Conceptualisation of mindfilm: Palmer’s private and social minds applied to feature films

In Fictional Minds Palmer (2004) refers to the internalist perspective of character’s thoughts: a character gains access to his own thoughts by introspection (private minds). Palmer opposes this paradigm – which was/is dominant in narratological and film studies – to the externalist perspective: a character gains access to another character’s thoughts through mind reading (social minds). The private and the social minds are part of a larger research field which includes subjective film (Bordwell), flashbackfilm (Turim), mind-game film (Elsaesser), etc. In my research, I introduced a new label that covers these concepts: mindfilm. Mindfilm is not a film genre, but mindfilms do have stylistic and narrative features in common. This new label can also be expanded to other media: mindtelevision, mindtheatre, etc. To create a profound knowledge about character’s thoughts, a conceptual model should not only include internalist elements like focalisation (sensory perception), emotions (driving force behind motivation), cognition (narrative information or knowledge) and modes of consciousness1 (memories, dreams, imaginations, hallucinations and hybrid modes of consciousness2) of a character. Equally important are externalist elements like actions, verbal communication (speech act) and non-verbal communication (like intonation, body language or facial expressions) of a character.status: publishe