Cinema has the capacity to enflame our passions, to arouse our pity, to inspire our love. Feeling Film is a book that examines the emotional encounters found in contemporary popular cinema cultures. Examining melodrama, film noir, comic book franchises, cult indie movies and romantic comedy within the context of a Jungian-informed psychology and contemporary movements in film-philosophy, this book considers the various kinds of feelings engendered by our everyday engagements with cinema. Greg Singh questions the popular idea of what cinema is, and considers what happens during the anticipation and act of watching a movie, through to the act of sharing our feelings about them, the reviewing process and repeat-viewing practices. Feeling Film does this through a critique of purely textual approaches, instead offering a model which emphasises lived, warm (embodied and inhabited) psychological relationships between the viewer and the viewed. It extends the narrative action of cinema beyond the duration of the screening into realms of anticipation and afterlife, in particular providing insight into the tertiary and participatory practices afforded through rich media engagement. In rethinking the everyday, co-productive relationship between viewer and viewed from this perspective, Feeling Film reinstates the importance of feelings as a central concern for film theory. What emerges from this study is a re-engagement of the place of emotion, affect and feeling in film theory and criticism. In reconsidering the duration of the cinematic encounter, Feeling Film makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the inter-subjective relationship between viewer and viewed. It takes post-Jungian criticism into the realms of post-cinema technologies and reignites the dialogue between depth psychology and the study of images as they appear to, and for, us. This book will make essential reading for those interested in the relationship between film and aspects of depth psychology, film and philosophy students at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels, film and cinema academics and cinephiles.

This book questions the de facto dominance of narrative when watching films. Using the film musical as a case study, this book explores whether an alternative spatial understanding of film can offer alternative readings to narrative. For instance, how do film aesthetics influence our interaction with the film? Can camera movement and music make us ‘feel’ cinema? Can the film world bleed into our own? Utilising film musicals ranging from those by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000), Feeling Film: A Spatial Approach investigates how we might go about understanding the audience's spatial relationship with film aesthetics, what it might look like, and the tools needed to conduct analysis.

An analysis of what contemporary directors seek to attain by putting their spectators in a position of strong discomfort

There is an upsurge of interest in contemporary film theory towards cinematic emotions. Tarja Laine's innovative study proposes a methodology for interpreting affective encounters with films, not as objectively readable texts, but as emotionally salient events. Laine argues convincingly that film is not an immutable system of representation that is meant for (one-way) communication, but an active, dynamic participant in the becoming of the cinematic experience. Through a range of chapters that include Horror, Hope, Shame and Love - and through close readings of films such as The Shining, American Beauty and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Laine demonstrates that cinematic emotions are more than mere indicators of the properties of their objects. They are processes that are intentional in a phenomenological sense, supporting the continuous, shifting, and reciprocal exchange between the film's world and the spectator's world. Grounded in continental philosophy, this provocative book explores the affective dynamics of cinema as an interchange between the film and the spectator in a manner that transcends traditional generic patterns.

Nino Rota is one of the most important composers in the history of cinema. Both popular and prolific, he wrote some of the most cherished and memorable of all film music – for The Godfather Parts I and II, The Leopard, the Zeffirelli Shakespeares, nearly all of Fellini and for more than 140 popular Italian movies. Yet his music does not quite work in the way that we have come to assume music in film works: it does not seek to draw us in and identify, nor to overwhelm and excite us. In itself, in its pretty but reticent melodies, its at once comic and touching rhythms, and in its relation to what's on screen, Rota's music is close and affectionate towards characters and events but still restrained, not detached but ironically attached. In this major new study of Rota's film career, Richard Dyer gives a detailed account of Rota's aesthetic, suggesting it offers a new approach to how we understand both film music and feeling and film more broadly. He also provides a first full account in English of Rota's life and work, linking it to notions of plagiarism and pastiche, genre and convention, irony and narrative. Rota's practice is related to some of the major ways music is used in film, including the motif, musical reference, underscoring and the difference between diegetic and non-diegetic music, revealing how Rota both conforms to and undermines standard conceptions. In addition, Dyer considers the issue of gay cultural production, Rota's favourte genre, comedy, and his productive collaboration with the director Federico Fellini.

