Film Structure and the Emotion System

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. Film Structure and the Emotion System synthesizes research on emotion in cognitive psychology and neurology in an effort to provide a more nuanced understanding of how film evokes emotion. Analysing a variety and range of films, including Casablanca and Stranger than Paradise, this book offers a grounded approach to the mechanisms through which films appeal to the human emotions, demonstrating the role of style and narration in this process.

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-ing out: the partial success of early Eisenstein's emotional appeal; 7. Lyricism and unevenness: emotional transitions in Renoir's A Day in the Country and The Lower Depths; 8. Emotion work: The Joy Luck Club and the limits of the emotion system; 9. 'I was misinformed': nostalgia and uncertainty in Casablanca; Part III. Afterword: 10. An invitation to interpret; Appendix: the neurological basis of psychoanalytic film theory: Metz's emotional debt to Freud the biologist; Notes; Index.

Films evoke broad moods and cue particular emotions that can be broadly shared as well as individually experienced. Film Structure and the Emotion System synthesizes research on emotion in cognitive psychology and neurology in an effort to provide a more nuanced understanding of how film evokes emotion.