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Personality & Identity Psychology, Film Theory & Appreciation, Media - General & Miscellaneous, Film History & Criticism - General & Miscellaneous
Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema by Murray Smith β€” book cover

Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema

by Murray Smith
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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; BuΓ±uel'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.

Synopsis

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.

About the Author, Murray Smith

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.

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Book Details

Published
October 1, 1995
Publisher
Oxford University Press, USA
Pages
280
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780198183471

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