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 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
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 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.
6. 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
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 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.
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 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 andVictor, 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?
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 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 DolceVita
(1960) of Frederico Fellini. Or the theme of Rebel without a cause (Nicholas Ray 1955) with the iconics
James Dean and NathalieWood.
• 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
ElisabethTaylor 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 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)
