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FM4: Varieties Of Film Experience –
Issues and Debates
Section B: Spectatorship Topics
Popular Film and Emotional
Response
Popular Film and Emotional Response
• Aims:
• Consider the relationship between the film on the
screen and the audience in terms of the
communication process
• Consider the idea that spectators will find that
particular films and particular sequences within films
draw out from them certain, often strong, emotional
responses
• Use a psychoanalytical approach to help decode the
films of study and understand the relationship
between spectator and the film.
Starter
What is a film that you have watched that has provoked an
emotional response in you? How?
Make a mind map for your chosen film, explaining how that
film provoked an emotional response for you as an
individual.
A series of
shots in which
James Franco
is isolatedcreated
empathy and
sympathy for
the situation
the character
was in.
127
hours
Character begins as a
fun loving, adventure
seeking adrenalin
junky- hard to love.
Performance
from James
Franco brought
the real life
story
conviction.
Case Study Films
•
•
•
•
The Fighter
The Wrestler
The Blind Side
Rocky
• You can also watch your own sports drama’s
and include them in the comparison.
Film as a communication process
• First perspective: Film is a form of communication,
transmission of messages (single intended meaning).
Senders encoding and receivers decoding those messages,
an attempt by the sender of the message to influence in
some way the state of mind of another person. A certain
meaning has been placed in the text by the author, the reader
has to discover that meaning
• Second perspective: Film is a form of communication –
meaning making is an interactive process (a variety of
possible meanings) texts interact with readers (spectators) to
provide a variety of possible meanings, in this case the
readers becomes a factor in the production of meaning.
Meaning is no longer singular and clearly defined by the
authorial intention, but is plural and created in the relationship
between the individual reader and the text.
Film as a communication process
• First perspective: Film is a form of communication,
transmission of messages (single intended
meaning).
• Second perspective: Film is a form of
communication – meaning making is an interactive
process (a variety of possible meanings) texts
interact with readers (spectators) to provide a variety
of possible meanings, in this case the readers
becomes a factor in the production of meaning.
• How would we analyse both perspectives
within this section of the exam?
Film as a communication process
• Film ‘Language’: Film operates as a language; it
communicates with the spectator through the use of
images and sound. Visual indicators and carefully
arranged shots combined with spoken word, sound
effects and musical soundtracks
• Films as ‘constructs’: Films are built by filmmakers from
a series of component parts that we can identify, and
since they have been constructed we can take them
apart and see how they have been put together. We can
attempt to suggest reasons why choices have been
made, explore possible meanings, this is how we interact
Film as a communication process
• Film ‘Language’: Film operates as a language; it
communicates with the spectator through the use of
images and sound. Visual indicators and carefully
arranged shots combined with spoken word, sound
effects and musical soundtracks
• Think about the films we have watched so
far. How is film ‘language’ used within
them? Give specific examples, identifying
key scenes.
Spectator and Audience?
• Spectator – individual, personal connection
• Audience – a group, group experience, shared
meaning
• What are the different micro and macro
aspects of the films we would consider, when
looking at the Spectator/audience? Discuss on
your tables and compile a list.
What is emotion?
• What exactly is emotion, or emotional response?
• To what extent should emotions be seen to be linked
to thought?
• As we watch films we can each experience fear, and
pleasure, and desire, and surprise, and shock and a
whole array of possible emotions, but we will not all
experience these emotions equally at the same
moments in a film
• What is that determines our individual predisposition
to respond in particular emotional ways at certain
points in certain films?
Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema (1975)
Laura Mulvey
Fascination and film
• Film fascinates us (engages our emotions), through
images and spectacle
• Mulvey uses psychoanalysis ‘to discover where and
how the fascination of film is reinforced by preexisting patterns of fascination already at work
within the individual subject’ (= spectator)
• What does Mulvey mean by ‘pre-existing patterns of
fascination’?
• How will this help with our analysis?
Cinema and pleasure
• Hollywood/mainstream/narrative cinema
manipulates visual pleasure.
• It ‘codes the erotic into the language of the
dominant patriarchal order’.
• In what ways have the films we’ve watched
manipulated visual pleasure from it
audiences?
Scopophilia
• Scopophilia = pleasure in looking (Sigmund Freud
1905, in ‘Three Essays’)
• Examples of the private and curious gaze: children’s
voyeurism, cinematic looking
• The most pleasurable looking = looking at the human
form and the human face, figural looking
(corresponds to psychic patterns)
‘Woman as image, man as bearer of
the look’
• Pleasure in looking: split between active/male
and passive/female
• Women connote ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’
• the visual presence of women ‘works against
the development of a story-line, freezes the
flow of action in moments of erotic
contemplation’.
• How far would you agree with this in the
films we have watched?
‘Woman as image, man as bearer of
the look’ II
• The woman functions as both erotic object for the
characters within the screen story and erotic object
for the spectator within the auditorium (object of
fantasy)
• The spectator is led to identify with the main male
protagonist
• ‘the power of the male protagonist as he controls
events coincides with the active power of the erotic
look’
• Compile a list of examples that expresses this within
the films we have watched.
Fetishistic scopophilia
• The image of the woman also carries a threat
• There are two avenues of escape from fear of
femininity for the male spectator
– investigate the woman, demystify her mystery
– disavow (deny) castration by turning the woman into a
reassuring fetish. The image of the woman > overvalued:
this is the cult of the (beautiful) female star
–How are women ‘demystified’ within
the films we have studied so far?