Film Directors and Emotion: An Affective Turn in Contemporary American Cinema

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Cinema is an affective medium. Films move us to feel wonder, joy, and love as well as fear, anger, and hatred. Today, we are living through a new age of sensibility when emotion is given priority over reason. Hollywood produces movies that employ cheap manipulative tricks to make audiences cry, feel good, or jump in fright. Yet, there is a counter-cultural current in contemporary American cinema that offers a more nuanced treatment of emotion. Both aesthetically and eidetically, this new cinema of affect allows viewers to make up their own minds about what they feel and think.

This book focuses on key films by important auteur-directors–David Fincer, Bryan Singer, Christopher Nolan, Kathryn Bigelow, Richard Linklater, Barry Jenkins, Greta Gerwig, and Pete Docter–who are to the forefront of this new cinema. Without ever being dogmatic, these directors’ films offer their audiences a glimpse at strategies for relating to, and entering into being with, others in a manner that can be regarded as profoundly ethical. Employing affect theory, Jungian analytical psychology, and Hegelian dialecticism, this book explores how these filmmakers anatomize affect, showing how it functions in the creation or degradation of character and society.