Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema

Thrillers, weepies, horror movies, and melodramas evoke characteristic kinds of emotional response, yet emotion is not much examined by film or literary theory. Engaging Characters discusses emotional responses to films, integrating them into a theory of engagement (`identification') with characters in cinematic and literary fictions. Films and filmmakers discussed include The Accused; Hitchcock (including detailed analyses of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Saboteur); Godard; Ruiz; Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire; Dovzhenko's Arsenal; Preminger's Daisy Kenyon; Bresson's L'Argent; Eisenstein's Strike; and Melville's Le Doulos.