PDF: Review: Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion. Carl

ailleurs il semble passer un peu vite sur
certains films que probablement il
apprécie moins, il s’attarde parfaitement
sur d’autres et propose des analyses et
des défenses éclairantes. Le cas le plus
clair à mon sens est celui de Pour le
meilleur et pour le pire qui est souvent considéré comme le moins réussi des Jutra
québécois et que l’auteur défend de
maniè re très intel li gen te afin d’en
proposer une réévaluation. Sa mise en
contexte des Jutra canadiens aide aussi
à apprécier à meilleure mesure des
films trop négligés, surtout par les
cinéphiles et les critiques québécois.
Le regard canadien porté sur eux est
important.
Malgré les réserves que j’ai énoncées,
l’ouvrage de Leach est une contribution notable à la connaissance d’un
cinéaste qui, comme le dit l’auteur, est
une légende et qui à ce titre n’est pas
toujours correctement connu. Il fourmille d’observations éclairantes et
d’informations pertinentes. Le lecteur
qui voudrait approfondir le sujet devra
consulter les sources que j’ai déjà suggérées et aussi se reporter au Canadian
Filmand Video. A Bibliography and Guide to
the Literature (Loren Lerner ed, University of Toronto Press, 1997). On
doit à Peter Harcourt le premier
ouvra ge sur Jean Pierre Lefebvre
(1981), à la Cinémathèque québécoise
le pre mier sur la renais san ce du
cinéma d’auteur canadien-anglais (1991)
et à Jim Leach le premier sur Jutra.
Des ouvrages qui n’ont pas encore
d’équivalents dans «l’autre langue».
Doit-on en conclure que les regards
croisés sont parfois nécessaires pour
éclairer notre pratique cinématographique d’un océan à l’autre ? Chose
sûre—et c’est un vaste débat—on
devrait s’interroger sur la disponibilité
et la diffusion de nos films francophones et anglophones partout au
Canada, sur leur réception populaire
et critique, et leur appréciation dans
leur collectivité d’origine et dans
«l’autre» collectivité. Mais l’ouvrage
de Leach montre bien qu’il y a un destin commun et une communauté réelle
entre les cinémas canadien et québécois, et que leur histoire ne peut se
faire séparément. Devrais-je dire qu’ils
vivent en souveraineté-association…
Cinémathèque québécoise
PASSIONATE VIEWS:
FILM, COGNITION, AND EMOTION
Edited by Carl Plantinga
and Greg M. Smith
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1999, 301 pp.
Reviewed by Mette Hjort
T
his volume comprises essays by
twelve leading scholars from philosophy, psychology, and film and
media studies. The essays are
informed by, and contribute indirectly to, general debates among analytic
aestheticians about the nature of
CJ FS • RCEC
127
emotion and its place in the creation
and reception of works of art. Several
of the essays, for example, presuppose
some understanding of the so-called
“paradox of fiction” and attempt to
solve the puzzle of the apparent irrationality of emotional responses to
fiction. The main goal, however, is to
reflect carefully on emotion in the
specific context of film and in relation
to dominant trends in film studies.
Together the essays further develop
the contributors’ cognitivist approach
to film, which has been gaining
ground since the 1980s and now represents a promising alternative to the
semiological theories of film that
have constituted the dominant paradigm of film studies over the past two
decades.
As the editors point out, the views
endorsed by the contributors do not
amount to a monolithic “theory”, but
they do find a basis in a shared conception of emotion. Current thinking
about emotion typically involves a
rejection of the “feeling theory” associated with Descartes, Hume, and
William James, and of the “behaviorist
theory” articulated by B. F. Skinner and
J. B. Watson. At this point most theorists agree that while emotions frequently involve strong bodily perturbations, they cannot be reduced to
mere feelings. The consensus, then, is
that emotions are a matter of intentionality and are constituted by agents’
beliefs about, and general evaluations
of, particular states of affairs.
