Emotion and Films

All forms of art move us, but if there is one form that affects us the most emotionally; it would be cinema. The emotional power of a movie is an overly complex idea. Simply stating that the emotional power of a movie derives from our identification with a character (or multiple characters) is same as saying that Ferrari is a machine with four wheels (which is in fact, made up of many complex elements). Similarly, the emotional power of the movie does not only depend on our identification with a character. With the following arguments I intend to illustrate that the emotional power of the movie is a composition of various complex elements, just like the Ferrari.

When I hear the ‘Imperial March’ by john Williams from Star Wars, I can tell that some bad people are about to do bad villainy stuff; maybe snap someone’s neck or destroy an entire planet. Usually it’s Darth Vader but it doesn’t have to be, the musical score for Dark Lord from Lord of the Rings, Voldemort from Harry Potter have similar tonal qualities to it. Music is one of the most powerful tool in a film’s arsenal. Music creates a convincing atmosphere of time and place, underlines the psychological refinements, serves as a neutral background filler, builds a sense of continuity, builds the foundation of a theme and rounds it off with a sense of finality. For example, in the great train robbery, which has no additional sound uses music to set the mood of the film; the slight increase in the tempo and intensity when the robbery is taking place, and then the music turns suspenseful when the robbers are about to get caught. Using more recent examples, Led Zeplin’s introductory wail in the immigrant song that uses dissonance to resolution from a C to a half step higher C sharp and then back to C again evokes the emotion of pain, fury and, raising to power. This song is used is various films to depict unleashing of a great source of power. I.e., In Thor Ragnarok trailer its used as Hela’s theme as she raises to power. Scored music lays down the foundation for characters and culture, fundamental for the emotional depiction of the film. Films such as Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Star Wars, Breakfast Club, etc. could be viewed as the visual representation of a phenomenal musical score. Music along with its association with the strong visual cues of the film gains greater expressive power and in turn conveys that power of the film as a whole.

My next argument would be the relation of time compared to the medium of art; There are four kinds of temporal properties that are important in films. Story time which is the time it takes for the events to occur in the film’s plane of reality. Plot time is comprised of the time stretches that are only shown in the film. Viewing time is the amount of time it takes to experience a form of art. And work time is the result of the artists’ (i.e. filmmaker) restricting the viewing time to impact their audiences’ reaction. The viewing time required to experience a work of art has strong emotional implications. When I was watching IT, the film had a series of scary scenes from Georgie getting his hand bitten off to the explosion of blood in Beverly’s bathroom and so on. These scenes shown at an interval with increasing amount of horror overloads our neural receptors that are responsible for our local appraisals thus creating the strong emotional reaction of fear. Most film maker employs this fact to pile emotion on top of emotion to emphasize the films power to manipulate its views emotion. Let’s take the beginning of the movie UP, we are introduced to the characters, they fall in love while growing up, they get married and then grow old together. In the span of 10 minutes we see a full life story of two people play out. The compilation of various emotions such as happiness, love, loss, pity overloads our neural pathways overwhelming us with emotion and bringing us to tears. This exact story would be much less effective it was shown over the normal runtime of 90 minutes.

Furthermore, films compared to other forms of art have a more specific depiction of people,