Perceiving emotional causality in film: a conceptual and formal analysis

This article investigates the conceptual and formal ways in which the cinematic mode of expression prompts the viewer to perceive emotional causality in film, namely the percept that the viewer sees that the character's perception of an outer event is the cause of an emotional state in the character. The structure of our paper is twofold. The first section is theoretical and centres around the answerability of four main questions: What is emotional causality? How do we conceptualise it? How do we perceive it? And how do we perceive it in the filmic form? Explanations will be mainly drawn from three different intellectual disciplines: cognitive linguistics, experimental psychology and the philosophy of mind. The second section is practical and aims to show how the proposed theoretical model can be applied by considering its use for the analysis of what has been described by many as the prototypical genre of intense emotions, namely the melodrama genre. Using a scene from Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows as an example, we show how film, through its formal articulation of various conceptual mechanisms, stimulates the viewer to infer a causal relationship between (1) the character's visual experience and (2) the character's emotional state.

Publication year:2016