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 |