128 Volume 9 No. 1
It is further assumed that emotions can
motivate action, although there is no
necessary connection between any
given emotion and specific behavioral
responses. Influential social constructivist accounts espoused, for example,
by Rom Harré or Catherine Lutz, are
not departures from this basic cognitivist conception, but rather attempts
to broaden the scope of relevant theorizing so that attention is drawn to the
way in which language and culture, by
creating certain emotional dispositions, ultimately are constitutive of
actual emotional states. Passionate
Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion is situated squarely within the cognitivist,
rather than the social constructivist
tradition, and the focus is thus on
agents’ beliefs, attitudes, desires, and
evaluations, rather than on larger
social or cultural developments.
The volume is divided into three parts,
“Kinds of Films, Kinds of Emotions”,
“Film Technique, Film Narrative, and
Emotion,” and “Desire, Identification,
and Empathy.” The first section,
which focuses on the extent to which
the specificity of genres can be
defined in terms of certain emotions
or types of emotion, includes pieces
by Noël Carroll, Ed Tan and Nico
Frijda, Cynthia Freeland, and Dirk
Eitzen. The second section, with contributions by Greg Smith, Torben
Grodal, Jeff Smith, and Susan Feagin,
deals broadly with some of the salient
ways in which cinematic narration and
style serve to prompt appropriate
emotional responses on the part of
spectators. Greg Smith’s claim that
narrative and stylistic features serve to
generate prolonged moods capable of
supporting a number of brief emotional
episodes is particularly noteworthy,
for it represents an insightful mobilization of the distinction between
mood and emotion that is standard in
the relevant psychological literature.
In the last section, Gregory Currie,
Berys Gaut, Murray Smith, and Carl
Plantinga variously engage with the
questions of desire and identification
that figure centrally in psychoanalytic
views on spectatorship. What emerges
is a number of plausible alternative
concepts that do not rely on psychoanalytic premises.
Since it is impossible to do justice
here to all of the articles, I shall foreground two that propose significantly
revised conceptions of the phenomena of identification and perversion
that are widely believed to be central
to cinematic spectatorship. In “Identification and Emotion in Narrative
Film,” Berys Gaut contests the psychoanalytic conception of narrative film
as promoting forms of identification
that sustain the ideological illusion of
a unified subject. At the same time, he
takes issue with the tendency on the
part of analytically-minded film theorists to reject, on various grounds, the
idea of identification altogether.
Gaut’s starting point is based on folk
wisdom, which holds that identification with cinematic characters is a
recurrent feature of movie-going. Gaut
argues that identification, properly
construed, hinges on imagining, not
what it would be like to be some character, but rather what it would be like
to find oneself in that individual’s situation. Identification, claims Gaut, is
aspectual, for the viewer may be
attuned in the relevant ways to only
perceptual, affective, or motivational
features of a given character’s situation.
Gaut further contends that critics
should distinguish between two
distinct forms of identification: imaginative identification and empathic
identification, with only the second
type involving a convergence to the
point of identity between the emotions of character and viewer. Gaut
goes on to state that whereas previous
disputes over the issue of identification have hinged on the role played
by point-of-view shots, reaction shots
are in fact much more effective in
bringing about the central responses.
He concludes by noting, pace Brecht
and influential psychoanalytic film
theorists, that identification need not
be a source of ideological illusions and
collusions, but may in fact provide the
basis for distinct types of learning.
In “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes,
or Apparently Perverse Allegiances,”
Murray Smith targets doctrines of
catharsis and, more importantly perhaps, the widespread psychoanalytic
assumption that viewers’ engagement
with various cinematic narratives
CJ FS • RCEC
129
amounts to a fueling of perverse desires
or an expression of repressed wishes
and fears. To this end he considers a
particular instance of the so-called
“paradox of tragedy,” namely, the
conundrum that arises as a result of
viewers’ apparent allegiance with
morally perverse characters on
account precisely of their perceived
perversion. Smith’s general point is
that perverse allegiances in fact are
much more rare than is typically
assumed and tend to be encouraged
only intermittently and for strategic
purposes in narratives that ultimately
aim to provoke moral responses.
Smith analyzes a number of different
aesthetic approaches to moral perversion and argues that each prompts a
different kind of emotional response.
