Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Films evoke broad moods and cue particular emotions that can be broadly shared as well as individually experienced. Although the experience of emotion is central to the viewing of movies, film studies have neglected to focus attention on the emotions, relying instead on vague psychoanalytic concepts of desire. Film Structure and the Emotion System synthesizes research on emotion in cognitive psychology and neurology in an effort to provide a more nuanced understanding of how film evokes emotion. Analysing a variety and range of films, including Casablanca and Stranger than Paradise, this book offers a grounded approach to the mechanisms through which films appeal to the human emotions, demonstrating the role of style and narration in this process.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Part I Developing the Approach
• 1 An invitation to feel
• 2 The emotion system and nonprototypical emotions
• 3 The mood-cure approach to filmic emotion
• 4 Other cogniticisms
• Part II Analyzing Films' Emotional Appeals
• 5 'Couldn't you read between those pitiful lines?' feeling for Stella Dallas
• 6 Stike-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 III Afterward
• 10 An invitation to interpret
• Part IV Appendix: The neurological basis of psychoanalytic film theory: Metz's emotional debt to Freud the biologist

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Coeditor (with Carl Plantinga) of one of the few books on emotion in film (Passionate Views, CH, Dec'99), Smith (Georgia State Univ.) again deploys cognitive psychology and neurology to explore the neglected subject of film structure and emotion. He rejects psychoanalytic concepts of pleasure, desire, and identification as too broad to address the specific ways in which individual films make their emotional appeals; instead he reads a handful of films (Stella Dallas, Strike, Lower Depths, Day in the Country, The Joy Luck Club, Casablanca) in terms of basic formal structures that "extend an invitation to feel." In other words, he focuses not only on character but also on music, mise-en-scene, and editing, arguing that films establish mood through a series of redundant emotive cues (suspense during the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark; mixed horror/comedy in Ghostbusters). His reading of Stella Dallas stresses the difference between feeling for and feeling with characters; he argues that the audience experiences the emotions of both Stella and Stephen and Stella and Laurel in a series of scenes in which these characters remain ignorant of one another's emotions. Readings of the films are emotionally obvious, calling into question the value of Smith's critical apparatus. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Extensive academic collections. J. Belton Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick