarily a qualitative phenomenon, in line with Heraclitus (Benveniste, 1966).
At the same time, quantitative aspects—such as meter and repetition, associated with Plato (Benveniste, 1966)—intersect with this qualitative dimension and help define rhythm more fully.
Section 2 • METRO_ART

Theoretical premises

Rhythm perception is grounded in the proprioceptive experience of bodily movement. It emerges from immediate sensorimotor experience and is activated through mirroring and embodied simulation, even when rhythm is perceived only visually or through sound.
Key interrelated factors include: (a) movement segmentation; (b) the investment, modulation, and release of energy in space and time, expressed through both the speed of gestures and the distribution of stress or accent; (c) energetic relations with the surrounding context, such as gravity, weight, or their suspension; (d) the isolation or repetition of gestural sequences.
Section 2 • METRO_ART

Theoretical premises

In everyday life, rhythmic forms regulate interactions between organisms and environments by providing subjects with both the capacity to predict their own and others’ motor patterns and a shared, attuned speed/velocity across different subjects’ and objects’ displacements. The evolutionary usefulness of rhythmic perception is probably based on this point.
In cinematic and audiovisual experience, we are confronted with a particularly dense interplay of transformative forces and movements: actors, objects, camera movement, focal length, editing, music, sound, and more. As a result, the rhythmic experience of cinema becomes a highly complex phenomenon.
Section 2 • METRO_ART

Research questions / Basic

How do the parameters outlined above—particularly segmentation, energy management, and repetition—co-determine one another, and how do they shape the rhythmic experience in terms of the perception of regularity, fluidity, and energy investment?

How do the visual and auditory features of a film interact—whether in collaboration or contrast—in the construction of distinct yet co-present rhythmic series?

What changes occur in the transition from cinema to virtual reality, a medium that appears to be characterized by a greater degree of continuity?

Section 2 • METRO_ART

Research questions / Advanced

How do different rhythmic qualities of cinematic and VR movement shape the spectator’s emotional experience?

How do different rhythmic qualities of cinematic and VR movement influence the spectator’s perception of time?

Section 2 • METRO_ART
1

Recordings of stimuli in 2D and 3D

First selection of stimuli to be tested based on the most evident features

2

Kinematic analysis of stimuli

Second selection of stimuli to be tested based on the most significant results

3

CAWI test

Use of 2D stimuli
Identification of the initial findings of the research by answering the first of basic research questions

4

In-person experiments with 2D stimuli

Identification of advanced results at the level of basic and advanced questions

5

In-person experiments with 3D stimuli

Identification of advanced results at the level of basic and advanced questions
Identifying results when viewing in VR

6

Start of the next phase

Experimenting with different editing styles and introduction of sound

Section 2 • METRO_ART
PRIN 2022
METRO/ART
Movement Experience Through Rhythmic Organization in Audiovisual Representational Texts
GET RHYTHM
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Bibliography

References

Balzarotti S., F. Cavaletti, A. D’Aloia, B. Colombo, E. Cardani, M. R. Ciceri, A. Antonietti, R. Eugeni. 2021. “The Editing Density of Moving Images Influences Viewers’ Time Perception: The Mediating Role of Eye Movements.” Cognitive Science, 45(4): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12969
Benveniste, E. 1966. “La notion de «rythme» dans son expression linguistique.” Journal de psychlogie, 1951, then in Id., Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris: Gallimard, 327–35.
Cavaletti, F., 2017, «Cinema as a Time Lab: Challenging Ordinary Time Perception through Cinematic Representations and Experience», Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVII, no. 29, pp. 133-136.
Cancer, A., S. Balzarotti, A. Antonietti, A. D’Aloia, R. Eugeni, “As time goes by: SMA neuromodulation and time perception while watching moving images with different editing styles. A tDCS stydy”, Frontiers in Human Neurosciences, Vol. 19, 2025, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2025.1595599
D’Aloia, A., 2021, Neurofilmology of the Moving Image: Gravity and Vertigo in Contemporary Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP.
D’Aloia A., R. Eugeni (eds), 2014, Neurofilmology. Audiovisual Studies and the Challenge of Neurosciences, special issue of Cinéma et Cie. International Film Studies Journal, XIV, n. 22/23,
Eugeni, R. 2023. “Neurofilmology: Semiotics, cognitivism, audiovisual experience”. In Open Semiotics. 3, «Texts, Images, Arts», ed. A. Biglari. Paris: L’Harmattan, 421–34.
Eugeni, R., S. Balzarotti, F. Cavaletti. 2020. “It Doesn’t Seem_it, But It Is. A Neurofilmological Approach to the Subjective Experience of Moving-Image Time.” In: The Extended Theory of Cognitive Creativity Interdisciplinary Approaches to Performativity, ed. A. Pennisi & A. Falzone, Cham: Springer, 243–65. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22090-7_16.
Gallagher, S., 2023 Embodied and Enactive Approaches to Cognition, Cambridge – New York, Cambridge UP.
Gallese, V. & M. Guerra. 2019. The Empathic Screen. Cinema and Neuroscience. Oxford University Press.
Gaudin, A. 2024, “Du rythme visuel au ’rythme spatial du visible’ : pour une musicalité spécifique au cinéma”, Itinéraires [En ligne], http://journals.openedition.org/itineraires/15055
Guido, L., 2007, L’âge du rythme, Lausanne: L'Àge d'homme.
Kagan, J,. 2009, The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, And The Humanities In The 21St Century Cambridge – New York, Cambridge UP.
Metz, C. 1971, Essais sur la signification au cinema, tome 1, 2nd edition.
Mitry, J. 1997. The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Odin, R. 1990, Cinéma et production de sens, Paris: Armand Colin.
Pearlman, K. 2016. Cutting Rhythms: Intuitive Film Editing. 2nd ed. New York: Focal Press.
Pearlman, K. 2018. “Documentary Editing and Distributed Cognition.” In: A Cognitive Approach to Documentary Film, ed. C. Brylla & M. Kramer. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 143-163.
Sconigh, J. 2022, The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, New York, Oxford: Oxford UP.
Smith, M. 2017, Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film, New York, Oxford: Oxford UP.
Torlasco, D. 2021, The Rhythm of Images: Cinema beyond Measure, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Turvey, T., 2025, Film, Art, and the Limits of Science. In Defence of Humanistic Explanation, Cham:Springer.
Wilson E O 1998 Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge New York: Randon House