Projections

This issue of Projections ranges across the avant-garde cinema, tear-jerking melodramas, the nature of historical trauma, and narratives that assume playful, game-like formats and that may be found in title sequences and trailers.

The artist Stan Brakhage drew creatively from the habits, limitations, and thresholds of human visual perception. This article examines how Brakhage compelled viewers to attend to their visual perceptions in a unique way when engaging with his films. The article begins with an outline of John Ruskin's concept of the innocent eye, and its relevance to Brakhage's creative aspirations. Next, by placing the concept of the innocent eye within the context of existing theories on visual perception, the article suggests two ways in which Brakhage was able to retutor the eyes through his films: the first was by paying special attention to entoptic vision (visual impressions whose source is within the eye itself) as a source of inspiration; the second was by developing a series of techniques that compel the viewer to attend to the visual information on the screen in a way that subordinates semantic salience, and emphasizes the surface detail.

Melodramas are sometimes called "tearjerkers" because of their ability to make viewers cry, but there is currently no detailed account of how they succeed at this task. Psychological research suggests that crying occurs when people feel helpless in the face of intense emotion. The emotion felt most intensely when watching melodramas is sadness, and sadness has a structure and specific features that determine its intensity. I describe the ways the conventions of melodrama fulfill the criteria for intense sadness and perceived helplessness that underlie these films' ability to make viewers cry. I illustrate this model with a detailed analysis of Stella Dallas (1937).

This article examines representations of traumatic memory within the context of psychological and poetic domains by analyzing two films: Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman (2008) and Cache (Hidden) by Michael Heneke (2005). These two films are coping with two events: the Sabra and Shatila's massacre that took place in Lebanon in 1982, and the 1961 massacre of Algerian demonstrators in Paris. In both events the films depict the intersection between private and collective traumatic memory. Analyzing the texts focuses especially on the arousing stage of the trauma from a long period of belatedness and is used as a model for questions referring to the act of translating the trauma concept from discourse of psychology to the poetic language of film.

This article raises the question to what extent ludic forms affect the audience's engagement with characters. By introducing the analytic method of morphologic observation, the interrelation between ludic forms and narrative context becomes the main focus. Moreover, this allows a closer look at the filmic characters that are also affected by the integration of ludic forms. By exploring films that deal with the death of a main character and would usually call for tragic effects, the article shows how ludic forms partially inhibit the typical engagement with characters. Other forms of blocking empathy are discussed and the article closes with some thoughts on the consequences of ludic films on reception and pedagogic or therapeutic potential.

Although some research has been done about narrative functions of title sequences in television series, this article focuses on their affective implications for viewers. Concentrating on immersive styles in trailer sequences of quality series, the article discusses diverse strategies of their affective priming, asking: How do immersive openers prime the viewers' affective appraisal of the show to follow? And how do they prepare them for the leading “feeling tone” (Plantinga 2009: 166) and mood of a series' world? Using the popular openers of the series Dexter, Six Feet Under, and True Blood, the article analyzes in three in-depth analyses successful immersive strategies for affective priming. They argue that these immersive title sequences use embodied metaphors, and symbols of collective imagery to create ambivalent affective cues that even tend to create mixed feelings in the viewers.

This article investigates the film trailer in a cognitive film analytic perspective. More specifically, the focus is on how it circumvents its ontological tension between both giving and holding back its product—the film—at the same time. The hypothesis is that trailers that follow a classic genre convention seek to sell their products by condensing a range of genre traits, which arouses a specific, intense emotional experience. Most particularly, the trailer chooses to activate the main genre of the film and the corresponding range of emotions by reducing and reordering its often complex narrative. On this basis, compared to the film, the trailer may be viewed as an alternative narrative.

ARTHUR P. SHIMAMURA, ED., PSYCHOCINEMATICS: EXPLORING COGNITION AT THE MOVIES

Ted Nannicelli