Film Structure and the Emotion System [Hardcover]

Synthesizes research on emotion in cognitive psychology and neurology to provide an understanding of how film evokes emotion.Films evoke broad moods and cue particular emotions that can be broadly shared as well as individually experienced. Although the experience of emotion is central to the viewing of movies, film studies have neglected to focus attention on the emotions, relying instead on vague psychoanalytic concepts of desire. Movies, Emotion, and Mood synthesizes recent research on emotion in cognitive psychology and neurology in an effort to provide a more nuanced understanding of how film evokes emotion.Films evoke broad moods and cue particular emotions that can be broadly shared as well as individually experienced. Although the experience of emotion is central to the viewing of movies, film studies have neglected to focus attention on the emotions, relying instead on vague psychoanalytic concepts of desire. Movies, Emotion, and Mood synthesizes recent research on emotion in cognitive psychology and neurology in an effort to provide a more nuanced understanding of how film evokes emotion.Synthesizing recent research on emotion in cognitive psychology and neurology, this study provides a more nuanced understanding of how film evokes emotion. Although the experience of emotion is central to movie-viewing, film studies have not focused on the emotions, relying instead on vague psychoanalytic concepts of desire. This volume describes a grounded approach to analyzing the emotional appeal of a wide variety of films (from Casablanca to Stranger than Paradise, from Renoir to Spielberg), showing how style and narration call upon the viewer's emotion system.Part I. Developing the Approach: 1. An invitation to feel; 2. The emotion system and nonprototypical emotions; 3. The mood-cue approach to filmic emotion; 4. Other cognitivisms; Part II. Analyzing Emotional Appeals in Film: 5. 'Couldn't you read between those pitiful lines?': feeling for Stella Dallas; 6. Strike-lã2