Skip to Main Content
Genres are essential to movie culture. They provide writers and directors with readymade formulae for new films. They help studio executives and producers plan releases on a schedule with the confidence that they will attract an audience. But perhaps most interestingly, genres serve as a kind of contract with potential viewers. The familiar imagery in a film’s posters and trailers signals the kind of emotional experience it will create in a viewer in exchange for their cash. Perhaps more so than any medium, movies are associated with stimulating powerful feelings for viewers’ pleasure. This course examines how and why certain genres of film, despite their content often being predictable, consistently elicit viewers’ emotions. The how refers their regular themes, stories, and stylistic techniques. How do filmmakers move viewers, and how have their strategies changed over time and in different cultural contexts? The why refers to the deeper relationship between aesthetics and human psychology. What are emotions, and how do they relate to our minds and bodies? How do fictional stories and artworks provoke emotions? Are they the same or different from the ones we feel in everyday life? Why do people feel so strongly for characters and situations that they know are not real? And why would anyone voluntarily choose to be feel fear, sadness, or disgust—emotions they normally avoid at all costs? This course uses three genres to take up these questions, each of them directly focused on stimulating a particular emotional response. The “sensational melodrama”—most familiar to us today in the action film—emerged in the modern era as a theatrical genre that thrilled audiences by creating fear and suspense. In a twisting historical development, the word “melodrama” later came to refer to a very different group of films—ones with stories close to the home and family and often crafted with women’s tastes in mind. The “weepie” melodrama or “tearjerker” stimulates pathos and gave the viewer an opportunity to “have a good cry”—even as many viewers find themselves ashamed to admit when they weep. Finally, Hollywood drew on traditions of Western Romanticism as it pioneered one of its most enduring genres: the horror film. Audiences have flocked to these films for over a century to experience not only fear, but also disgust that nauseates them physically and morally. As we discuss each genre, we consider the difficulties of defining a genre precisely, the diversity possible within each, and how they evolve and transform over time, always drawing on other cultural and artistic traditions. Weekly screenings include exemplary films, while tutorial sessions focus on theoretical texts that explore art and emotion. The course will balance literature from the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and cognitive science. It will also explore the relationship between emotion and broader questions of aesthetic and moral value. Are emotionally powerful artworks socially beneficial, merely harmless, or outright dangerous? And what ethical principles govern artists who seek to engage viewers’ emotions, and therefore possibly their behavior and beliefs? We hope not merely to illustrate concepts through the screenings, but rather to provide an environment in which students draw new connections among the readings and films.
This book investigates the relationship between genre and emotion; explores how film narrative, music, and cinematic techniques such as the close-up are used to elicit emotion; and examines the spectator's identification with and response to film characters. An impressive range of films and topics is brought in this book, including the success of Stella Dallas and An Affair to Remember as tearjerkers; the power of Night of the Living Dead to inspire fear and disgust; the sublime evoked in The Passion of Joan of Arc, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and The Children of Paradise; the emotional basis of film comedy as seen in When Harry Met Sally; etc.
Beyond Aesthetics brings together philosophical essays addressing art and related issues. Countering conventional aesthetic theories - those maintaining that authorial intention, art history, morality and emotional responses are irrelevant to the experience of art - Noël Carroll argues for a more pluralistic and commonsensical view in which all of these factors can play a legitimate role in our encounter with art works. Throughout, the book combines philosophical theorizing with illustrative examples including works of high culture and the avant-garde, as well as works of popular culture, jokes, horror novels, and suspense films.
This book discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. Chapter One proposes an account of the nature of horror, specifically with respect to the emotion, art-horror, that the genre is designed to engender. Chapter Two introduces the first of our paradoxes of the heart, the paradox of fiction. Chapter Three is a review of the most characteristically recurrent plots in the genre, including extensive discussion of interrelated plot formations such as suspense and what contemporary literary critics call the fantastic. Chapter Four deals with the second paradox of the heart, the question of why anyone would subject themselves to horror.
This book is a classic of feminist cinema criticism. Ranging across time and genres from the golden age of Hollywood to films of the late twentieth century, Haskell analyzes images of women in movies, the relationship between these images and the status of women in society, the stars who fit these images or defied them, and the attitudes of their directors. This new edition features both a new foreword by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis and a new introduction from the author that discusses the book’s reception and the evolution of her views.
This book brings together key articles to provide a comprehensive resource for students of horror cinema. Mark Jancovich's introduction traces the development of horror film from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to The Blair Witch Project, and outlines the main critical debates. Combining classic and recent articles, each section explores a central issue of horror film, and features an editor's introduction outlining the context of debates. The book traces attempts to identify the defining features of the genre and account for the enduring appeal of horror films, debates masculinity and femininity in horror films, looks at the contexts in which films are made, and considers the reception of horror.
This book investigates into the nature and meanings of melodrama in American culture between 1880 and 1920. Ben Singer offers a challenging new reevaluation of early American cinema and the era that spawned it. Singer looks back to the sensational or "blood and thunder" melodramas (e.g., The Perils of Pauline, The Hazards of Helen, etc.) and uncovers a fundamentally modern cultural expression, one reflecting spectacular transformations in the sensory environment of the metropolis, in the experience of capitalism, in the popular imagination of gender, and in the exploitation of the thrill in popular amusement.
This book sets out a comprehensive analysis of character, exploring the role of characters in our experience of narrative and fiction. Smith's analysis focuses on film, and also illuminates character in literature, opera, song, cartoons, new and social media. At the heart of this account is an explanation of the capacity of characters to move us. Integrating the arguments with research on emotion in philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology, this book advances an account of the nature of fictional characters and their functions in fiction, imagination, and human experience.
This book is a major selection of Bertolt Brecht’s groundbreaking critical writing. Brecht is one of the twentieth century’s most influential dramatists, a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Arranged in chronological order from 1918 to 1956, these essays explore Brecht’s definition of the Epic Theatre and his theory of alienation effects in directing, acting, and writing, and discuss, among other works, the Threepenny Opera, Mahagonny, Mother Courage, Puntila, and Galileo. Also included is A Short Organum for the Theatre, Brecht’s most complete exposition of his revolutionary philosophy of drama.
