Local Emotions, Global Moods: The Emotion System and Film Structure (original) (raw)
Related papers
This is a comparison of the emotions we have in watching a movie with those we have in everyday life. Everyday emotion is loose in frame or context but rather controlled and regulated in content. Movie emotion, in contrast, is tightly framed and boundaried but permissive and uncontrolled in content. Movie emotion is therefore quite safe and inconsequential but can still be unusually satisfying and pleasurable. I think of the movie emotions as modeling clay that can symbolize all sorts of human troubles. Amajor function of movies then is catharsis, a term I use more inclusively than usual. Throughout I use a pragmatist approach to film theory. This position gives the optimal distance to the study of ordinary, middle-level emotion. In contrast psychoanalysis is too close and cognitive theory too distant. This middle position is similar to Arlie Hochschild's symbolic interactionist approach to the sociology of emotions, which also mediates between psychoanalysis and cognitive theories.
How Many Emotions Does Film Studies Need? A Phenomenological Proposal
Projections, 2021
A look at current emotion research in film studies, a field that has been thriving for over three decades, reveals three limitations. (1) Film scholars concentrate strongly on a restricted set of garden-variety emotions-some emotions are therefore neglected. (2) Their understanding of standard emotions is often too monolithic-some subtypes of these emotions are consequently overlooked. (3) The range of existing emotion terms does not seem fine-grained enough to cover the wide range of affective experiences viewers undergo when watching films-a number of emotions might thus be missed. Against this background, the article suggests at least four benefits of introducing a more granular emotion lexicon in film studies. As a remedy, the article suggests paying closer attention to the subjective-experience component of emotions. Here the descriptive method of phenomenology-including its particular subfield phenomenology of emotions-might have useful things to tell film scholars.
The Psychological Construction of Emotion: A Filmological Approach
Comunicazioni Sociali, 2017
The aim of this paper is a reconsideration of the questions surrounding the film and audiovisual media experience in the light of the current debate in psychology and the neurosciences. It presents four steps to assess the current situation: first and most obviously, to define clearly both the field of research and the methodology proposed; secondly, to employ a grounding paradigm, which may be found in the concept of functional consciousness; thirdly, to address the core theories of the psychology of emotions, which today lies at the heart of the scientific debate, and to do sousing the most up-to-date tools, with particular regard to the psychological construction of emotion and subsequently that of the film and audiovisual media viewing experience; fourthly and finally, to define the relevance of the model with respect to the specific field of film and media, which will be done here through the use of classic filmological models that take into account the dynamics of the attribution of reality to film images, emotional participation, and cinematic self-projection. The last of these, in my view, allows us on the one hand to draw a richer and more up-to-date picture of the film and audiovisual media experience and, and on the other, to understand a neo-filmological approach as a mediator between phenomenology and functionalist psychology. Here, again, emotion will play a crucial role.
Mixed Feelings: Conflicts in Emotional Responses to Film
Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXXIV (2010): 278-292
Some films scare us; some make us cry; some thrill us. Some of the most interesting films, however, leave us suspended between feelings – both joyous and sad, or angry and serene. This paper attempts to explain how this can happen and why it is important. I look closely at one film that creates and exploits these conflicted responses. I argue that cases of conflict in film illuminate a pair of vexing questions about emotion in film: (1) To what extent are emotional responses rational, or in need of rationalization?; and (2) What relationship is there between emotional response and value (moral, filmic, or otherwise)? I argue that conflicted emotions in response to film are valuable because they remind us of our epistemic limitations and of the disorder of moral and social life.
2016 - Perceiving Emotional Causality in Film: A Conceptual and Formal Analysis
This article investigates the conceptual and formal ways in which the cinematic mode of expression prompts the viewer to perceive emotional causality in film, namely the percept that the viewer sees that the character’s perception of an outer event is the cause of an emotional state in the character. The structure of our paper is twofold. The first section is theoretical and centres around the answerability of four main questions: What is emotional causality? How do we conceptualise it? How do we perceive it? And how do we perceive it in the filmic form? Explanations will be mainly drawn from three different intellectual disciplines: cognitive linguistics, experimental psychology and the philosophy of mind. The second section is practical and aims to show how the proposed theoretical model can be applied by considering its use for the analysis of what has been described by many as the prototypical genre of intense emotions, namely the melodrama genre. Using a scene from Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows as an example, we show how film, through its formal articulation of various conceptual mechanisms, stimulates the viewer to infer a causal relationship between (1) the character’s visual experience and (2) the character’s emotional state.
Emotions and film genres: from attitudes to expectations
A cognitive approach suggests that original bodily changes are subject to an assessment of the objects, people and events involved in a situation - this assessment leads to the formation of beliefs that in turn help to recognise the bodily signals as emotions. Emotions at the movies, however, are affected by a pre-arranged context whose emotional impact has largely been foreseen. This impact requires that viewers develop attitudes of sympathy or concern for the movie characters, so that expectations towards the outcome of their situation can be formed and eventually fulfilled. In most cases, such attitudes also involve a moral dimension which makes the emotional involvement even stronger. Film genres generally specialize in staging characters and events that are used to elicit particular kinds of emotions in viewers. This Interactive workshop offers opportunities to analyse film sequences in terms of the beliefs, attitudes and expectations that are elicited by the film itself in order for the viewers to experience a range of emotions.