Torben Grodal is Professor of Film studies at the University of Copenhagen. His books include Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition (1997) and Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film (2009).

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The talk will present a general model of the fundamentals of narrative based on (embodied) brain functions and the flow from perception to emotion, cognition and simulated action. The brain-based model explains the aesthetic effects of scrambling the canonical flow; how different deviations create lyrical effects and influences reality status evaluations (e.g. fictionality). It will describe how reality status evaluations are linked to action potentials, to the mechanisms behind central salient narrative effects such as comic, tragic and lyrical modes, and to the effects of scrambling temporal orders.