Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema

Thrillers, weepies, 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 hitherto dealt with in only the most impressionistic and tangential fashion. Engaging Characters discusses the varieties of emotional response to films with precision, integrating them into a larger theory of our engagement (or `identification') with characters in both cinematic and literary fictions. Films and film-makers discussed include The Accused; Hitchcock (including detailed analyses of The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956] and Saboteur); Godard; Ruiz; Bunuel'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.