Filmmakers aim to elicit emotional responses from audiences. However, individuals may experience different emotions to the same film due to personal experiences and social/cultural backgrounds. While some shared responses are possible within social or ideological groups, each person brings private memories and desires to their viewing experience.

1. What is emotion?
As we watch films we can each experience fear, and pleasure, and desire, and surprise, and shock
and a whole array of possible emotions, but we will not all experience these emotions equally at the
same moments in a film
What is that determines our individual predisposition to respond in particular
emotional ways at certain points in certain films?
Think carefully about this but don’t worry about a right answer, this is the debate.
Your job is to recognise that there is an intense interaction with the sounds and images occurring as
we watch films, and that film makers are deliberately setting out to create emotional responses.

2. What is emotion?
As we watch films we can each experience fear, and pleasure, and desire, and surprise, and shock
and a whole array of possible emotions, but we will not all experience these emotions equally at the
same moments in a film
What technical elements can a film maker use to create and
develop the reaction in an audience?
Think back to a scene that you had an emotional reaction to.
What was the scene? What was your reaction? Why do you think you acted in that way?

3. What is emotion?
What technical elements can a film maker use to create and
develop the reaction in an audience?

4. Documentary
Documentary is an art form that has developed and changed dramactically
since the birth of cinema.
Films, to begin with, were concerned almost exclusively with capturing a
version of ‘real life’ on film, of showing moving images as reality.
This is most clearly the case for the Lumiere brothers who pioneered the idea of
a video camera and who documented Parisian life through the lens of cameras.

5. Exiting the Factory
•
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO0EkMKfgJI

6. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
(The Lumière Brothers, 1895)

7. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
(The Lumière Brothers, 1895)
Even this film footage, presented as real life through a camera lens, provoked
reactions from the audience.
What could those reactions have been? How might the spectators of the time
reacted to this film? Why?
Here are some of
the Lumière
Brothers’ other
early works.
What kind of reaction
do we have watching?
Why?
What kind of reaction
might have audiences
then have had? Why?

9. The Great Train Robbery
(1903)
The Great Train Robbery is a 1903 American Western film written, produced, and directed by
Edwin S. Porter. 12 minutes long, it is considered a milestone in film making, expanding on
Porter's previous work Life of an American Fireman. The film used a number of innovative
techniques including cross cutting, double exposure composite editing, camera movement
and on location shooting. Cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique. Some
prints were also hand colored in certain scenes.
•
The film was directed and photographed by Edwin S. Porter, a former Edison Studios
cameraman. Actors in the movie included Alfred C. Abadie, Broncho Billy Anderson and
Justus D. Barnes, although there were no credits. Though a Western, it was filmed in
Milltown, New Jersey. The film has been selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry.

10. Emotional
response
The emotional response
that some audiences would
have had to The Great Train
Robbery are drastically
different to ours. Why is
that?

11. Emotion response
What do you define emotion as now?
For the most part we’ll be dealing with cognitive responses.
The mental process of knowing, including aspects
The mental process of knowing, including aspects
such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and
such as awareness, perception, reasoning, and
judgement, that which comes to be known as through
judgement, that which comes to be known as through
perception, reasoning or intuition; knowledge.
perception, reasoning or intuition; knowledge.
Can our emotional response be different to someone else’s if
we watch the same film film? Why?

12. Why people share emotional
responses
Film Studies and Cultural Studies Film Studies, influenced by Cultural
Studies is increasingly likely to centre on local, small scale and precise
groups of people who share, perhaps, some social or political
‘Formation’. Their behaviour both as individuated spectators and as a
collective of people forming an audience is likely to be understood if we
respect and try to understand the importance of particular life
experiences and social; attitudes they bring with them to the viewing
situation.
What does this mean?
In your own words, try to explain how we can be sure that people share
emotional responses.

13. Why people share emotional
responses
Groups of people may share a social or political group/formation.
You can be an individual with a specific and unique response, but you
can still ‘belong’ to a group of similar people as an audience.
We need to be able to understand and appreciate both.
You = cry at people who don’t win on quiz shows.
Audience = doesn’t cry.
Still aligned as an
audience because of
your appreciation
for that quiz show.

14. Spectatorship
A spectator is an individual member of an audience. Spectatorship
is an important concept in film theory. Traditional models of
audience response tend to treat viewers, readers or listeners as
groups, spectatorship study suggests that the film builds a specific
relationship with every individual who experiences it. Rather than
being concerned with media effects, spectatorship study focuses
on understanding the ways films produce pleasure in their viewers.

15. Responses
Our response to a film draws on the whole of the self, a self that includes:
A social self who can make meaning in ways not very different from other with a
similar ideological formation
A cultural self who makes particular intertextual references (to other films, other
kinds of images and sound) based on the bank of material s/he possesses
A private self who carried the memories of his/her own experiences and who may
find person significance in a film in ways very different from others
A desiring self who brings conscious and unconscious energies and intensities to
the film event that have little to do with the film’s ‘surface’ content

16. Responses
A cultural self who makes particular intertextual references (to other films, other
kinds of images and sound) based on the bank of material s/he possesses
Use of celebrities and the jokes about them in Family Guy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlVUKQ96VxI
Shrek fighting using ‘Bullet Time’
http://moviesimpsons.tumblr.com/
http://www.totalfilm.com/features/100-greatest-simpsons-moviereferences/harry-potter-and-the-philosopher-s-stone
Tarantino references
http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6860507/every-pop-culture-reference-fromtarantino-movies

17. Responses
Our response to a film draws on the whole of the self, a self that includes:
A social self who can make meaning in ways not very different from others with a
similar ideological formation.
http://cli.ps/sP6wn
http://cli.ps/uWp3L
http://cli.ps/MxCyj
http://cli.ps/KdPx
Write down your responses to these
clips.
Emotions, reactions, thoughts, opinions.
Do we share any?

