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Bestseller
BestsellerE-book
Author Plantinga, Carl R.

Title Moving viewers : American film and the spectator's experience / Carl Plantinga.

Publication Info. Berkeley : University of California Press, [2009]
©2009

Item Status

Description 1 online resource (xii, 280 pages)
data file
Series ACLS Humanities E-Book (Series)
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-267) and index.
Contents Introduction: Affect and the movies : The significance of affect ; A theory of affect at the movies ; In defense of films ; Spectators and roles: a brief note on terminology -- 1. Pleasures, desires, fantasies : Movie pleasures ; Cognitive play ; Visceral experience ; Sympathy, antipathy, and parasocial engagement ; Narrative scenarios and emotional satisfactions ; Reflexive and social pleasures ; The multiple pleasures of the spectator ; Movie desires ; Movies as fantasies ; Movies and dreams -- 2. Movies and emotions : Automaticity and the psychological unconscious ; What is emotion? ; A cognitive-perceptual approach ; Basic concepts and terms ; Emotions inside and outside the movie theater ; The paradox of fiction ; Play and the regulation of emotion ; Kinds of emotion ; Direct, sympathetic/antipathetic, artifact, and meta-emotions ; Memory traces and associations ; Summary: emotions at the movies -- 3. Stories and sympathies : Affective prefocusing ; Paradigm scenarios ; Primary emotions and the movies ; Hollywood and the new Hollywood ; Narrative and character ; Classical narrative structure and emotion ; Character engagement ; Character goals and engagement ; The structure of engagement ; Character engagement and spectator difference ; What character engagement is: a summary -- 4. The sensual medium : Seeing and hearing movies ; Film and the body ; Direct affect ; Representing emotional experience ; Affective mimicry ; Mimicry and the face ; Mimicry and the body ; Music, sound, and affect ; Affect and contemporary Hollywood style -- 5. Affective trajectories and synesthesia : Narrative focus ; Character goals and narration ; Synesthetic affect and fittingness ; Narrative scenarios and synesthetic affect ; Shame, guilt, and the Spectator ; Shame and guilt as meta-emotions ; Shame/guilt scenarios and synesthetic affect ; Four parameters of affective trajectories -- 6. Negative emotions and sympathetic narratives : Sympathetic and distanced narratives ; The paradox of negative emotions ; Hume on the paradox of tragedy ; Catharsis? ; Managing the negative emotions ; The spillover effect ; Fantasies of assurance and control ; Ideology in sympathetic and distanced narratives -- 7. The rhetoric of emotion: disgust and beyond : The affective rhetoric of film ; The case of disgust ; Disgust defined ; The rise of movie disgust ; The nature of movie disgust ; The rhetoric of movie disgust ; Polyester and ironic disgust ; The rhetoric of emotion in film -- Conclusion: Moving viewers.
Summary Everyone knows the thrill of being transported by a film, but what is it that makes movie watching such a compelling emotional experience? In Moving Viewers, Carl Plantinga explores this question and the implications of its answer for aesthetics, the psychology of spectatorship, and the place of movies in culture. Through an in-depth discussion of mainstream Hollywood films, Plantinga investigates what he terms "the paradox of negative emotion" and the function of mainstream narratives as ritualistic fantasies. He describes the sensual nature of the movies and shows how film emotions are often elicited for rhetorical purposes. He uses cognitive science and philosophical aesthetics to demonstrate why cinema may deliver a similar emotional charge for diverse audiences.
Local Note eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America
Subject Motion picture audiences -- Psychology.
Motion picture audiences -- Psychology.
Motion pictures -- United States.
Motion pictures.
United States.
PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / General.
Genre/Form Motion pictures.
Electronic books.
Electronic books.
Motion pictures.
Other Form: Print version: Moving viewers Berkeley : University of California Press, c2009. 9780520256958 (cloth : alk. paper) (DLC) 2008035578
ISBN 9780520943919 ebook
0520943910
9780520256958 cloth alkaline paper
0520256956 cloth alkaline paper
9780520256965 paperback alkaline paper
0520256964 paperback alkaline paper
Standard No. 9786612772627