hrvatski  
Home
About us
Production
Publishing
Croatian film
chronicles
Note
Festivals
impressum
 
2002.
30

FILM AND EMOTION

Movie Music as Moving Music: Emotion, Cognition and the Film Score

Dealing with the problem of the relation between film music and emotion, the author attempts to situate the emotional significance of film music within a more general theory of musical expressivity. Using research done in the disciplines of music theory and psychomusicology, he then looks at the processes he considers central to our emotional experience of film music: polarization and affective congruence. Although important in dealing with these problems, cognitive theories have had very little to say within the study of film music, contrary to post structuralism and psychoanalysis. Cognitive theories, however, (for example, Noël Carroll’s works) are better suited to explaining the important difference between communicating an affective component and evoking it.

The categories of judgment and emotion are equally important in the viewer’s emotional reaction to film music. The author goes on to explain the film music dramatic functions that include a series of musical and narrative interactions, and the author elaborates on the experiments (for example, those done by Annabel Cohen), which can substantiate such (cognitivist) concept of the relation between music and emotion. The conclusion is that only a careful theorization of the various processes of film-musical cognition will provide us with a better understanding not only of what film music contributes to film, but of the emotional expressiveness of cinema as a whole.

ANALYTIC CONTENTS OF THE PAPER:
Emotion and music: cognitivist theories versus emotivist theories; Emotion and the film score’s dramatic functions: playing the mood of the scene versus the mood of the character; Emotion, film music, and psychology: polarization and affective congruence; Conclusions.



Jeff Smith

Local Emotions, Global Moods, and Film Structure
Sentiment in Film Viewing
Towards a Psychological Theory of Close-ups: Experiencing Intimacy and Threat
The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film

View other articles in this edition...

 

new edition
archive
associates
subscription
impressum






Web Statistics