Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion

Rating:
Summary: Stimulating and unique collection.
Review: A welcome and insightful anthology, bringing much needed attention and light to the affective dimension of film. Too often the undeniable emotional power of the cinematic experience has been ignored by scholars and critics, unless this elusive register of film was being "politicized" in Marxist or feminist critiques of the "insidious" messages of a dominant ideology.

The essays about "Clockwork Orange" and "The Elephant Man" are especially useful (though I would argue that no director has captured the "sound of silence" more affectingly than does Lynch in the disturbing montage sequences representing Merrick's consciousness).

Since Jeff Smith's essay addresses my own somewhat "pioneering" analysis of Friedhofer's score for "Best Years," I'll briefly respond. The representation of my own position and approach--influenced by Lacanian "suture" theory--is impressively accurate. But I would suggest that Smith's counterproposal of a more cognitive-based approach would not necessarily produce a more reliable account of the viewer's response to the film score--especially given the widely-accepted discreditation of music's inherently narrative, or "programmatic," features. Rather, music is one of cinema's most fluid and elusive signifiers, capable of reaching the viewer at both conscious and sub-conscious levels as well as evoking emotions through incongruous juxtapositions of the ironic and the literal. Representing this "transaction" between the film's emotive messages and the viewer's claiming them as "his own," will always be an activity located in a rhetorical as much as an analytic space.

Rating:
Summary: Stimulating and unique collection.
Review: A welcome and insightful anthology, bringing much needed attention and light to the affective dimension of film. Too often the undeniable emotional power of the cinematic experience has been ignored by scholars and critics, unless this elusive register of film was being "politicized" in Marxist or feminist critiques of the "insidious" messages of a dominant ideology.

The essays about "Clockwork Orange" and "The Elephant Man" are especially useful (though I would argue that no director has captured the "sound of silence" more affectingly than does Lynch in the disturbing montage sequences representing Merrick's consciousness).

Since Jeff Smith's essay addresses my own somewhat "pioneering" analysis of Friedhofer's score for "Best Years," I'll briefly respond. The representation of my own position and approach--influenced by Lacanian "suture" theory--is impressively accurate. But I would suggest that Smith's counterproposal of a more cognitive-based approach would not necessarily produce a more reliable account of the viewer's response to the film score--especially given the widely-accepted discreditation of music's inherently narrative, or "programmatic," features. Rather, music is one of cinema's most fluid and elusive signifiers, capable of reaching the viewer at both conscious and sub-conscious levels as well as evoking emotions through incongruous juxtapositions of the ironic and the literal. Representing this "transaction" between the film's emotive messages and the viewer's claiming them as "his own," will always be an activity located in a rhetorical as much as an analytic space.