Projections

This article proposes a philosophy of melodrama, following the example of Noël Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror (1990). Melodrama is defined by a distinctive mode of address in which morality is dramatized through an appeal to our emotions. More narrowly conceived as the “tearjerker,” it is designed to solicit tears through the orchestration of pathos. While melodrama is associated above all with a genre of nineteenth- century theater, it is considered here as a mode that persists from at least the medieval period into the present, encompassing discrete art forms, such as theater, opera, and film. Furthermore, as it evolves historically, it develops more complex idioms. Classical melodrama, or the melodrama of good versus evil, which dwells on the pathos of suffering innocence, is contrasted with romantic melodrama or the melodrama of moral antinomy (Singer), which explores the pathos of sacrifice. A series of distinctions are drawn between sympathy, pathos, empathy, and identification, and the relationship of each to the other and to our moral responses are briefly delineated. The article contests Murray Smith's theory of empathy as central or personal imagination and defends a distinctive concept of identification, based upon its roots in the medieval French “identifier,” to “regard as the same.” It concludes with a brief defense of melodrama against the charge that is emotionally contrived and exploits our moral sentiments for meretricious ends.

The current article outlines a theory for character re-identification across films and fictional works: that is, by which interpretive operations does a viewer, spotting a character in film-y, understands that it is the same character identified on the occasion of a prior film-x? While this seems to be a mundane activity, consideration of multiple examples discloses that such acts mobilize sophisticated and abstract concepts and inferences, requiring theoretical insight. Such insight comes by way of Julius Moravcsik's application of Aristotelian concepts to lexical theory. The alignment of the latter—lexical theory—to film interpretation raises deeper questions as to the link of cognition to language, whose implications for future film scholarship are acknowledged in the conclusion.

In visual cognition research, saliency refers to the prominence of specific elements in a scene. Moreover, saliency guidance is part of a filmmaker's toolset to build narratives and guide the audience into emotive responses. This article compares two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) saliency mapping models with viewers’ eye-position mapping to investigate the potentiality of automated saliency mapping in moving image studies by analyzing saliency's role during cinema's transition from one-shot to multiple-shot. Although the exact moment when montage and editing methods appeared cannot be identified with precision, findings suggest one of the reasons for this transition was saliency guidance, hence its preponderance.

Despite the increasing documentary filmmakers’ on-screen presence in their own films, the analysis of their corporeal presence and performance in the documentary genre hasn't been fully explored yet. Following Plantinga's (2018) discussion on characterization and character in documentary film, the present article proposes to examine documentary filmmakers’ on-screen presence and performance, making three central assumptions. First, documentary filmmakers’ on-screen presence is a cinematic representation constructed in similar ways to that of other characters/subjects participating in the film. Second, documentary filmmakers’ characters are generally shaped and constructed throughout the filmmakers’ careers, much like fiction film stars. Third and last, the salience of filmmakers as characters should be understood as the outcome of major cultural, technological, and economic shifts shaping and affecting the documentary film production patterns and stylistic devices.

Kathryn Millard. Double Exposure: How Social Psychology Fell in Love with the Movies. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022, 170 pp., $29.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781978809451.

Wyatt Moss-Wellington. Cognitive Film and Media Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021, 208 pp., $43.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9780197552896.

Mathias Clasen. A Very Nervous Person's Guide to Horror Movies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021, 208 pp, $14.99 (softcover), ISBN: 9780197535905.

Carl Plantinga. Alternative Realities. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020, 168 pp., $21.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9780813599816.