How Movie Emotions Work, According to Film Theory
Happiness, joy, laughter, confusion, sadness, terror: these all Cinematic Emotions.
There’s a billion of them, just like there’s billions of people. They’re the reason why some people like a movie and some don’t, and they’re the reason some films succeed, and some don’t. Emotions determine so much from a film experience, that understanding emotional dynamics usually means the difference between success and failure.
The emotional dynamics of watching a film is a relatively new field of study in modern film academia. It’s a cross section of philosophy, psychology, film studies, cognitive science, sound theory, photo theory — basically a lot of different theories. The end goal of emotion-focused film studies is to understand how movies create meaning in an individual, and possibly through that, a society. After all, emotions are one of the strongest meaning-makers in humans, so studying them is usually incredibly fruitful.
The dynamics of cinematic emotions can be understood through three major components of cinema.
1. The film
2. The spectator
3. The “dance”
The Film
What really is a film? Photos, sounds, camera angles, association, context, story, editing, language, history, color — yeah, exactly, it’s information. A film is information packed in a multitude of different forms.
A film also happens as a function of time. Without time, a film is just a photo; time gives the film duration. The distribution of specific information in a certain set of time creates the film we all know.
Now where do emotions come into play? Some scholars believe that every film has something they call the Emotional Core. The emotional core is something that is built-in to the film itself, into the film’s language and the aesthetics. For example, the emotional core of E.T. is wonder, or in Fight Club it’s discontent — it’s the sum of the strategic and intentionally built structure of the film.
As a film is information distributed in time, the emotional core is a certain feeling distributed in time: it’s emotional information, which is multiplied, given a pattern, and presented in a certain rhythm. An emotional core is not something which is attached to the film externally, it’s not our feeling, it exists within the film, it’s the film’s feeling. This core can be analyzed with a very hands on-method: we look at the film’s aesthetics, angles, color or story. For example, if we look at Fight Club: the story is about a man who feels emasculated and disconnected from his primal, aggressive nature. We see shots of the man disconnected from everything, in isolation, then we see shots of him fighting. The color palette is grey, and the overall mood is usually depressing. The story shows that this disconnection is a result of a society too focused on consumerism and superficial values. This is especially shown through dialogue and characters, through the narrative. Even though these elements on paper are all different, they all point towards a similar emotion: discontent. The dissatisfaction towards the world is built into the fabric of the film, and it can be felt from two channels: film aesthetics and the narrative. These two are the main guideposts towards the emotional core of the film.
The spectator
Even though a movie can exhibit emotions without anybody ever seeing it, the emotions don’t really mean anything without an audience, a spectator. As the spectator is a human, the emotional framework is much more complex than in a film. In order to understand how emotions arise in a human while watching a film, we must first discuss how emotions are generated in the first place. Of course, the person who knows the definite answer to this question deserves a Nobel Prize, but thankfully, there’s a few theories.
The appraisal theory is a very popular model for the generation of emotions, and I think it’s one the best for understanding cinematic emotion. It doesn’t have a complete form, but the working definition states that emotions are generated in a two-step-process: first, we receive an external stimulus, something happens to us: this creates the emotion. After this, we evaluate the stimulus and generate a reaction towards it. This is our feeling towards the emotion. For example, if someone suddenly shouts in front of you, the emotion might be fear — you then evaluate the emotion and create the feeling: I feel scared.
Appraisal theory states that the first emotion is usually pre-cognitive, which means we can’t really control it — it’s something that happens very quickly, through our senses. The evaluation on the other hand, is something we have a little more control over. We evaluate the emotion through what’s happening, the context, but also through our personality, our history, social class, experiences, trauma — basically through an incredibly multi-layered process. I’ll give you an example.
If you watch this video of a crying child, you can feel the appraisal theory in action. The first stimulus is seeing the child — the face, the nose, the tears. Your first emotion came to you immediately: for example, if you hate the sound of crying, your emotion is repulsion; if you have a kid yourself, you might feel strong empathy, and want to help the kid. The second reaction is you evaluating the first emotion, you’re feeling towards it. You realize you hate the sound of crying, that’s why feel repulsion, but you understand why the child needs help, thus you end up feeling empathy. Or maybe you understand that it’s not your job helping the kid, you have your own, and end up feeling anger towards the parents of the kid. Whatever it is, the evaluation gives the initial emotion a meaning, it categorizes it and transforms it into a memory. This results in a feeling that we perceive is more “ours”, more like me.
Watching a movie is similar, but the process is much deeper. If we cut from the kid to shot of ice cream on the ground, the memory and emotion of the child crying changes. We associate the videos together, give them a narrative: the child dropped his ice cream. Now we have a new feeling: we might feel at ease, we might feel sympathetic, some people might even laugh. The process of editing is a new stimulus and causes a new evaluation. When we watch an entire movie, we’ve gone through a thousand cuts, a thousand evaluations. And I’m not even talking about the effect of photo angles, music, the characters — there’s a thousand things to consider! This is how we get to the third major component of cinema:
The “dance”
The Dance is the dynamic process between the film and the spectator. This is the space where the academic definition of cinematic emotions is created; the place where the film and the spectator unite and become part of the same thing: the cinematic event.
