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.