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Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film - Film As An Emotion Machine (Hardcover)
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Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film - Film As An Emotion Machine (Hardcover)
Series: Routledge Communication Series
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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Introduced one hundred years ago, film has since become part of our
lives. For the past century, however, the experience offered by
fiction films has remained a mystery. Questions such as why adult
viewers cry and shiver, and why they care at all about fictional
characters -- while aware that they contemplate an entirely staged
scene -- are still unresolved. In addition, it is unknown why
spectators find some film experiences entertaining that have a
clearly aversive nature outside the cinema. These and other
questions make the psychological status of "emotions" allegedly
induced by the fiction film highly problematic.
Earlier attempts to answer these questions have been limited to a
few genre studies. In recent years, film criticism and the theory
of film structure have made use of psychoanalytic concepts which
have proven insufficient in accounting for the diversity of film
induced affect. In contrast, academic psychology -- during the
century of its existence -- has made extensive study of emotional
responses provoked by viewing fiction film, but has taken the role
of film as a natural stimulus completely for granted. The present
volume bridges the gap between critical theories of film on the one
hand, and recent psychological theory and research of human emotion
on the other, in an attempt to explain the emotions provoked by
fiction film.
This book integrates insights on the narrative structure of
fiction film including its themes, plot structure, and characters
with recent knowledge on the cognitive processing of natural
events, and narrative and person information. It develops a
theoretical framework for systematically describing emotion in the
film viewer. The question whether or not film produces genuine
emotion is answered by comparing affect in the viewer with emotion
in the real world experienced by persons witnessing events that
have personal significance to them. Current understanding of the
psychology of emotions provides the basis for identifying critical
features of the fiction film that trigger the general emotion
system. Individual emotions are classified according to their
position in the affect structure of a film -- a larger system of
emotions produced by one particular film as a whole. Along the way,
a series of problematic issues is dealt with, notably the "reality"
of the emotional stimulus in film, the "identification" of the
viewer with protagonists on screen, and the necessity of the
viewer's cooperation in arriving at a genuine emotion. Finally, it
is argued that film-produced emotions are genuine emotions in
response to an artificial stimulus. Film can be regarded as a
fine-tuned machine for a continuous stream of emotions that are
entertaining after all.
The work paves the way for understanding and, in principle,
predicting emotions in the film viewer using existing psychological
instruments of investigation. Dealing with the problems of
film-induced affect and rendering them accessible to formal
modeling and experimental method serves a wider interest of
understanding aesthetic emotion -- the feelings that man-made
products, and especially works of art, can evoke in the
beholder.
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