EMOTIONS THROUGH MOVIES

Ryan : comedy moviesDamian: dramatic movies

Jonah: Horror movies Gabrielle: Romantic movies

Movies and emotions:• Movies are known since the Lumieres’ brother in 1895 invented the cinematograph. The

first movie: ‘The arrival of the train’ (1896) by the Lumieres brothers.

• Movies= Moving pictures which create the illusion of the reality, the audio-visual projection of another world.

• The only way to ‘see’ a representation of the past, the future and an idealistic or imaginary present.

• D.W.Griffith ‘We can never really know the past but continually play with it’.

• Movie can be an escape to the reality.

• J.L Baudry, film theorist: 1970s‘a historical one where the development of optics and the technology of mechanical reproduction produce the cinema as a specific visual organization of the subject, and an ontogenetic one, where the cinema imitates the very structure of the human psyche and the formation of the ego’.

• Emotion experienced in movies are both universal and social-constructed

The studies and theories:

• Cinema and emotions, the relations the spectator has with the movie ‘spectator ship’ and the brain process are studied from the beginning of cinema. It has such a direct, instant and intense impact on people’s brain

• Apparatus theory of J.L Baudry, cinema is ideological, indeed the process to make a movie are ideological. ‘cinema as an institution confines the spectator in an illusory identity, by a play of self-image’. Identification.

• Recent studies of Jan Eder, German audio-visual researcher, 4 levels in watching a movie:

The direct perception of sound and image which stimulates a perceptual effect, then moral and non-moral criteria as well as memory are activated to create individual reaction and attractiveness or rejection, suspense, sympathy or empathy. Finally thematic emotions are activated which involves social norms or individual values.

ROMANTIC MOVIES: An unreal relationship

Gabrielle

Love a biological emotion but also personal.Romantic relationship is a recurrent theme in movies:

a vast genre

• A basic structure: search of love, finding of love, separation, reunion followed by a happy or dramatic ending.

• This the projection of an IDEAL LOVE. Movies try to replicate the real world by playing with this reality.

• Steps: The film structure, the cognitive process and the emotional response

• People experience multiple emotions by watching a romantic movie: happyness, love, melancholy, sadness… emotions related to memories and souvenirs

The impact of romantic movies on the brain

The brain is extremely active.The use of the right hemisphere: The visual area Memory area Emotion areaAgainst gender stereotypes: • Everybody has emphatic capabilities, it is

proved though that women will tend to use it more than man

• The gender difference between ‘girly movie’ and ‘manly movie’ is not ‘romantic movies’ vs ‘actions movies’

• It is in the indentification process: if the main character or even the director is a girl, girls will be more inclined to understand it. And the contrary works.

Casablanca

MICHEL CURTIZ (1886-1962)

Peter LorreSignor Ugarte

Ingrid Bergman Humphred BogartIlsa Lund Rick Blaine

Paul HenreidVictor Laszlo

Claude RainsCaptain Louis Renault

Conrad VeidtMajor Heinrich Strasser

• American classis movie • 1942• Won 3 Oscars• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt1vQ81jNWw• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc02Y4xHWys

THE ICONIC CHARACTERS

The main emotions developed in the movie DISTRESS: melancholy, depression,sadness,LOVE and ANGER

The movie calls for emotional memories

The identification process is stimulated by the narrative, at the time but also today : An impossible love between Ilsa and Frank because of the war and Victor, Ilsa’s husband (memory for the time but nowaday imagination since it shows a historical past we will never know it in reality),

The movie was made to push the United States in participating to the Second World War.

What explains that 70 years later it is still a classic?

CASABLANCA: the Cliché movie

Max Steiner (1888- 1971)

• Political idea: To put love aside for the

cause: The involvement in the war• The Music: La Marseillaise, Gone with

the wind intense, smooth and melancholic atmosphere. Also patriotism

• Black and white The audience focus on the characteres

• The facial expressions • The actions, use of object• Language:‘Here ’s looking at you kid’

The eyes, and facials expressions

Silent movie: Seventh Heaven

• American movie made in 1927

• An Iconic couple: Janet Gaynor and Charles Farell

• black and white+no sound+only music= facials expressions reinforced, less realistic image (use creativity and imagination to connect with the movie), a more simple narration and emotions

• Borzage ‘I like to penetrate the heart and soul of my actors and let them live their caracters’

Frank Borzage(1894-1962)

• He wanted to ‘make the audience sentimental instead of the player. Make the audience act’

• Idea that the director influences (instead of manipulates) the emotions of the spectator because he is the one who ‘plays’ with the illusory and makes it own reality.

Evolution of romantic movies: The cultural and historical impact.• Technical evolutions: more realism: images are faster (from 16 or 18 images per secondes to 24), coloured (1936) and talking (1925).

• Countries have their own way to deal with romantic movies:

o Happy ending culture: Love is stronger than your duty in the society. The importance of LOVE as an emotion is different

o The use of the body (kiss, nudity, sexual scenes…) is not moraly acceptable the same way everywhere at everytime: In India, kisses in movies were not allowed until the 1990s. When the first kiss ‘The May Irwin Kiss’ was represented on screen in 1896 it was seen as ‘disgusting’.

• The inditification process is socially-constructed

• Over the time in western countries differents movements in cinema appeared to be influenced by the political, economic and social situation (expressionism in Germany after the IIWW because the economy is bad and movies cannot compete with the big american productions: use of symbolism. Or Italian Neoralism of the war which can be seen as documentaries. Ex: La Strada (1954) or La Dolce Vita (1960) of Frederico Fellini. Or the theme of Rebel without a cause (Nicholas Ray 1955) with the iconics James Dean and Nathalie Wood.

• With time Love stories are becoming more complex or simply more ‘realistic’ and show more complexe relationships in response to the expectation of the spectator: A street car named desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) with Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh, The cat on a hot tin roof(Richard Brooks,1958) with Elisabeth Taylor and Paul Newman;

• The Beauty ideals are also changing.

Passion and Tenderness

The May Irwin Kiss (William Heiss, 1896)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zURTEs8C1lo

HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL IMPACT

LE QUAI DES BRUMESPort of Shadows

• French movie made in 1938 by Marcel Carné

• Diologues and story written Jacques Prevert and Pierre Dumarchais

• ‘t’as d’beaux yeux tu sais?’ (‘You’ve got beautiful eyes you know?’ The iconic Jean Gabin with his old parisien accent and Michel Morgan with her big eyes.) The love is itensified by the connection of the eyes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snY3L7RYOOs

• Censure of the Vichy regime because the movie shows the desillusion of an army desartor and the movie was supposed to be shown in a war time:

SO DANGEROUS. It was shown anyway and well received as it answered to the real and general desillusion of the French population.

• ‘No one consider the barometer responsible for the storm and the function of the artist is to be the barometer of the time.’ Marcel Carné

Marcel Carné (1906-1993)