Jazz stories have been entwined with cinema since the inception of jazz film genre in the 1920s, giving us origin tales and biopics, spectacles and low-budget quickies, comedies, musicals, and dramas, and stories of improvisers and composers at work. And the jazz film has seen a resurgence in recent years--from biopics like Miles Ahead and HBO's Bessie, to dramas Whiplash and La La Land. In Play the Way You Feel, author and jazz critic Kevin Whitehead offers a comprehensive guide to these films and other media from the perspective of the music itself. Spanning 93 years of film history, the book looks closely at movies, cartoons, and a few TV shows that tell jazz stories, from early talkies to modern times, with an eye to narrative conventions and common story points. Examining the ways historical films have painted a clear picture of the past or overtly distorted history, Play the Way You Feel serves up capsule discussions of sundry topics including Duke Ellington's social life at the Cotton Club, avant-garde musical practices in 1930s vaudeville, and Martin Scorsese's improvisatory method on the set of New York, New York. Throughout the book, Whitehead brings the same analytical bent and concise, witty language listeners know from his jazz segments on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. He investigates well-known songs, traces the development of the stock jazz film ending, and offers fresh, often revisionist takes on works by such directors as Howard Hawks, John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Francis Ford Coppola, Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, Robert Altman, Woody Allen and Damien Chazelle. In all, Play the Way You Feel is a feast for film-genre fanatics and movie-watching jazz enthusiasts.

Popular film and television are ideally suited in understanding how emotions create culturally shared meanings. Yet very little has been done in this area. Emotion, Genre, and Justice in Film and Television explores textual representations of emotions from a cultural perspective, rather than in biological or psychological terms. It considers emotions as structures of feeling that are collectively shared and historically developed. Through their cultural meanings and uses, emotions enable social identities to be created and contested, to become fixed or alter. Popular narratives often take on emotional significance, aiding groups of people in recognizing or expressing what they feel and who they are. This book focuses on the justice genres – the generic network of film and television programs that are concerned with crime, law, and social order – to examine how fictional police, detective, and legal stories participate in collectively realized conceptions of emotion. A range of films (Crash, Man on Fire) and television series (Cold Case,Cagney and Lacey) serve as case studies to explore contemporarily relevant representations of anger, fear, loss and consolation, and compassion.

What is the relationship between a cinematic grid of color and that most visceral of negative affects, disgust? How might anxiety be a matter of an interrupted horizontal line, or grief a figure of blazing light? Offering a bold corrective to the emphasis on embodiment and experience in recent affect theory, Eugenie Brinkema develops a novel mode of criticism that locates the forms of particular affects within the specific details of cinematic and textual construction. Through close readings of works by Roland Barthes, Hollis Frampton, Sigmund Freud, Peter Greenaway, Michael Haneke, Alfred Hitchcock, Søren Kierkegaard, and David Lynch, Brinkema shows that deep attention to form, structure, and aesthetics enables a fundamental rethinking of the study of sensation. In the process, she delves into concepts as diverse as putrescence in French gastronomy, the role of the tear in philosophies of emotion, Nietzschean joy as a wild aesthetic of repetition, and the psychoanalytic theory of embarrassment. Above all, this provocative work is a call to harness the vitality of the affective turn for a renewed exploration of the possibilities of cinematic form.

“Widdis’s rich and fascinating book has opened a new perspective from which to think about the Soviet cinema.” —Kritika This major reimagining of the history of Soviet film and its cultural impact explores the fundamental transformations in how film, through the senses, remade the Soviet self in the 1920s and 1930s. Following the Russian Revolution, there was a shared ambition for a ‘sensory revolution’ to accompany political and social change: Soviet men and women were to be reborn into a revitalized relationship with the material world. Cinema was seen as a privileged site for the creation of this sensory revolution: Film could both discover the world anew, and model a way of inhabiting it. Drawing upon an extraordinary array of films, noted scholar Emma Widdis shows how Soviet cinema, as it evolved from the revolutionary avant-garde to Socialist Realism, gradually shifted its materialist agenda from emphasizing the external senses to instilling the appropriate internal senses (consciousness, emotions) in the new Soviet subject.

Aesthetics and Film is a philosophical study of the art of film. Its motivation is the recent surge of interest among analytic philosophers in the philosophical implications of central issues in film theory and the application of general issues in aesthetics to the specific case of film. Of particular interest are questions concerning the distinctive representational capacities of film art, particularly in relation to realism and narration, the influence of the literary paradigm in understanding film authorship and interpretation, and our imaginative and affective engagement with film. For all of these questions, Katherine Thomson-Jones critically compares the most compelling answers, driving home key points with a wide range of film examples including Wiene's The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Eisenstein's October, Hitchcock's Rear Window, Kubrick's The Shining and Sluizer's The Vanishing. Students and scholars of aesthetics and cinema will find this an illuminating, accessible and highly enjoyable investigation into the nature and power of a technologically evolving art form.