Emotional arousal is not just a random byproduct of the film experience but is closely related to the stylistic qualities of movies. One of the first experiments on the emotional power of film editing was conducted by the Russian filmmakers/theorists Pudovkin and Kuleshov, who discovered what has been called the Kuleshov effect. They took a close-up shot of an actor looking offscreen with a neutral facial expression and then edited in different objects including a bowl of soup; a woman lying dead in a coffin; and a little girl playing with a stuffed bear. Audiences shown the short films were all impressed by the actor's ability, yet the emotion they attributed to him differed from film to film. When audiences saw him “staring” at the soup, they thought the actor looked pensive. In the coffin version, he was thought to be sorrowful. In the little girl version, he seemed cheerful. Of course, in each case, the shot of the actor was the same.27
This experiment demonstrates several things about cognitive processes generally, and film editing specifically. In each condition of the experiment, the audience assumed the actor was looking at the object in the second shot, even though it had been superimposed via the editing. Audience members automatically join different parts of an edited film in order to form an intelligible whole.28 The experiment also demonstrated a tendency to organize ambiguous stimuli via context. Thus, depending on the object with which it was paired, the same neutral expression could be interpreted as pensive, sorrowful, or cheerful.
Camera angle is another stylistic aspect that has an impact on not only the emotional reactions of viewers but how they appraise the emotions of a character. In another study, short movies were created about ordinary activities between two characters such as a fender bender. Several versions were shot in which the camera angles varied. In one version, Character A was shot from a low angle while Character B was shot from a high angle, and vice versa. Even though every other aspect of the movies were identical, characters shot from a low angle (towering above the camera) were perceived as stronger, bolder, more aggressive, and less afraid. The opposite was true of the character filmed from a high angle (being looked down on).29 The results correspond to a well-known rule about the function of camera angles—low angles convey superiority while high angles convey a character's inferiority.30 Citizen Kane famously employs low camera angles when Kane (Orson Welles) is confidently launching his newspaper empire, while later in the film, after his life has collapsed, the camera looks down on Kane from on high. Such angles echo patterns from outside film. When we physically look down on someone (an adult to a child), we typically have a position of superiority and vice versa.
Emotional Themes
Ever since Aristotle characterized tragedy as dramas evoking fear and pity, there has been a close connection between emotion and story.31 Since a narrative film is more than a random series of provocative images, its emotional power is not based just on visual perception but on the fundamental qualities of stories, particularly theme and character.
Try the following experiment: Imagine the fear-inducing basement scene from Silence of the Lambs. Take any frame from that scene and turn it into a still photograph. Would that photograph be scary? My guess is that a well-chosen frame might evoke some anxiety, but wouldn't arouse as much fear and anxiety as the scene itself. (I also suspect the photo would arouse more fear in people who have seen the film, due to pre-existing associations between the image and the story.)
Stories provoke feelings, an observation that intertwines emotional theory with narrative theory. The cognitive schemas (mental structures) people use to comprehend their actions and those of others, are called “scripts.”32 We have scripts for all of the actions we perform or witness, from trips to the store to weddings. Since scripted events are important for helping us get through the day, achieve success, and ultimately survive, they have an emotional resonance that lets us make intuitive decisions about what is valuable and what is dangerous.
Scripts not only apply to understanding people and events but to comprehending fictional events in the movies; within a literary or cinematic context, these scripts are called themes. As we watch a movie and witness variations of events we have seen before, certain scripts are triggered, bringing an automatic emotional response. Some scripts (going to a grocery store) provoke mild reactions while others (someone getting married) tend to evoke stronger emotions. Sometimes the stories in movies line up with established scripts (weddings at the end of many romantic comedies); and others contrast starkly (the wedding-turned-massacre in Kill Bill). Typically conventional stories allow us to feel comfortable and content (even when they bore us) while unconventional stories make us feel disoriented or alienated.
Experiments have demonstrated that our core scripts or themes affect the intensity of our emotional reactions (as well as subsequent memory of events). In one study, participants were shown excerpts from two films (fiction and nonfiction) that each corresponded to one of three themes: weddings, AIDS, and the life of Gandhi. Emotional reactions were more intense to the AIDS and wedding films than the Gandhi films. In addition, participants remembered the material in these films better than they did the Gandhi films, a finding that connects emotions with the cognitive process of memory. Unlike the Gandhi films, the wedding and AIDS films corresponded to two powerful scripts—love and death. In contrast, the Gandhi films were about complicated sociopolitical and historical factors that, while not entirely unemotional, could not compete with the immediacy of love and death.33
The emotional comprehension of themes can be seen through textual analysis of films. The study of film genres is a robust tradition in film studies. It highlights the role of themes since genres involve a repetition of core themes and stylistic motifs.34 These motifs trigger particular scripts and accompanying emotions. A successful genre film combines multiple sequences that evoke affective memories on the part of the audience and lead to a response related to one dominant emotion.
