ABSTRACT

Why should anyone be concerned about the affective experiences of film viewers? We could list at least the following reasons: (1) a pleasurable affective experience is one of the primary motivations for film viewing; (2) emotions provide narrative and character information and are necessary to fully understand a narrative film; (3) emotions and affects, whether pleasurable or not, are a central element of the phenomenological experience of the cinema; (4) emotions are intimately tied to cognitions, and for this reason affective experience, meaning, and interpretation are firmly intertwined; and (5) emotions as experienced in films have powerful rhetorical functions and contribute to a film's ideological effects.