Affect and Cinema

After decades in which the scrutiny of cinematic emotions had been considerably marginalized in film studies, the affective turn emerged as a cross-disciplinary theoretical trend during the mid 1990s. Inspired by the enhanced interest in affect and emotion in the humanities and the arts, a growing cinematic research has addressed questions regarding the embodied and emotional aspects of cinematic experience, cognitive-emotional interactions in motion pictures, the link between the cinematic image and the so called psychopathologies, and the social and historical impact of cinematic emotions.   

The course will first introduce highlights in the psychological study of emotions. It will then review the main developments in research cinematic emotion research along the major perspectives of cognitivism, phenomenology, and Deleuzian and post-Deleuzian theory.