Some genres—melodrama, suspense and horror—wear their emotions on their sleeves. Melodramas are more than movies that express oversized emotions but feature plots in which bad things happen to good people, thereby evoking the emotion of pity. Melodramas tend to be less emotionally complicated than tragedies since tragic characters have flaws that make them responsible for the outcome, evoking judgment and diluting audience pity. In melodramas however, the protagonists’ flaws are not emphasized—they are in a sense innocents. Gone with the Wind is often described as melodramatic, but it is not a prototypical melodrama because Scarlet's (Vivien Leigh) vanity contributes to her downfall. An Affair to Remember is a clearer example where Terry (Deborah Kerr) is prevented from rendezvousing with Nicky (Cary Grant) through no fault of her own (she's crippled in a car accident). Her character evokes a high degree of pity from as audiences access their melodramatic scripts.
The dominant emotions produced by the horror genre are fear and disgust. We fear for the protagonists because they are explicitly threatened, tapping into personal scripts that involve threat and potential harm. Other genres (thrillers) have elements of threat and harm, but horror distinguishes itself by combining our fear with disgust. We are not just afraid of the monster, we are disgusted by its deformity, lack of humanity, or corruption. The monsters in horror films—vampires, zombies, werewolves possess typically non-human qualities. Even the modern psychopath, while nominally human, is usually masked or made to look grotesque, and demonstrates few identifiable human characteristics. The fear and disgust responses intensify in combination with each other.
Suspense occurs during many movies, and like horror, involves fear. For a film to be categorized in the suspense genre, it must sustain a pervasive sense of anxiety about what is to come; suspense always has a future orientation. Suspense films place the future in serious doubt and require the audience to experience dread and anticipation for an extended period of time. Hitchcock films are commonly cited in this category, but other films also qualify. An action film like Speed in which a bus must maintain a high speed to keep
from exploding also establishes an uncertain future that the audience must contemplate throughout.35
Emotions, Character Motivation and Empathy
The use of provocative themes is not the only way in which films connect comprehension with feelings. Another is figuring out why characters do what they do. Without a sense of character motivation, it would be impossible to follow a string of causally related events. Each character's behavior would be as likely as any other, and any temporal sequence would be arbitrary. To maintain cognitive and emotional involvement, we have to “get inside” the characters.
We do not approach each character as someone entirely new, however. Another variation of schema theory proposes that we also have schemas for people. These are sometimes called stereotypes or, less pejoratively, prototypes.36 As viewers are introduced to characters in a film, they attempt to fit them into previously held categories.37 Little information is necessary to begin the associative process: a black hat, a smile, an awkward hesitation—these cues may be all a viewer needs to evoke a familiar prototype.
As the character onscreen is developed, further characteristics are introduced that lead viewers to better understand his or her motivations. While iconoclastic characters are sometimes sufficiently complicated to challenge the range of types viewers have available to them, most characters correspond to available prototypes and are therefore easy to understand. One reason why the audience tolerates the complicated narrative in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is that the characters are so familiar—the “wacky, imaginative girl” and the “lovable sad sack.”
When viewers recognize the motivational structure, they identify with that character. This identification need not be intense or lasting, but it has to occur long enough for the character's actions to make sense and serve the development of the story.38 Often viewer identification with a particular character is not neutral; we feel certain things as we identify with different characters. We empathize with them and experience a range of emotions.
Our empathetic experience affects how we relate to the story. Experimental research has demonstrated the impact of viewer empathy on responses to scary films. Participants who were empathetic to characters found it necessary to deliberately inject “unreality” into their viewing experience, such as focusing on the visual effects. Some viewers were so bonded to characters, they experienced personal distress during scary scenes and withdrew from the narrative world by imagining they were somewhere else.39 Clearly there is a relationship between characters, viewers’ emotional experience, and the story.
Much of what has been said about identification, character motivation, and empathy could be applied to any narrative form, yet there are differences. Readers assert that they bond with literary characters by using their imagination to provide the unwritten details. In contrast, viewers are quite easily drawn into visual narratives as in the common experience of turning on the TV “for just a second,” catching a glimpse of a film, and then being “sucked into the story,” unable to walk away.
