How Emotions Work in Movies, According to Film Theory | Video Essay

Happiness, joy, laughter, confusion, sadness, terror. These are all cinematic emotions. There's a billion of them, just like there's billions of people. They're the reason why some people like a movie and some don't, and they're the reason some films succeed and some don't. Emotions determine so much from a film experience, that understanding emotional dynamics usually means the difference between success and failure. The emotional dynamics of watching a film is a relatively new field of study i

n modern film academia. It's a cross-section of philosophy, psychology, film studies, cognitive science, sound theory, photo theory, basically a lot of different theories. The end goal of emotion-focused film studies is to understand how films create meaning in an individual and possibly through that, a society. After all, emotions are one of the strongest meaning makers in humans, so studying them is usually incredibly fruitful. The dynamics of cinematic emotions can be understood through three

major components of cinema. Number one, the film. What really is a film? Photos, Sounds. Camera angles, Association. Context. Story. Editing, language, history, color. Yeah, exactly. It's information. A film is information packed in a multitude of different forms. A film also happens as a function of time. Without time a film is just a photo. Time gives the film duration. The distribution of specific information in a certain set of time creates the film we all know. Now, where do emotions come

into play? Some scholars believe that every film has something they call the emotional core. The emotional core is something that's built into the film itself, into the film's language and aesthetics. For example, the emotional core of E.T. is wonder, or in a Fight Club, its discontent. It's the sum of the strategic and intentionally built structure of the film. As the film is information distributed in time, the emotional core is a certain feeling distributed in time. It's emotional information

which is multiplied, given a pattern and presented in a certain rhythm. An emotional core is not something which is attached to the film externally. It's not our feeling. It exists within the film. It's the film's feeling. This core can be analyzed with a very hands-on method. We look at the film's aesthetics, angles, color or story. For example, if we look at Fight Club, the story is about a man who feels emasculated and disconnected from his primal, aggressive nature. We see shots of the man

disconnected from everything, in isolation. Then we see shots of him fighting. The color palette is gray, and the overall mood is very depressing. The story shows that this disconnection is a result of a society too focused on consumerism and superficial values. This is especially shown through the dialogue and the characters - through the narrative. Even though these elements on paper are all different, they all point towards a similar emotion, discontent. The dissatisfaction towards the world

is built into the fabric of the film, and it can be felt from two channels: the film's aesthetics and the narrative. These two are the main guideposts towards the emotional core of the film. Number two: The Spectator. Even though a movie can exhibit emotions without anybody ever seeing it, the emotions don't really mean anything without an audience, a spectator. As the spectator is a human, the emotional framework is much more complex than in a film. In order to understand how emotions arise in

a human while watching a movie, we must first discuss how emotions are generated in the first place. Of course, the person who knows the definite answer to this deserves a Nobel Prize, but thankfully there's a few theories. The appraisal theory is a very popular model for the generation of emotions, and I think it's one of the best for understanding cinematic emotion. It doesn't have a complete form, but the working definition states that emotions are generated in a two step process. First, we r

eceive an external stimulus, something happens to us. This creates the emotion. After this, we evaluate the stimulus and generate a reaction towards it. This is our feeling towards the emotion. For example, if someone suddenly shouts in front of you, the emotion might be fear. You then evaluate the emotion and create the feeling: I feel scared. Appraisal theory states that the first emotion is usually precognitive, which means we can't really control it. It's something that happens very quickly

through, our senses. Evaluation, on the other hand, is something we have a little more control over. We evaluate the emotion through what's happening, the context, but also through our personality, our history, social class experiences, trauma, basically through an incredibly multilayered process. I'll give you an example. If you watch this video of a crying child, you can feel the appraisal theory in action. The first stimulus is seeing the child, the face, the nose, the tears. Your first emoti

on came to you immediately. For example, if you hate the sound of crying, your emotion is repulsion. If you have a kid yourself, you might feel strong empathy and want to help the kid. The second reaction is you evaluating the first emotion; you're feeling towards it. You realize you hate the sound of crying. That's why you feel repulsion. But you understand why the child needs help. Thus you end up feeling empathy. Or maybe you understand that it's not your job to help the kid, you have your ow

n, and you end up feeling anger towards the parents of the kids who are not helping him. Whatever it is, the evaluation gives the initial emotion a meaning. It categorizes it and transforms it into a memory. This results in a feeling that we perceive is more “ours”, more like me. Watching a movie is similar, but the process is much deeper. If we cut from the kid to a shot of ice cream on the ground, the memory and the emotion of the child crying changes. We associate the videos together, give th

em a narrative. The child has dropped his ice cream. Now we have a new feeling: we might feel at ease, we might feel sympathetic, some people might even laugh. The process of editing is a new stimulus and causes a new evaluation. When we watch an entire movie, we've gone through a thousand cuts, a thousand evaluations. And I'm not even talking about the effect of photo angles, music, characters. There's a thousand things to consider. This is how we get to the third major component of cinema: The

