Study Unit B : Film And Emotional Response

In choosing a popular film designed to give pleasure to an audience, the first
criterion should be – does it raise interesting questions for a study of
spectatorship?
Let us take a specific film – Benigni’s Life is Beautiful. (which, by the way, is a
‘popular film’, an Oscar winner and a film clearly designed for the mainstream
market in its country of orgin, and which has gone on to be a global best
seller in the dvd market.) Life is Beautiful tells an emotive story – designed to
play on the cusp between comedy and tragedy. It is somewhat (!) fantastic in
its premise but has a coherence within its own fictional terms. We may ask
the following questions:
- How does the film work to generate emotion, and here the emphasis may
be on relatively straight forward issues like the use of mise-en-scene,
staging and music or more complex issues of identification and spectator
alignment with particular characters?
- How far does the spectator feel consciously manipulated by the film and,
by contrast, how far does the emotional power of the film derive from a
combination of elements which are difficult to pin down?
- How far does the emotional affect of the film derive from contextual
knowledge, - in this case, our ability to respond to the film in the gap
between fictional representation and historical fact?
Studying this film alongside Schindler’s List opens up some important
broader debates about ‘good news’ Holocaust movies.
The above is a complex example – chosen to illustrate how rich and
challenging this topic can be, depending on the level of ambition.
Some steer has already been provided in (l) above for how you might choose
films for this topic. You may take a genre approach – or identify auteurs
whose cinematic approach lends itself particularly well to the study of emotion
and spectatorship. As a completely serendipitous way of identifying possible
films, here are the Oscar winners, 1988 - 2008:
Rain Man
Shakespeare in Love
Driving Miss Daisy
American Beauty
Dances with Wolves
Gladiator
The Silence of the Lambs
A Beautiful Mind
Unforgiven
Chicago
Schindler’s List
The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King
Forrest Gump 
Billion Dollar Baby
Braveheart
Crash
The English Patient 
The Departed
Titanic
No Country for Old Men
Slumdog Millionaire
And keeping to the Oscar theme, here are some foreign language films that
have been nominated or have won “best foreign picture” during the same
period:
Cinema Paradiso
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Life is Beautiful
Tsotsi
All About My Mother
 The Lives of Others
As none of the above films represent animation, it is worth saying that some
of the most affecting of films are animations. But perhaps it is time to move
beyond the death of Bambi’s mother.
Another powerful body of work is propaganda, with the interesting appeal to
patriotism and the national.
Another rich vein may be sports movies – from Chariots of Fire to Breaking
Away or from Fever Pitch to, yes, of course, Rocky …