Emotion in Film
After each of your three readings for the week, I will provide a brief summation of takeaways from each article before moving on to the next. First, let's consider emotion in film and some key terms from the reading.
Emotion
Jane Stadler writes in this article that narrative cinema trains us to have an emotional repertoire with stories and characters on display. It’s crucial to cinema and allows us to give aesthetic, ideological and ethical weight to a film. Narrative structure, editing, lighting, cinematography and more foreground emotional details to viewers.
A still from Shawshank Redemption, from Business Insider
Stadler posits that in order to understand identification with screen characters, we need to break emotional and imaginative engagement down into precisely defined terms. In the above still from Shawshank Redemption, consider how Frank Darabont utilizes camera positioning, color palette, camera movement and composition to create an emotional identification with the main character.
Sympathy
Sympathy and Empathy (feeling for/feeling with) are two ways that we can identify with characters in films.
Sympathy involves three levels of emotional engagement with characters:
- Recognition: Spectators identify representations and performances as characters.
- Alignment: Provides access to what characters know and feel through POV and subjective imagery.
- Allegiance: Spectators choose allies in the film based on their moral and ideological evaluation of the character.
Consider these three levels of emotional engagement in films that you've watched recently and during this week's screening of Stories We Tell (2012).
Now, continue on to read a theoretical article on point of view. This reading will build upon the previous one.
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