History of EmotionsFilm panel

Featuring: Drama,Propaganda films

Triumph of the Will, 1935

• Chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters.The film contains excerpts from speeches given by Nazi leaders at the Congress

• Hitler commissioned the film and served as an unofficial

executive producer; his name appears in the opening titles. The film's overriding theme is the return of Germany as a great power, with Hitler as the leader who will bring glory to the nation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80lLU5-yji8&bpctr=1398902914

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein

Battleship Potemkin

Battleship Potemkin, 1925The basic story of Battleship Potemkin can be described in a few sentences. Like most

films of the era, Potemkin is broken into acts (with each act coinciding with a reel change) .Together with [screenwriter] Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko…[Eisenstein] began work

on a scenario, conceiving the film as a vast panorama of the events of 1905. These were to include, in six parts: the Russo–Japanese War; the massacre of innocent workers in St Petersburg…; popular uprisings throughout city and countryside; a general strike and its

suppression by the state; counter-Revolutionary pogroms; and the emergence of a political movement in the workers’ district of Krasnaya Presnya. One small episode within

this historical overview would address the mutiny on the Russian naval vessel Prince Potemkin…

—from Sergei Eisenstein (Critical Lives),Mike O' Mahoney, Reaktion Books, 2008

• Eisenstein was building on the work of a filmmaker named Lev Kuleshov. Kuleshov edited together images of an actor's perfectly expressionless face, and paired it with other images: a pretty girl, a coffin, a bowl of soup, etc. He then showed this to an audience, and established that viewers would interpret the expression on the actor's face in relation to the surrounding images: it was lust, it was hunger, it was grief, etc. This idea really forms the basis of Soviet montage theory, and it became known as "the Kuleshov effect."

In Act Four, "The Odessa Staircase," the people of the town show their solidarity with the Potemkin by delivering supplies to the ship and gathering on the great stone staircase overlooking the harbor. However, their revolutionary zeal is punished when Tsarist forces arrive and begin shooting into the crowd: hundreds of men, women, and children are massacred on the Odessa steps, an act of brutality that inspires the Potemkin to fire its great guns at the town's imperial headquarters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v-kZzfec Odessa steps scene

• Popular Film and Emotional Response

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Contextual Knowledge

Emotions are affected by our wider experiences, by what we know. Knowledge and emotion are sometimes thought of as opposites but they are in fact interrelated. Put formally: emotional experience is mediated by what we know.

Emotional response and emotional involvement

• Filmmakers aim to draw us into the narrative of films: they do that in the way they structure the narrative—both in terms of the overall structure of the film and in the way they construct the narrative shot by shot through editing.

Positioning: do all spectators respond in the same way?

• Following Stuart Hall’s ideas about positioning, it follows that spectators do not necessarily respond in the same way to films— people’s social and cultural background influences the way they will respond.

• Does gender or ethnicity play a significant role in spectators’ emotional responses?

Emotions• Emotions appear to be involuntary—

something which happens to us. They are nevertheless caused by something.

Most important is attention:

• Filmmakers must focus spectators’ attention on characters’ facial expressions in order to elicit contagion responses.

• They can do this through the use of:– extreme close-ups, – shallow focus, – various point-of-view structures, – progressively closer shots of a character’s face and

expressions. • These techniques do not work, however, unless the duration of

the shot of the character’s facial expression is long enough.

Emotion response

• The mental process of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgement, that which comes to be known as through perception, reasoning or Intuition;

• Can our emotional response be different to someone else’s if we watch the same film film? Why?

Why people share emotional responses

Groups of people may share a social or political group/formation. You can be an individual with a specific and unique response, but you can still ‘belong’ to a group of similar people as an audience.

Emotional response and pleasureFilmmakers have always attempted to gain some sort of emotional response from spectators, and for their part spectators have always responded emotionally to film. More than that, spectators have always attended the cinema in order to have their emotions aroused and with the expectation that this will take place. This is, after all, a basic function of storytelling. Stories gain emotional responses from listeners, readers or viewers. Effective storytelling encourages us to feel human emotions by allowing us to sympathise, empathise or even identify with characters and their narrative experiences.

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