FILM AND EMOTION

Local Emotions, Global Moods, and Film Structure

Overturning long-held Romantic notions about the opposition between emotion and cognition, a cognitivist can emphasize emotions as a structured complement to cognitive processes. Emotions, from the cognitivist perspective, are the motivational aspect of cognitive processes, functional action tendencies that motivate us toward goals shaped by our situational expectations. Though the author agrees with the trust of this argument, he argues that the emotions system is more complex then such functionalist assumptions would indicate.

He argues for an associationist model of emotions, according to which emotions are some sort of multidimensional response syndromes, groups of responses (including action tendencies, orienting responses, and expressions) connected to several possible eliciting systems. Some of the emotion generating ’combinations’ may not be goal-oriented, and may not have articulated action tendencies, but they still bear an emotional mark — one of such is the so-called ’mood’. The author argues that films are more commonly structured to elicit such a generalized feeling, a ’mood’, then short-term — action prone — emotions. A film is offering a number of ’mood cues’, mood markers (music, mise en scene elements, colour, sound and lighting), which are able to convey a particular mood to audience members.

ANALITICAL CONTENTS OF THE PAPER:
Film cognitivism and emotion thus far: the emotion prototype; The emotion system: an associative model; Mood; The emotion system and film structure; Informativeness, goal orientation, and emotion markers.

Greg M. Smith