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
8 - Emotion Work: The Joy Luck Club and the Limits of the Emotion System
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
The mood-cue approach seems to favor films that try to maintain a consistent emotional tone. Yes, filmmakers can shift tones effectively if they cue an audience to expect such a change (as A Day in the Country demonstrates), but navigating such a shift can be tricky (cf. The Lower Depths). It seems easier to take advantage of the emotion system's continuity. Once you establish a mood, you just have to keep pouring on a steady stream of congruent emotion cues, and you've got it made, it would seem.
But can a filmmaker simply keep adding cue after cue? We have seen how brief emotion and longer-lasting mood interact to support each other, but are there limits to an audience's ability maintain this consistency? Can a film's emotional appeal wear itself out by trying to evoke too much emotion over time? Again we must remember that different audiences have different expectations for the pacing of their emotion cues. An audience choosing to follow Stranger than Paradise cannot expect the same density of cuing they would from Raiders of the Lost Ark. But even audience members who have developed a taste for dense emotion cuing rely on the basic emotion system, and that network, like all systems, has its limits. Filmmakers must pace their emotion cues appropriately to maintain a consistent mood. Space the emotion cues too far apart, and the filmmaker is in danger of losing his or her audience's emotions.
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- Information
- Film Structure and the Emotion System , pp. 138 - 150Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003