Moving viewers

About this book

"Everyone knows the thrill of being transported by a film, but what is it that makes movie watching such a compelling emotional experience? In Moving Viewers, Carl Plantinga deftly explores this fascinating question and the implications of its answer for aesthetics, the psychology of spectatorship, and the place of movies in culture. Through an in-depth discussion of mainstream Hollywood films, Plantinga investigates what he terms 'the paradox of negative emotion' and the function of mainstream narratives as ritualistic fantasies. he describes the sensual nature of the movies -- their direct appeal to the human body through sight, sound, and the human propensity for mimicry -- and shows how film emotions are often elicited for rhetorical purposes. He moves away from a psychoanalytic explanation and makes powerful use of cognitive science and philosophical aesthetics to demonstrate why cinema may deliver the same emotional charge in Senegal, Thailand, or Peru as it does in Steven Spielberg's America." -- rear cover.