Cinematic Narration and its Psychological Impact

Cinematic Narration and its Psychological Impact PDF Author: Peter Wuss
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443806870
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Film provides experience potential. Contemporary cognitive psychology gives the opportunity to define this impact on the film spectators’ mind in regard to different aspects of cognition, imagination and emotion. Proceeding from these positions, this book considers a number of practical issues of cinematic narration with which filmmakers, theorists and cineastes are frequently confronted: What is storytelling, and how may we objectify the regularities to be found at work in different modes of narration in the fiction film, among them structural principles of “art-cinema” which are often experienced on a level beneath conscious reception? What is the role of the element of conflict in the process of narration, and what are the effects that the representation of conflict situations on the screen has on the viewers’ emotions? How can we define “cinematic tension” and also “suspense”, and how does each influence the disposition of the audience? What constitutes a “reality-effect” in fiction films, and how can it vary in different modes of storytelling? How are a given protagonists’ dreams, fantasies and play behaviour integrated both into the course of narrative events and into the development of the spectator’s imageries and ideas? And finally: How do film genres work on a psychological level? Providing a theoretical framework for further empirical research, the book outlines a differentiated model for analysing key devices of cinematic narration in view of their impact on the spectators’ mind.

Cinematic Narration and its Psychological Impact

Cinematic Narration and its Psychological Impact PDF Author: Peter Wuss
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443806870
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book Here

Book Description
Film provides experience potential. Contemporary cognitive psychology gives the opportunity to define this impact on the film spectators’ mind in regard to different aspects of cognition, imagination and emotion. Proceeding from these positions, this book considers a number of practical issues of cinematic narration with which filmmakers, theorists and cineastes are frequently confronted: What is storytelling, and how may we objectify the regularities to be found at work in different modes of narration in the fiction film, among them structural principles of “art-cinema” which are often experienced on a level beneath conscious reception? What is the role of the element of conflict in the process of narration, and what are the effects that the representation of conflict situations on the screen has on the viewers’ emotions? How can we define “cinematic tension” and also “suspense”, and how does each influence the disposition of the audience? What constitutes a “reality-effect” in fiction films, and how can it vary in different modes of storytelling? How are a given protagonists’ dreams, fantasies and play behaviour integrated both into the course of narrative events and into the development of the spectator’s imageries and ideas? And finally: How do film genres work on a psychological level? Providing a theoretical framework for further empirical research, the book outlines a differentiated model for analysing key devices of cinematic narration in view of their impact on the spectators’ mind.

Cinematic Narration and Its Psychological Impact

Cinematic Narration and Its Psychological Impact PDF Author: Peter Wuss
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Film provides experience potential. Contemporary cognitive psychology gives the opportunity to define this impact on the film spectatorsâ (TM) mind in regard to different aspects of cognition, imagination and emotion. Proceeding from these positions, this book considers a number of practical issues of cinematic narration with which filmmakers, theorists and cineastes are frequently confronted: What is storytelling, and how may we objectify the regularities to be found at work in different modes of narration in the fiction film, among them structural principles of â oeart-cinemaâ which are often experienced on a level beneath conscious reception? What is the role of the element of conflict in the process of narration, and what are the effects that the representation of conflict situations on the screen has on the viewersâ (TM) emotions? How can we define â oecinematic tensionâ and also â oesuspenseâ , and how does each influence the disposition of the audience? What constitutes a â oereality-effectâ in fiction films, and how can it vary in different modes of storytelling? How are a given protagonistsâ (TM) dreams, fantasies and play behaviour integrated both into the course of narrative events and into the development of the spectatorâ (TM)s imageries and ideas? And finally: How do film genres work on a psychological level? Providing a theoretical framework for further empirical research, the book outlines a differentiated model for analysing key devices of cinematic narration in view of their impact on the spectatorsâ (TM) mind.

Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film

Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film PDF Author: Ed S. Tan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136694978
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Introduced one hundred years ago, film has since become part of our lives. For the past century, however, the experience offered by fiction films has remained a mystery. Questions such as why adult viewers cry and shiver, and why they care at all about fictional characters -- while aware that they contemplate an entirely staged scene -- are still unresolved. In addition, it is unknown why spectators find some film experiences entertaining that have a clearly aversive nature outside the cinema. These and other questions make the psychological status of emotions allegedly induced by the fiction film highly problematic. Earlier attempts to answer these questions have been limited to a few genre studies. In recent years, film criticism and the theory of film structure have made use of psychoanalytic concepts which have proven insufficient in accounting for the diversity of film induced affect. In contrast, academic psychology -- during the century of its existence -- has made extensive study of emotional responses provoked by viewing fiction film, but has taken the role of film as a natural stimulus completely for granted. The present volume bridges the gap between critical theories of film on the one hand, and recent psychological theory and research of human emotion on the other, in an attempt to explain the emotions provoked by fiction film. This book integrates insights on the narrative structure of fiction film including its themes, plot structure, and characters with recent knowledge on the cognitive processing of natural events, and narrative and person information. It develops a theoretical framework for systematically describing emotion in the film viewer. The question whether or not film produces genuine emotion is answered by comparing affect in the viewer with emotion in the real world experienced by persons witnessing events that have personal significance to them. Current understanding of the psychology of emotions provides the basis for identifying critical features of the fiction film that trigger the general emotion system. Individual emotions are classified according to their position in the affect structure of a film -- a larger system of emotions produced by one particular film as a whole. Along the way, a series of problematic issues is dealt with, notably the reality of the emotional stimulus in film, the identification of the viewer with protagonists on screen, and the necessity of the viewer's cooperation in arriving at a genuine emotion. Finally, it is argued that film-produced emotions are genuine emotions in response to an artificial stimulus. Film can be regarded as a fine-tuned machine for a continuous stream of emotions that are entertaining after all. The work paves the way for understanding and, in principle, predicting emotions in the film viewer using existing psychological instruments of investigation. Dealing with the problems of film-induced affect and rendering them accessible to formal modeling and experimental method serves a wider interest of understanding aesthetic emotion -- the feelings that man-made products, and especially works of art, can evoke in the beholder.

Narrative and Narration

Narrative and Narration PDF Author: Warren Buckland
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023154359X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
From mainstream blockbusters to art house cinema, narrative and narration are the driving forces that organize a film. Yet attempts to explain these forces are often mired in notoriously complex terminology and dense theory. Warren Buckland provides a clear and accessible introduction that explains how narrative and narration work using straightforward language. Narrative and Narration distills the basic components of cinematic storytelling into a set of core concepts: narrative structure, processes of narration, and narrative agents. The book opens with a discussion of the emergence of narrative and narration in early cinema and proceeds to illustrate key ideas through numerous case studies. Each chapter guides readers through different methods that they can use to analyze cinematic storytelling. Buckland also discusses how departures from traditional modes, such as feminist narratives, art cinema, and unreliable narrators, can complicate and corroborate the book’s understanding of narrative and narration. Examples include mainstream films, both classic and contemporary; art house films of every stripe; and two relatively new styles of cinematic storytelling: the puzzle film and those driven by a narrative logic derived from video games. Narrative and Narration is a concise introduction that provides readers with fundamental tools to understand cinematic storytelling.

Multimodal Film Analysis

Multimodal Film Analysis PDF Author: John Bateman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136467548
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This book presents a new basis for the empirical analysis of film. Starting from an established body of work in film theory, the authors show how a close incorporation of the current state of the art in multimodal theory—including accounts of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of organisation, discourse semantics and advanced ‘layout structure’—builds a methodology by which concrete details of film sequences drive mechanisms for constructing filmic discourse structures. The book introduces the necessary background, the open questions raised, and the method by which analysis can proceed step-by-step. Extensive examples are given from a broad range of films. With this new analytic tool set, the reader will approach the study of film organisation with new levels of detail and probe more deeply into the fundamental question of the discipline: just how is it that films reliably communicate meaning?

Cinematic Metaphor

Cinematic Metaphor PDF Author: Cornelia Müller
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110579782
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Metaphors in audiovisual media receive increasing attention from film and communication studies as well as from linguistics and multimodal metaphor research. The specific media character of film, and thus of cinematic metaphor, remains, however, largely ignored. Audiovisual images are all too frequently understood as iconic representations and material carriers of information. Cinematic Metaphor proposes an alternative: starting from film images as affective experience of movement-images, it replaces the cognitive idea of viewers as information-processing machines, and heals the break with rhetoric established by conceptual metaphor theory. Subscribing to a phenomenological concept of embodiment, a shared vantage point for metaphorical meaning-making in film-viewing and face-to-face interaction is developed. The book offers a critique of cognitive film and metaphor theories and a theory of cinematic metaphor as performative action of meaning-making, grounded in the dynamics of viewers' embodied experiences with a film. Fine-grained case studies ranging from Hollywood to German feature film and TV news, from tango lesson to electoral campaign commercial, illustrate the framework’s application to media and multimodality analysis.