Dance. The dance is the dynamic process between the film and the spectator. This is the space where the academic definition of cinematic emotions is created, the place where the film and the spectator unite and become part of the same thing: the cinematic event. When studying cinematic emotions, we must realize that the emotions in the film are not separate from cinematic emotions, just as the emotions of the spectator are part of the same process. Cinematic emotions is more of an umbrella term

, encompassing all of the emotions that can be identified during the cinematic event. To illustrate this, let's look at Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. The film begins with an ominous soundtrack and floating aerial shots of a small car driving in the forest, possibly toward someplace distant. These are elements of the film, its aesthetics. Also the movement, the act of driving a car is already setting up a narrative: someone is going somewhere, possibly devoid of human settlement. For the spectat

or, an uneasy feeling might arise, a feeling of isolation and impending doom might even pop up. You get a feeling that something bad is about to happen. This is where the magic starts to happen, the part where the dance begins. The Shining presents itself for 146 minutes. The elements presented in the beginning are expanded, multiplied, given a pattern and put in a certain rhythm. The spectator takes in all of the stimuli and has a swirl of emotions and evaluations raised in them. Of course, the

se emotions and evaluations are all different in every person, but whatever happens, everything is part of the same cinematic event. The film and The Spectator are immersed in an emotional engagement process, an interaction. There are two parts of emotional engagement, resonance and dialogue. If The Shining creates emotions you accept, you start resonating with the film. At its best, resonance is a certain tuning-in process, where you accept the world of the film and its emotions. The end point

of this is usually one where the spectator understands the emotional core of the film, or more specifically, they don't only understand it, they feel it. Emotional dialogue is not necessarily the opposite of resonance, but it's still very different. Dialog happens when you reject the emotions the film is trying to exhibit. Rejection does not straight away mean dislike, but rather it means a differing emotion. For example, the twins in The Shining exhibit an eerie and ghastly element of the film.

In emotional resonance, you feel terrified. In emotional dialogue, you might feel boredom because you think using eerie twins is a cheap trick. This boredom, then, is something you carry on to the next scene, and if powerful enough, it's something you carry on for the entire film. And this middle ground where the engagement happens, this battlefield of interaction, is where the dance happens. This is where we determine whether a film is good or not. It's a space that in reality exists only in t

he viewer's mind, a sort of cognitive space, one where the elements of the film and your thoughts about it collide. This interaction, this dance, is the base of all cinematic interaction. Filmmakers are usually aware of the importance of this space, So in essence, emotionally well-made films are more focused on the success of this interaction, the success of the resonance. Of course, resonance is impossible if the Spectator does not understand the elements of the film. This is why popular movies

usually try to keep their film elements as simple as possible so that more people can emotionally resonate with it. Do you see what this implies? This theory of interaction, one where the film and the spectator share a cognitive space, implies that there are differences in the ability to watch and emotionally understand a movie. Let's imagine two persons. One of them is a highly trained professor of film studies and the other one is a normal person who watches films every now and then, for plea

sure. They watch the same film, so they're both exposed to the same stimuli, the same emotional core. Of course, they'll have completely different opinions. This is nothing new. What's interesting are the paths which lead them to their opinion and how they're able to retrace and explain that path. A normal person might like a film just as it is, and when asked why they like it, they might say they like the story, the visuals, or the action. The trained professor might be able to give them more d

etailed answer, one where they've analyzed entire parts of the movie, understood themes, mapped a pattern of camera angles and character traits. The possibilities really are endless. Now, this difference in opinion paths does not mean that one is better than the other. It only showcases how people come to different conclusions: it's because their Dance is different. The filmmaker and the film critic share a profound similarity in their ability to understand the dance. The filmmaker is constantly

aware of this emotional interaction. They build the film elements with interaction in mind. So basically, filmmaking is not that much building a film more than it is building a relationship, using film. A good film does not need a well-educated audience for emotional resonance. A really well-made film caters to all viewers since it's able to spark positive evaluations and understandable emotions in everybody. While the filmmakers work from down to up, the film critic works from up to down. A go

od film critic can watch a film and be able to retrace the success of the interaction. This requires objective thinking, but also an ability to be aware of your emotions at the same time. The filmmaker and critic are both working with the interaction between film and spectator, with the dance, but their angles are different. The filmmaker is trying to build resonance; the critic is evaluating the success of it. For a successful evaluation, the critic must become the filmmaker and the spectator s

imultaneously, in order to understand the motivations behind the film, to understand what is being conveyed and also to understand not only their own emotion, but also society's emotions. This is why good criticism is actually incredibly hard. The amount of awareness it requires positions it as an art form itself, not above filmmaking, but possibly as an equal. It goes without saying that filmmaking is also incredibly hard - doing anything which has the emotions of millions of people involved is

hard. I mean, sometimes it's incredibly hard to handle the emotions of one person. What all of this really means is that behind each and every film experience is an incredibly complex, individually emotional process. But more than that, a process which can be studied, analyzed and communicated. These cinematic emotions, terror, sadness, laughter, happiness - these are what this channel Fragments of Cinema is really about. Understanding them is something that cannot be done alone. It needs other

people, other emotions. I invite you to help me understand them! So follow this channel and we can go on this journey together. I guarantee we'll find something amazing.