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Spectatorship
Spectatorship is primarily concerned with the way the individual is positioned between projector and screen in a darkened space. Although the spectator is singular, a figure alone before the screen, spectatorship studies tries to generalise about how all spectators behave.
Physiological / Psychological
The emotion of fear created in the presence of a screen displaying a sequence of images in a horror film may manifest in a bodily, or physiological way (there may be a start, a jump, a scream, a cold sweat, increased heart rate), but there will also be a mental or psychological sensation perhaps terror. The feeling may be fleeting or stay with us a few hours, days or longer.
What is an emotion?
We think of an emotion as something that moves us a feeling we experience. Indeed, the word emotion comes from the Latin word for moving .
A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; A feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love.
Emotions
Emotions appear to be involuntary something which happens to us. They are nevertheless caused by something. What are the factors that contribute to Emotional Contagion as described by Amy Coplan in her analysis of Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998)?
Contextual Knowledge
Emotions are affected by our wider experiences, by what we know. Knowledge and emotion are sometimes thought of as opposites but they are in fact interrelated. Put formally: emotional experience is mediated by what we know. There is frequently a tension between the emotions we experience when watching a film (Eden Lake) and what we know (moral panic in press over teenagers).
Alignment
That process of identification is sometimes called alignment and refers to the way spectators are encouraged through macro and micro features to relate to characters emotions as well as to adopt their points of view. The emotional impact of a film frequently depends on spectator alignment with central characters. What tools do film makers use to align us?
Identify key moments where the central character(s) appear in a film you are studying.
Explore the central character of the film you are studying How are you encouraged to identify with that character? Does the star status of the actor playing the character and thus how the character is shot affect your response? What role does the performance of the actor play in shaping your emotional response?
Positioning: do all spectators respond in the same way? Following Stuart Hall s ideas about positioning, it follows that spectators do not necessarily respond in the same way to films people s social and cultural background influences the way they will respond. How might different audiences respond to the 3 texts we have studied, referring to preferred, negotiated and oppositional positions?
Cultural Background
This opens out other perspectives: does gender or ethnicity play a significant role in spectators emotional responses? Are the pleasures offered male or female and what might this mean? (Mulvey) In addition, you might ask yourself whether as an individual spectator you respond in quite individual ways to what you see.
Contradictory Responses
All this goes towards explaining how film, particularly popular film, can produce contradictory emotions for spectators. Raises questions like: why do we cry or laugh or hold our breath or wince at key moments in our viewing of popular films. However, as often as one might want to argue for a clear cause/effect relationship between film device and response, there will also be the need to explore and question these assumptions from a spectator perspective.
1. Explore how more complex, contradictory emotional responses are produced & the factors affecting those responses 2. E.g. the postmodern emphasis on hybridity leading to an experience of emotion at same time as an awareness of the way your responses are being played with...Inception 3. Contradictory emotions created by such films as Eden Lake where there is arguably a tension between the emotions we experience and the issues they raise. 4. Recognising that emotional responses are mediated by context
Emotional Contagion
Incidents that have been found to reliably evoke such mimicry include pain, laughter, smiling, affection, embarrassment, discomfort, disgust, facing a thrown projectile, ducking away from being hit, stuttering, word-finding, and succeeding and failing at a timed task.
These techniques do not work, however, unless the duration of the shot of the character s facial expression is long enough.