Psychocinematics

Psychocinematics PDF Author: Arthur P. Shimamura
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199862141
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
Largely through trial and error, filmmakers have developed engaging techniques that capture our sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Philosophers and film theorists have thought deeply about the nature and impact of these techniques, yet few scientists have delved into empirical analyses of our movie experience-or what Arthur P. Shimamura has coined "psychocinematics." This edited volume introduces this exciting field by bringing together film theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists to consider the viability of a scientific approach to our movie experience.

Film and Stereotype

Film and Stereotype PDF Author: Jörg Schweinitz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231151489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Since the early days of film, critics and theorists have contested the value of formula, cliché, conventional imagery, and recurring narrative patterns of reduced complexity in cinema. Whether it's the high-noon showdown or the last-minute rescue, a lonely woman standing in the window or two lovers saying goodbye in the rain, many films rely on scenes of stereotype, and audiences have come to expect them. Outlining a comprehensive theory of film stereotype, a device as functionally important as it is problematic to a film's narrative, Jörg Schweinitz constructs a fascinating though overlooked critical history from the 1920s to today. Drawing on theories of stereotype in linguistics, literary analysis, art history, and psychology, Schweinitz identifies the major facets of film stereotype and articulates the positions of theorists in response to the challenges posed by stereotype. He reviews the writing of Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Theodor W. Adorno, Rudolf Arnheim, Robert Musil, Béla Balázs, Hugo Münsterberg, and Edgar Morin, and he revives the work of less-prominent writers, such as René Fülöp-Miller and Gilbert Cohen-Séat, tracing the evolution of the discourse into a postmodern celebration of the device. Through detailed readings of specific films, Schweinitz also maps the development of models for adapting and reflecting stereotype, from early irony (Alexander Granowski) and conscious rejection (Robert Rossellini) to critical deconstruction (Robert Altman in the 1970s) and celebratory transfiguration (Sergio Leone and the Coen brothers). Altogether a provocative spectacle, Schweinitz's history reveals the role of film stereotype in shaping processes of communication and recognition, as well as its function in growing media competence in audiences beyond cinema.

Visual Communication

Visual Communication PDF Author: David Machin
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110370522
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 705

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Book Description
The primary goal of the volume on "Visual Communication" is to provide a collection of high quality, accessible papers that offer an overview of the different academic approaches to Visual Communication, the different theoretical perspectives on which they are based, the methods of analysis used and the different media and genre that have come under analysis. There is no such existing volume that draws together this range of closely related material generally found in much less related areas of research, including semiotics, art history, design, and new media theory. The volume has a total of 34 individual chapters that are organized into two sections: theories and methods, and areas of visual analysis. The chapters are all written by quality theorists and researchers, with a view that the research should be accessible to non-specialists in their own field while at the same time maintaining a high quality of work. The volume contains an introduction, which plots and locates the different approaches contained in it within broader developments and history of approaches to visual communication across different disciplines as each has attempted to define its terrain sometimes through unique concepts and methods sometimes through those borrowed and modified from others.

Narrative painting in nineteenth-century Europe

Narrative painting in nineteenth-century Europe PDF Author: Nina Lübbren
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526168561
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This ground-breaking book presents a critical study of pictorial narrative in nineteenth-century European painting. Covering works from France, Germany, Britain, Italy and elsewhere, it traces the ways in which immensely popular artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme, Karl von Piloty and William Quiller Orchardson used unique visual strategies to tell thrilling and engaging stories. Regardless of genre, content or national context, these paintings share a fundamental modern narrative mode. Unlike traditional art, they do not rely on textual sources; nor do they tell stories through the human body alone. Instead, they experiment with objects, spaces, cause-and-effect relations and open-ended ambiguity, prompting viewers and reviewers to read for clues in order to weave their own elaborate tales.