One explanation why films achieve such rapid emotional response has to do with their ability to show facial expressions. Extensive cross-cultural research has demonstrated that a set of basic expressions (sorrow, anger, disgust, happiness) are accurately interpreted by people from all cultures. Humans also have powerful emotional reactions to these expressions. Through close-ups, movies vividly portray facial expressions, thus conveying information about emotions instantaneously. The audience is able to grasp a character's motivations, increasing our empathy. The death scene of the android (Rutger Hauer) in Blade Runner is justly famous due to the power of facial expression. The camera focuses on Hauer's upper body and face for an extended period. As he recounts the joys and sorrows of his life, his face continually and unequivocally reflects his inner experience—and ours.40
Brain Functioning and the Movies
While brain research had been progressing at remarkable pace over the past several decades, current understanding is still limited, and applications to complex real world experiences tend to be crude. The application of brain science to film viewing is in its infancy, but the early findings are intriguing. A recent study of narrative comprehension looked at fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagery) technology, the most sophisticated form of noninvasive neuro-imaging (“picturing” the brain) currently available; it allows researchers to obtain a relatively precise image of brain activity over a period of time.
This particular study focused on cortical activity. The cortex is the large, deeply indented, outer part of the brain responsible for sophisticated abilities (motor functioning, visual processing, language processing, abstract reasoning, etc.). Researchers showed participants short (silent) scenes like the one in My Girl in which two children disturb a wasp nest, or montages of clips, randomly edited from different movies. For the narrative sequence, a predictable network of brain parts was activated. For the scrambled sequence, no network was noticeable (i.e., brain activity was more random). The researchers concluded, “The comprehension of edited visual action sequences … appears to be based on the coordinated activities of multiple brain areas that are bound together functionally in a high-level cognitive network.”41 Such statements are still a long way from explaining the total viewing experience of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but they strongly suggest a mind-brain-film connection.
While direct laboratory research is sparse, we can reasonably speculate that the viewer's emotional experience while watching cinematic stories is related to brain functioning. The autonomic nervous system (the system regulating automatic bodily functions such as the breathing and heart beat) and the subcortical areas of the brain seem particularly involved. Subcortical refers to the diverse areas of the brain that lies just beneath the cortex. These areas deal with the primitive functions necessary for immediate survival—hunger, wakening, breathing, and so on. Strong emotional reactions, particularly negative reactions, are partially located in this primitive zone.
One small subcortical part, the amygdala, is especially responsible for processing responses to aversive stimuli. Recent models of subcortical functioning have suggested that while messages reach the amygdala either directly or indirectly after cortical processing, the direct input happens much faster. Interestingly, only certain stimuli directly stimulate the amygdala including noises such as growling, large, imposing objects, and wriggling movements such as those made by snakes. Such potentially dangerous environmental inputs are processed quickly, allowing us to respond before other parts of the brain can rationally process the threat and figure out what to do.
Even though filmed objects are not “real,” our perceptual and cognitive systems often treat them as though they were real, thereby enhancing our emotional reactions. This is particularly true in comparison to books, which though capable of evoking great emotion in readers, are perceptually just inked symbols on paper, requiring greater higher-order (i.e., cortical) processing. In a movie, the image of a beast, the sound of a loud growl, or a quick edit of a snake about to strike momentarily bypass our rational cortex and goes straight for the spontaneity-loving subcortex, in some cases causing us to jump in our seats, even though we rationally know it is “only a movie.”42
Closing Shots: An Unlikely Partnership
The pairing of cognitive science and film studies has been fruitful, but there are tensions. Bordwell has argued that the focus on comprehension sets cognitive-based film studies apart from the previously dominant tradition which had been almost exclusively concerned with interpretation (explicating what a film says about human nature, politics, cultural values, and so on 43). Since comprehension is more amenable to concepts grounded in cognitive science, it stands in contrast to a relativistic film studies based on countless alternative readings of a film.44 However, even at the level of story comprehension, movies are not unequivocal. It is possible to argue about what exactly happened in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind just as it is possible to argue about what it m
eans. Differences in psychological characteristics such as age, gender, personality, education, and so on can all impact how one understands the story (which, as Bordwell points out, is in the “imagination” of the viewer).
Film studies’ movement toward cognitive science is also made difficult by differences in methodology. Cognitive science favors experiments and computer modeling while film studies favors textual analysis. Film scholars have welcomed cognitive concepts, and they have shown a willingness to utilize any tool at their disposal to better understand the object of their passion (movies). From the other direction, cognitively oriented psychologists have frequently utilized movies, but they have tended to see them as methodological instruments (e.g., emotional arousal research), not as art forms. Similarly, scientists often treat different cognitive processes as discreet45, making it difficult to see the movie viewing experience in a holistic, systemic way. Yet it is crucial that cognitive science address art and narrative forms like film for what they are. Patrick Colm Hogan notes that literary and artistic studies have rich academic traditions that are thousands of years old, and he asserts that “…if you have a theory of the human mind that does not explain the arts, then you have a very poor theory… If cognitive science fails to address this crucial part of our everyday lives, then cognitive science will be left on the dustheap of history.”46
Psychology at the Movies Page 13