Précis 1 23 Nov 22 Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind (in press, 2023) Précis of Movies on Our Minds James E. Cutting Movies on Our Minds (Cutting, 2021) provides structural analyses of popular, English-language cinema and maps them onto biological and psychological bases. It progresses from the details of optics and screen projection; through transitions and shots; on to scenes, montages, and syntagmas; and finally to larger narrative units and the flow of patterns of elements across whole movies. It focuses on changes in all of those patterns across a century, ascribing them to evolution. That evolution, akin to Darwinian evolution, is hallmarked by patterns of reproduction with inheritance, variation, and selection of traits over time. Two forces appear to have guided this evolution: the matching of elements of film form to predilections of the biology of our visual systems, and their matching to predilections of our cognition, particularly as it has been shaped by visual culture. Movies on Our Minds discusses biological and psychological underpinnings that constrain the physical form of popular movies. It summarizes and extends empirical research that my students and I conducted over a dozen years, published in three dozen book chapters and articles in professional outlets across cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, and film and media studies. In those works, we focused on tracking the changes in popular, English-language movies, eventually encompassing those released from 1915 to 2015. Overall, we analyzed three hundred movies, shot-by-shot and often frame-by-frame, sampled from among the most popular and across a wide range of genres. Many analyses were done by hand using digital players and recording results on spread sheets. Many others were done by purpose-written computer algorithms analyzing digital movie files. And some were done with hybrid techniques. The descriptive purpose of the book is to mesh film form with psychological phenomena. The theoretical purpose of the book is to provide a new framework for our understanding of cinematic change. That is, I claim there is strong evidence for evolution in popular movies. Moreover, this evolution is not far removed from biological evolution in its major precepts. Darwin postulated four tenets of evolution: reproduction, heredity of traits, variation in traits, and selection of traits. Although movies do not reproduce themselves, it is obvious that many are produced, sometimes remade. It is patent that many movies are similar to others that have gone before—sequels, prequels, franchises, spinoffs, and, more generally, genres of movies that share many “trait”-like similarities. It is also evident that there is ample variation in these traits across otherwise similar movies. But most importantly—and the focus of the research and data discussed in the book—there has been continual selection of traits over time. Or, in obverse, across successive cohort populations of popular movies, there has been a culling of many less effective trait values, gradually altering film form. Moreover, I claim, there have been two domains in this evolution—one focused on matching images with the biology of our visual systems, and the other focused on optimal form for cognition and on cultural changes that have affected our cognition. Some of these changes have resulted from technological advances, others from style choices made by filmmakers.