2. 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 creates 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’.
• Movie can be an escape to the reality
• J.L Baudry ‘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
3. The studies and theories:
• Cinema and emotions, the relations the spectator has with the movie spectator ship’ and the
brain process are studied from its beginning since it has such a direct, instant and intense impact
on people’s brain
• Apparatus theory of J.L Baudry, film theorist: 197Os, 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 is a main idea
• Recent 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.
6. Love would be a biological emotion but it is also
personal.
Romantic relationship is a recurrent theme in movies:
it is a vast genre
• A basic structure: search of love, finding of love, separation, reunion followed by
an happy or dramatic ending.
• The is the projection an IDEAL LOVE, which tries to replicate the real world by
play with this reality.
• The film structure, the cognitive process and the emotional response
• People experienced multiple emotions by watching a romantic movie:
happyness, love, melancholy, sadness… emotions related to memories and
souvenirs
7. 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 area
Against gender stereotypes:
• Everybody has emphatic capabilities, it is proved though
that women will tend to use it way more than man
• The gender difference between ‘girly movie’ and ‘manly
movie’ is not ‘romantic movie’ vs ‘actions movies’
• It is in the indentification process: if the main caracter or
even the director is a girl, gtils will be more incline to
understand it. And the contrary works.
8. Casablanca
MICHEL CURTIZ (1886-1962)
Peter Lorre
Signor Ugarte
Ingrid Bergman Humphred Bogart
Ilsa Lund Rick Blaine
Paul Henreid
Victor Laszlo
Claude Rains
Captain Louis Renault
Conrad Veidt
Major Heinrich Strasser
• American classis movie
• 1942
• Won 3 Oscars
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt1vQ81jNW
w
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc02Y4xHWys
THE ICONIC CHARACTERS
9. The main emotions of 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 andVictor, Ilsa husban
(memory for the time but nowaday imagination since it
shows a historical past we will never know 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?
10. 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’
12. 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.
13. Evolution of romantic movies: The cultural and historical impact.
• Technical evolutions: more realism: images are faster (from 16or18 images per secondes now 24), coloured (1936)
and talking (1925).
• Countries have their own way to deal 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 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) r La Dolce Vita (1960)o f Frederico Fellini. Or the theme of Rebel without a cause
(Nicholas Ray 1955) with the iconic James Dean and Nathalie Wood.
• With time Love stories are becoming more complex or simply more ‘realistic’ and shows more complexe relationships
in respons 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.
14. Passion and Tenderness
The May Irwin Kiss (William Heiss, 1896)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zURT
Es8C1lo
15. HISTORICAL AND
POLITICAL
IMPACT
LE QUAI DES BRUMES
Port 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 it shows the desillusion of an army
desartor. Except the movie was supposed to be shown in a war time:
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 (1906-
1993)
