Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion

by Carl Plantinga (Editor), Greg M. Smith (Editor), Jeff Smith (Contributor)

The movie theater has always been a place where people come together to share powerful emotional experiences, from the fear generated by horror films and the anxiety induced by thrillers to the laughter elicited by screwball comedies and the tears precipitated by melodramas. Indeed, the dependability of movies to provide such experiences lies at the center of the medium's appeal and power. Yet cinema's ability to influence, even manipulate, the emotions of the spectator is one of the least-explored topics in film theory today.

In Passionate Views, thirteen internationally recognized scholars of film studies, philosophy, and psychology explore the emotional appeal of the cinema. Employing a novel cognitive perspective, the volume investigates the relationship between genre and emotion; explores how film narrative, music, and cinematic techniques such as the close-up are used to elicit emotion; and examines the spectator's identification with and response to film characters.

An impressive range of films and topics is brought together by Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, including: the success of Stella Dallas and An Affair to Remember as tearjerkers; the power of Night of the Living Dead to inspire fear and disgust; the sublime evoked in The Passion of Joan of Arc, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and The Children of Paradise; the emotional basis of film comedy as seen in When Harry Met Sally; the use of cinematic cues in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Local Hero to arouse emotions; the relationship between narrative flow and emotion in Once Upon a Time in the West and E.T.; the emotive use of music in The Elephant Man and A Clockwork Orange; Stranger than Paradise's sense of timing; desire and resolution in Casablanca; audience identification with the main characters in Groundhog Day and The Crying Game; portrayal of perversity in The Silence of the Lambs, Flaming Creatures, and Shivers; and empathy elicited through closeups of actors' faces in Yankee Doodle Dandy and Blade Runner.

Passionate Views offers a new approach to our understanding of film and will be of interest to anyone fascinated by the emotional power of motion pictures and their relationship to the central concerns of our lives, as well as by the techniques filmmakers use to move an audience.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, Research

302 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 1999

About the author

Carl Plantinga is Professor of Film Studies at Calvin College. He is the author of Rhetoric and Representation in Non-Fiction Film and the coeditor of Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion.

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really hope these cognitive scholars don't become too dominant in the world of film studies. They do what I thought could never be done: they make film boring. Eff that noise!

That being said, I quite enjoyed a select few of the essays in this book. Use sparingly.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know that this is a specialist's book, written for a specialist's audience - but even so the level of inaccessibility in some of these essays was somewhat perplexing to me. Don't get me wrong, there are a number of great essays in here that thoughtfully and carefully lay out both the tenets of cognitive film theory and the specific scholarly gains those chapters are making in that field. But a large number of the chapters here are filled with jargon, complicated redefinitions of terms in sometimes slippery and elusive new language, and often arcane, highly specific cinematic examples that do very little to aid in concrete explanation or illustration of their theoretical perspectives. The few essays that are good are, actually, really good, yet fail to necessarily make up for some of the denser, more difficult passages throughout. I definitely enjoyed reading and exploring parts of these theories, but am also happy to have finished the book and gotten what I needed to out of it.

[Stark · Rating 5 out of 5]

So it’s cognitive film criticism that’s the one I like. What will stay with me is the notion of the “scene of empathy,” ie closeups that are set up by various other narrative and formal means to induce empathy in the spectator. This is the beauty of film.

[Jesse · Rating 1 out of 5]

Made me realize I despise cognitive film theory—it was rather amazing how many interesting films are rendered completely dull and lifeless through the various readings found here. For me, Greg M. Smith's "Local Emotions, Global Moods, and Film Structure" was the only essay of note.

[Nelson Zagalo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone studying emotion and film.