Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema

By Murray Smith

Book 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; Bu?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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 019818347X
• ISBN13: 9780198183471
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.2" x 9.3"