Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema

Thrillers, tear jerkers, 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 traditionally dealt with in only the most impressionistic and tangential fashion. Engaging Characters presents a precise discussion of the varieties of emotional response to films, integrating them into a larger theory of our engagement (or “identification”) with characters in both cinematic and literary fictions. Films and filmmakers discussed include The Accused ; Hitchcock (including detailed analyses of The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956] and Saboteur ); Godard; Ruiz; Buñuel’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 .