When studying cinematic emotions, we must realize that the emotions represented in the film are not separate from cinematic emotions — just as the emotions of the spectator are part of the same process. “Cinematic emotions” is more of an umbrella term, encompassing all of the emotions that can be identified during the cinematic event. To illustrate this, let’s look at Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
The film begins with an ominous soundtrack, and floating aerial shots of a small car driving in the forest and the mountains, possibly towards someplace distant. These are elements of the film, its aesthetics. Also, the movement, the act of driving a car is already setting up a narrative; someone is going somewhere, possibly devoid of human settlement. For the spectator, an uneasy feeling might arise. A feeling of isolation, and impending doom might even pop up. You get a feeling that something bad is about to happen. When these two meet, the film elements and the spectators feelings, this is where the magic starts to happen, the part where the Dance begins.
The Shining presents itself for 146 minutes. The elements presented in the beginning are expanded, multiplied, given a pattern and put in a certain rhythm. The spectator takes in all of the stimuli and has a swirl of emotions and evaluations raised in them. Of course, these emotions and evaluations are all different in every person, but whatever happens, everything is part of the same cinematic event. The film and the spectator are immersed in an emotional engagement process, an interaction.
There are two parts of emotional engagement: resonance and dialogue. If The Shining creates emotions you accept, you start resonating with the film. At its best, resonance is a certain “tuning-in” process, where you accept the world of the film and its emotions. The end point of this is usually one where the spectator understands the emotional core of the film — or more specifically, they don’t only understand it, they feel it.
Emotional dialogue is not necessarily the opposite of resonance, but it’s still very different. Dialogue happens when you reject the emotions the film is trying to exhibit. Rejection does not straight away mean dislike, but rather it means a differing emotion. For example, the twins in the Shining exhibit an eerie and ghastly element of the film. In emotional resonance, you feel terrified; in emotional dialogue, you might feel boredom, because you think using eerie twins is a cheap trick. This boredom then, is something you carry on to the next scene, and if powerful enough, it’s something you carry for the entire film.
This middle ground where the engagement happens, this battlefield of interaction, is where the Dance happens. This is where we determine whether a film is good or not. It’s a space that in reality exists only the viewer’s mind, a sort of cognitive space, one where the elements of the film and your thoughts about the film collide.
This interaction, this Dance, is the base of all cinematic interaction. Filmmakers are usually aware of the importance of this space, so in essence, emotionally well-made films are more focused on the success of this interaction, the success of the resonance. Of course, resonation is impossible if the spectator does not understand the elements of the film. This is why popular movies usually try to keep their film elements as simple as possible, so that more people can emotionally resonate with it. But do you see what this implies?
This theory of interaction, one where the film and spectator share a cognitive space, implies that there are differences in the ability to watch and emotionally understand a movie. Let’s imagine two persons: one of them is a highly trained professor of film studies, and the other one is a normal person, one who watches a film now and then, for pleasure. They watch the same film, so they’re both exposed to the same stimuli, the same emotional core of the film. Of course, they’ll have completely different opinions! This is nothing new. What’s interesting are the paths which lead them to their opinion and how they’re able to retrace and explain that path.
A normal person might like a film just as it is, and when asked why they liked it, they might say they liked the story, the visuals, or the action. The trained professor might be able to give a more detailed answer, one where they’ve analyzed entire parts of the movie, understood concurrent themes, mapped a pattern of camera angles, or character traits — the possibilities are endless! Now this difference in opinion paths does not mean that one is better than the other; it only showcases how people come to different conclusions — it’s because their Dance is different.
The filmmaker and the film critic
The filmmaker and the film critic share a profound similarity in their ability to understand the Dance. The filmmaker is constantly aware of this emotional interaction. They build the film elements with interaction in mind, so basically filmmaking is not that much building a film, more than it is building a relationship using film. A good film does not need a well-educated audience for emotional resonance — a really well-made film caters to all viewers, since it’s able to spark positive evaluations and understandable emotions in everybody. While filmmakers work from down to up, the film critic works from up to down. A good film critic can watch a film and be able to retrace the success of the interaction — this requires objective thinking but also an ability to be aware of your own emotions at the same time.
The filmmaker and the critic are both working with the interaction between film and spectator, with the Dance, but their angles are different. The filmmaker is trying to build resonance, the critic is evaluating the success of it. For successful evaluation the critic must become the filmmaker and the spectator simultaneously, in order to understand the motivations behind the film, to understand the what is being conveyed, and also to understand not only their own emotions, but also society’s emotions. This is why good criticism is actually incredibly hard. The amount of awareness it requires positions it as an art form itself, not above filmmaking, but possibly as an equal.
It goes without saying that filmmaking is also incredibly hard, doing anything which has the emotions of millions of people involved is hard. I mean, sometimes it’s incredibly hard to handle the emotions of one person! What all of this really means is that behind each and every film experience is an incredibly complex individually emotional process, but more than that, a process which can be studied, analyzed, and communicated. These cinematic emotions: terror, sadness, laughter, happiness — these are what this channel Fragments of Cinema is really about. Understanding them is something that cannot be done alone, it needs other people, other emotions. I invite you to help me understand them, so follow this channel and we can go on this journey together. I guarantee you we’ll find something amazing.