The recent decade has witnessed the development of a research stream, which dares to postulate universal laws of art perception and production: Neuroaesthtics. Leading neuroscientists have maintained that we can objectively define beauty and ugliness and even distinguish true art from kitsch. Moreover, some advocates of neuroaesthetics proclaim that it is the time for neuropsychological turn in art research, leaving behind limited methods such as formalism, semiotics, and post-structuralism. 

At the same time, cinema scholars have been increasingly interested in the neuroscientific knowledge, not necessarily as a means for understanding viewer's reaction to the cinematic content, but as a basis for a scrutiny of the cinematic form. The principles of brain functioning are utilized by scholars exploring the ways certain films assemble data and images. "It's not to psychoanalysis or linguistics but to the biology of the brain that we should look for principles", says Gilles Deleuze¹, "because they don't have the drawback, like the other two disciplines, of applying readymade concepts …  The whole of cinema can be assessed in terms of cerebral circuits, simply because it's a moving-image". 

The course will critically introduce central approaches to the study of art in general and cinema in specific based on accumulating neuroscientific knowledge. Its first part will be dedicated to the heated debate over the validity of the neuroscientific explanations of aesthetic experiences. The second part will focus on the significance of specific neuroscientific findings to the understanding of empathy. Finally, we will examine how updated neuroscientific observations may be integrated with "continental philosophy", such as that of Deleuze, for understanding the uniqueness of contemporary cinematic works.