Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema

Thrillers, weepies, horror movies and melodramas evoke characteristic kinds of emotional response, yet emotion is not much examined by film or literary theory. This work discusses emotional responses to films, integrating them into a theory of engagement, or identification with, characters in cinematic and literary fictions. Films and filmmakers discussed include: The Accused ; Hitchcock (including detailed analyses of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Saboteur ); Godard; Ruiz; Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire ; Dovzhenko’s Arsenal ; Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon ; Bresson’s L'Argent ; Eisenstein’s Strike ; and Melville’s Le Doulos . This book should be of interest to students of film, cultural, literary and media studies, as well as students of literary theory and philosophy.