Film Structure and the Emotion System

Synthesizing recent research on emotion in cognitive psychology and neurology, this study provides a more nuanced understanding of how film evokes emotion. Although the experience of emotion is central to movie-viewing, film studies have not focused on the emotions, relying instead on vague psychoanalytic concepts of desire. This volume describes a grounded approach to analyzing the emotional appeal of a wide variety of films (from Casablanca to Stranger than Paradise, from Renoir to Spielberg), showing how style and narration call upon the viewer's emotion system.