Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema

by Murray Smith

Overview

Thrillers, tear jerkers, horror movies, melodramas—like so many movie terms, these genre designations immediately evoke characteristic kinds of emotional response. Yet emotion is a subject that film and literary theory have traditionally dealt with in only the most impressionistic and tangential fashion. Engaging Characters presents a precise discussion of the varieties of emotional response to films, integrating them into a larger theory of our engagement (or "identification") with characters in both cinematic and literary fictions. Films and filmmakers discussed include The Accused; Hitchcock (including detailed analyses of The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956] and Saboteur); Godard; Ruiz; Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire; Dovzhenko's Arsenal and Preminger's Daisy Kenyon; Bresson's L'Argent; Eisenstein's Strike; and Melville's Le Doulos.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198183471
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	10/19/1995
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	9.25(w) x 6.13(h) x 0.64(d)
Lexile:	1510L (what's this?)

About the Author

Smith has contributed to a number of journals in media studies and literary criticism, ranging from Screen to The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He lives in London, SE13.