Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Film Structure and the Emotion System
- PART ONE DEVELOPING THE APPROACH
- PART TWO ANALYZING EMOTIONAL APPEALS IN FILM
- 5 “Couldn't You Read between Those Pitiful Lines?”: Feeling for Stella Dallas
- 6 Strike-ing Out: The Partial Success of Early Eisenstein's Emotional Appeal
- 7 Lyricism and Unevenness: Emotional Transitions in Renoir's A Day in the Country and The Lower Depths
- 8 Emotion Work: The Joy Luck Club and the Limits of the Emotion System
- 9 “I Was Misinformed”: Nostalgia and Uncertainty in Casablanca
- PART THREE AFTERWORD
- APPENDIX. The Neurological Basis of Psychoanalytic Film Theory: Metz's Emotional Debt to Freud the Biologist
- Notes
- Index
7 - Lyricism and Unevenness: Emotional Transitions in Renoir's A Day in the Country and The Lower Depths
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Film Structure and the Emotion System
- PART ONE DEVELOPING THE APPROACH
- PART TWO ANALYZING EMOTIONAL APPEALS IN FILM
- 5 “Couldn't You Read between Those Pitiful Lines?”: Feeling for Stella Dallas
- 6 Strike-ing Out: The Partial Success of Early Eisenstein's Emotional Appeal
- 7 Lyricism and Unevenness: Emotional Transitions in Renoir's A Day in the Country and The Lower Depths
- 8 Emotion Work: The Joy Luck Club and the Limits of the Emotion System
- 9 “I Was Misinformed”: Nostalgia and Uncertainty in Casablanca
- PART THREE AFTERWORD
- APPENDIX. The Neurological Basis of Psychoanalytic Film Theory: Metz's Emotional Debt to Freud the Biologist
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Emotions display a kind of inertia. When people are fearful or angry or joyous, they tend to remain in that state because the emotion system sets up a processing loop. Our mood encourages us to revisit the emotional stimulus repeatedly, each time gaining a fresh dose of mood-sustaining emotion. This looping tends to continue until it becomes “worn out” (overly familiarized) or until the stimulus is fundamentally reevaluated or removed. Even when we have worked to eliminate the stimulus (running away from a fearful object or violently removing an object that makes us angry), the emotional state still remains for a while because of bodily arousal. The emotions usually involve the body, and the body cannot change arousal states as quickly as the mind can change thoughts. To change from one emotional state to a radically different one requires time for the body to alter its orientation.
Film narration relies on this inertia to sustain its emotional appeal. The mood-cue approach is continuity-based because of the systematic tendency of emotions to maintain a consistent orientation. Does this mean that only films that maintain a unitary tone can successfully appeal to the emotions? Our desiderata specify that an approach to filmic emotion should be able to explain how such emotions change over time. What about films that make an abrupt shift in their emotional appeals? Can the mood-cue approach explain how a film might make such a switch?
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- Chapter
- Information
- Film Structure and the Emotion System , pp. 122 - 137Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003