The Power of Movies by Colin Mcginn

Author:Colin Mcginn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307489739
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-10T05:00:00+00:00

SENSORY/AFFECTIVE FUSION

Dreams, as everyone knows, are emotionally charged; they are also sensory in character—particularly, visual and auditory. But these two components of the dream are not independent of each other: they are fused together into a seamless whole. One might almost say that a dream image is a pictorial emotion—an emotion in sensory clothes. Nothing about the sensory content of a dream seems emotionally redundant, and each emotion in it has a sensory expression. The dream images have clearly been designed to convey—better, embody—a specific emotion. Often, in waking life, our sensory experiences have no particular affective connotation— we just see and hear what is going on around us, whether it has emotional resonance or not—but in dreams the entire point of a particular item of sensory material is to manifest an emotional meaning. The faces of dream characters, in particular, seem drenched in emotional color—sometimes lovable, sometimes fearful. Dream imagery is pregnant with strong affect: the visual is the visceral, and vice versa. It is almost as if the dream machinery's prime purpose is to find a sensory expression for whatever emotions are seething within—to transmute feeling into sensation.

But isn't this also an accurate description of what moving pictures attempt to do? What we see on the screen is intended to engage our emotions directly. This is the sensory manipulation of emotion. A well-made film succeeds in weaving together the affective and the sensory, so that every image on the screen evokes the emotion that fits the narrative. The images convey, by means of lighting, close-ups, and editing, the emotions of the characters, and then the viewer experiences his or her emotional response to all this. The face on the screen, in particular, becomes charged with emotional significance, so that every flicker of an eyelash carries affective weight. The eyes become liquid pools of dense feeling. It is as if we are seeing the emotions of the characters, so entwined are the images and the feelings (at least when the movie is doing its job). The clasp of Trevor Howard's hand on Celia Johnson's shoulder at the end of Brief Encounter, and the images of her facial expression, along with her blithely chattering companion, seem to condense an ocean of feeling into a single sensory moment. That vision will haunt the viewer, precisely because it packs such an emotional wallop. And, of course, a film is designed to do this—to exhibit sensory/affective fusion. It is not like a novel, in which the emotion is generated by mere words— the words are not experienced as dense with emotion (though the images they evoke in the mind of the reader may well be). You do not see Anna Karenina's pain in seeing her name upon the page—those marks on paper don't look as if they are at the end of their tether. But when you see the suffering heroine's face on the screen, her emotions suffuse her features. Moreover, the distinctive techniques of cinema—as opposed, say, to the stage—greatly aid this process of sensory and affective integration.

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