Overall, however, the solution proposed to the paradox of perversion is
the same in each case, for Smith
essentially claims that viewers’ (partial) allegiance with morally perverse
characters is based on some notion of
compensation. Viewers, in short, are
willing to tolerate certain kinds of
moral perversion because their so
doing entails rewards having to do
with freeing the imagination, satisfying curiosity about “the extremes of
possible or conceivable experience,”
and taking “delight in provocation.”
Perverse allegiances, then, are not a
matter of unleashing dangerous emotions under controlled circumstances,
nor do they arise as a result of various
unconscious mechanisms. Rather, they
130 Volume 9 No. 1
are typically encouraged in order to
expand the cognitive and moral
capacities of viewers capable of understanding the basic logic of trade-offs.
Passionate Views includes an excellent
introduction by Carl Plantinga and
Greg Smith, who expertly situate the
essays in relation to relevant trends in
the philosophical analysis of art and
emotion, the psychology of emotion,
earlier work on film and emotion,
and, more polemically, the key tenets
of psychoanalytic interpretations of
emotion that have been particularly
influential in film studies. The volume
also contains a useful “Select Bibliography,” which is organized in terms
of four rubrics: “Film and Emotion,”
“Film and Cognition,” “The Other
Arts and Emotion,” and “Emotion
(General).” Due to the consistently
high quality of the pieces, Passionate
Views makes a significant contribution
to film studies research. Passionate
Views also has genuine pedagogical
potential, for its clear arguments are
developed in response to precise
contexts of ongoing debate and are
carefully framed by the editors’ introduction.
Aalborg University
ENGLISH HITCHCOCK
Charles Barr
A Movie Book., Moffat, UK: Cameron &
Hollis, 1999, 255 pp.
Reviewed by Scott MacKenzie
W
hile best known as the Master
of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock
can be as easily labeled the Éminence
grise behind classical and contemporary film theory and criticism.
Hitchcock’s works have lent themselves to auteur theory (François
Truffaut, Robin Wood), formalism
(William Rothman, Kristin Thompson), feminism (Laura Mulvey, Tania
Modleski), queer theory (Robin Wood
again), and Lacanian psychoanalysis
(Slavoj žižek), as well as countless
other critical practices. Insofar as a
film such as Rear Window (1954) can be
construed as his own version of film
theory, Hitchcock is one of the few
Hollywood directors to ruminate on
the nature of the cinema. Indeed, at
times it seems that a new variation of
film theory can only be “successful” if
it can come to terms with Hitchcock.
Charles Barr’s new book English
Hitchcock rises to this challenge and
adopts an approach which is relatively
scarce in Hitchcock studies: that of
Hitchcock and national identity. Barr’s
book is an attempt to recontextualise
Hitchcock’s early pre-American work
into contemporary debates about what
exactly constitutes “Englishness” as a
category in the analysis of national
cinemas. Barr critically evaluates the
label “Hitchcock” and questions the
notion of a coherently defined category
of “Hitchcock’s work.”
Hitchcock’s English film career is
divided into different stages according
to the different screen-writers he
worked with: Elliot Stannard, Alma
Reville, Charles Bennett and the team
of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat.
Technology, including the development of sound film, and the positive
and negative experiences Hitchcock
had at different UK production companies (Gaumont-British, Gainsborough,
British International Pictures), also
play a role in Barr’s series of divisions.
Auteur theory foregrounded Hitchcock
as the sole author of his films, leaving
the contributions of others who went
into the making of “Hitchcock” by the
wayside. Hitchcock himself did not
give much credit to his script-writers,
which has also led to a dismissal of the
literary aspects of his work. Barr wishes
to reposition Hitchcock as an English
director, and at the same time, rethink
Hitchcock’s positioning by la politique
des auteurs in the 1960s.
Barr begins his analysis by examining
Hitchcock’s influences. While German
expressionism and Soviet montage
have often, and quite rightly, been
cited as key influences on Hitchcock’s
early film style, the fact that the director was living and working in London
has been largely neglected. Barr argues
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