18. Responses
A private self who carried the memories of his/her own experiences and who may
find person significance in a film in ways very different from others
Films which are especially brash, obvious or shallow in theme are unlikely to
provoke a strong personal response. Action films, for example, are not usually
something which someone could find a significant response in. (By significant we
mean anything other than the ‘basic’ instant emotions of gratification.)
Films which are more subtle, dealing in themes, often universal ones but on a
micro level, are more likely to provoke a personal response because they allow for
a degree of interpretation or interaction. A specific response may be triggered by
something specific in, or suggested by, the film, but this is entirely down to the
spectator.

19. Responses
A desiring self who brings conscious and unconscious energies and
intensities to the film event that have little to do with the film’s ‘surface’
content.
What do you think this means? Can you rephrase it?
Can you think of any examples in films that you’d be willing to share?

20. Emotional response and
Filmmakers have always attempted to gain some sort of emotional response
pleasure for their part spectators have always responded
from spectators, and
emotionally to film.
More than that, spectators have always attended the cinema in order to have
their emotions aroused and with the expectation that this will take place. This is,
after all, a basic function of storytelling.
Stories gain emotional responses from listeners, readers or viewers. Effective
storytelling encourages us to feel human emotions by allowing us to sympathise,
empathise or even identify with characters and their narrative experiences.
As spectators (and as readers) we presumably find this process to be
pleasurable or we would not return time after time to films (and stories), but in
what ways is it pleasurable?

21. In what ways is it
In groups, think of ways in which a spectator could find
pleasurable?
a film pleasurable.
(You may want to think of different genres of films to
give you ideas here)
Laughter/escapism
Mystery
Happy
Justice
Lust
Emotional
ending Nostalgia
Adrenaline
challenge
Ambiguity
True stories
Intrigue
Twists
Challenge your
Inspirational
Desirability
intelligence

22. Deconstruction
•
This theory challenges the assumption that a text has an
unchanging, unified meaning that is true for all readers and also
the idea that the author is the source of any text’s meaning. The
approach suggests that there is a multiplicity of legitimate
interpretations of a text.
•
Theories such as this, developed particularly during the 1970s,
tended to emphasise the viewer’s control over the creation of the
film being watched.

23. Deconstruction
•
However, other theories have attempted to demonstrate how the
spectator is fixed in place by the text (or by the system of values
within the text) so that audiences are manipulated by filmmakers
into seeing things, and therefore thinking, in certain ways.
•
The tension between concepts of the reader/spectator as on the
one hand active and in control, and on the other hand passive and
as a victim, lies at the heart of ideas regarding the experience of
spectatorship, or the process that is taking place as we view films.

24. Reception Theory
•
Reception theory hoped to be a more sophisticated approach to
studying audiences, concentrating more on those who consume a
text than the text itself.
•
When a text is encoded (watched & understood; note, only
possible for active not passive, viewers) certain ideologies are
dominant in an audience member, a spectator.
•
The audience decodes this message in multiple ways and this is
dependent on the background of the person.

25. Reception Theory
When a text is
encoded (watched
& understood)
certain ideologies
are dominant in an
audience member,
a spectator.
The audience
decodes this
message in
multiple ways
and this is
dependent on
the background
of the person.

26. •
Reception Theory
Reception Theory states that an audience may respond in one of three ways based on their
reading of a film and how they ‘decode’ the meanings / ideologies placed in to the text by
the filmmaker.
•
Preferred Reading – taking an intended reading of the film
identifying and agreeing with all messages encoded in to the text
•
Negotiated Reading – the viewer identifies most of the meanings
encoded in to the text but does not agree with, or take the full
meaning
•
Oppositional Reading – the viewer does not identify the meanings
encoded in to the text and their own personal ideologies /
experiences form an alternate meaning within the text

27. Reception Theory
•
Reception theory dictates that a film does not have any meaning without the
spectator . Meaning is only generated when the spectator views. the text and
‘decodes’ it.
•
This makes good logical sense, after all, how can there be a meaning without it
being seen?

What is the difference between ‘Meaning’ and ‘Response’?


Meaning deals with themes and specific scenarios
Response is an all-encompassing interaction with the film as a whole.

28. •
•
Reception Theory
Reception Theory states that an audience may respond in one of three ways based on their
reading of a film and how they ‘decode’ the meanings / ideologies placed in to the text by
the filmmaker.
Preferred Reading – taking an intended reading of the film
identifying and agreeing with all messages encoded in to the text

29. •
•
Reception Theory
Reception Theory states that an audience may respond in one of three ways based on their
reading of a film and how they ‘decode’ the meanings / ideologies placed in to the text by
the filmmaker.
Negotiated Reading – the viewer identifies most of the meanings
encoded in to the text but does not agree with, or take the full
meaning

30. •
•
Reception Theory
Reception Theory states that an audience may respond in one of three ways based on their
reading of a film and how they ‘decode’ the meanings / ideologies placed in to the text by
the filmmaker.
Oppositional Reading – the viewer does not identify the meanings
encoded in to the text and their own personal ideologies /
experiences form an alternate meaning within the text