Cinesonic Worldmaking: Principles of audiovisual composition in nonfiction cinema by David Villalvazo

This multimodal dissertation investigates the creative thought operations  involved in the composition of nonfiction films. It delves into the ways in which  nonfiction cinema explores, grasps, and informs the world through the manoeuvres of imaginative intelligence arising in cinematic editing and sound design.   Drawing on pluralistic epistemologies and interdisciplinary work on the  analogical nature of human thinking, the project looks into how art operates as a symbol system. It then situates these analyses in relation to grounded, enactive, and  spatial-kinetic approaches to cognition, illustrating that embodied engagements with physical, interpersonal, and cultural surroundings forge and shape our worldviews.  From these perspectives, the notion of worldmaking operations emerges as a way to  describe the faculty for discerning relevant patterns in the world. Cinesonic Worldmaking  delineates the various ways filmmakers harness this continuous process of situated  interactions, applying it to creatively organize a wide array of features and references to actuality into symbolic intermediaries, prompting the construction of understanding on human issues and possibilities.   To gain deeper insights into the audiovisual mechanisms for evoking vivid,  condensed, and fine-grained experiences in emotion and cognition, the thesis enters into dialogue with foundational studies on embodied metaphorical thought, conceptual  combination networks, and a wealth of psychological and neuroscientific research on the nature of concepts and analogical cognition. These exchanges allow outlining  the anatomy of cinesonic conceptualizations—the building blocks of documentaries'   interpretative horizons — and bring to light that, akin to musical forms, these ideational constructs are highly organized, holistic, evolving patterns containing many embedded levels of sensory detail. The work elucidates that, much like traditional Western music composers, filmmakers tend to build both structural units and large-scale structures by  arranging a core of graded motifs in time. In doing so, they orchestrate the intertwined layers of aural/visual imagery and dynamic patterns that documentary cinema delivers to yield interpretive access to intimate and social life. The investigation further suggests that the practical procedure of articulating cinesonic conceptualizations exemplifies what some contemporary scholars call multimodal manipulative abduction—a form of "thinking through doing" seen in the creation of scientific models leading to discoveries. Cinema editors and sound designers adopt this epistemic approach; they craft analogue models bearing on the comprehension of actuality by sketching, developing, and refining holistic configurations.   This research employs miscellaneous art forms and original short nonfiction films to illustrate the theoretical framework. The latter part of the dissertation emphasizes case studies in which cinesonic projects serve as a method of inquiry within social,  educational, and ethnographic settings. By breaking down the three primary types of  documentary structures—stories (narratives), studies (rhetorical performances), and  symphonies (cinesonic poems)—the section introduces key compositional strategies,  including spatiotemporal dynamics, closure, and clear density, demonstrating how these cinematic tools can be applied to explore interdisciplinary topics.    Throughout this study, the label cinesonic worldmaking characterizes the cognitive  processes by which film editing and sound design perform expressive reconfigurations of domains, incorporating them into experiences of cross-sensory patterned interaction that advance tacit knowledge and elicit explicit insights, ultimately fostering transformative understanding and empathy.

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This multimodal dissertation investigates the creative thought operations  involved in the composition of nonfiction films. It delves into the ways in which  nonfiction cinema explores, grasps, and informs the world through the manoeuvres of imaginative intelligence arising in cinematic editing and sound design.   Drawing on pluralistic epistemologies and interdisciplinary work on the  analogical nature of human thinking, the project looks into how art operates as a symbol system. It then situates these analyses in relation to grounded, enactive, and  spatial-kinetic approaches to cognition, illustrating that embodied engagements with physical, interpersonal, and cultural surroundings forge and shape our worldviews.  From these perspectives, the notion of worldmaking operations emerges as a way to  describe the faculty for discerning relevant patterns in the world. Cinesonic Worldmaking  delineates the various ways filmmakers harness this continuous process of situated  interactions, applying it to creatively organize a wide array of features and references to actuality into symbolic intermediaries, prompting the construction of understanding on human issues and possibilities.   To gain deeper insights into the audiovisual mechanisms for evoking vivid,  condensed, and fine-grained experiences in emotion and cognition, the thesis enters into dialogue with foundational studies on embodied metaphorical thought, conceptual  combination networks, and a wealth of psychological and neuroscientific research on the nature of concepts and analogical cognition. These exchanges allow outlining  the anatomy of cinesonic conceptualizations—the building blocks of documentaries'   interpretative horizons — and bring to light that, akin to musical forms, these ideational constructs are highly organized, holistic, evolving patterns containing many embedded levels of sensory detail. The work elucidates that, much like traditional Western music composers, filmmakers tend to build both structural units and large-scale structures by  arranging a core of graded motifs in time. In doing so, they orchestrate the intertwined layers of aural/visual imagery and dynamic patterns that documentary cinema delivers to yield interpretive access to intimate and social life. The investigation further suggests that the practical procedure of articulating cinesonic conceptualizations exemplifies what some contemporary scholars call multimodal manipulative abduction—a form of "thinking through doing" seen in the creation of scientific models leading to discoveries. Cinema editors and sound designers adopt this epistemic approach; they craft analogue models bearing on the comprehension of actuality by sketching, developing, and refining holistic configurations.   This research employs miscellaneous art forms and original short nonfiction films to illustrate the theoretical framework. The latter part of the dissertation emphasizes case studies in which cinesonic projects serve as a method of inquiry within social,  educational, and ethnographic settings. By breaking down the three primary types of  documentary structures—stories (narratives), studies (rhetorical performances), and  symphonies (cinesonic poems)—the section introduces key compositional strategies,  including spatiotemporal dynamics, closure, and clear density, demonstrating how these cinematic tools can be applied to explore interdisciplinary topics.    Throughout this study, the label cinesonic worldmaking characterizes the cognitive  processes by which film editing and sound design perform expressive reconfigurations of domains, incorporating them into experiences of cross-sensory patterned interaction that advance tacit knowledge and elicit explicit insights, ultimately fostering transformative understanding and empathy.
David Villalvazo - Cinesonic Worldmaking: Principles of audiovisual composition in nonfiction cinema - 2025
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