Hauke Lehmann

How is affective experience produced in the cinema? And how can we write a history of this experience? By asking these questions, this study by Hauke Lehmann aims at rethinking our conception of a critical period in US film history – the New Hollywood: as a moment of crisis that can neither be reduced to economic processes of adaption nor to a collection of masterpieces. Rather, the fine-grained analysis of core films reveals the power of cinematic images to affect their audiences – to confront them with the new. The films of the New Hollywood redefine the divisions of the classical genre system in a radical way and thereby transform the way spectators are addressed affectively in the cinema. The study describes a complex interplay between three modes of affectivity: suspense, paranoia, and melancholy. All three, each in their own way, implicate spectators in the deep-seated contradictions of their own feelings and their ways of being in the world: their relations to history, to society, and to cultural fantasy. On this basis, Affect Poetics of the New Hollywood projects an original conception of film history: as an affective history which can be re-written up to the present day.

Suspense, Paranoia, and Melancholy

Affect Poetics of the New Hollywood

Hermann Kappelhoff

Jan-Hendrik Bakels

Christina Schmitt

Das Handbuch führt erstmals die vielseitigen Traditionen der Emotionsforschung zusammen. Den Anfang macht eine historische Betrachtung der Emotions- und Affekttheorien von der Antike bis zur Moderne. Dem folgt eine umfassende Übersicht zentraler Emotionskonzepte der Gegenwart, wie sie in Psychologie und Philosophie diskutiert werden. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Konzepte und ihrer historischen Verortung entfaltet das Handbuch eine umfassende Typologie der Emotionen. Verschiedenste Komplexe – wie etwa Trauer, Melancholie und Depression oder Freude, Glück und Wohlbefinden – werden jeweils in den Sichtweisen unterschiedlicher Disziplinen dargelegt, darunter Ethnologie, Philosophie, Literaturwissenschaft, Soziologie, Psychologie. Abschließend werden entlang zentraler Konzepte wie Sprache, Kultur, Politik und Medien vier wesentliche Fluchtlinien aktueller Emotionsforschung entfaltet, welche den Horizont einzelner Disziplinen überschreiten und entsprechend in interdisziplinärer Perspektive erschlossen werden.

Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch

Emotionen

How do spectators become emotionally involved in cinema? Starting from this question, the book suggests an original view about a critical period in United States film history. In a detailed analysis of individual films, an image emerges of a complex interplay between three affective modes – suspense, paranoia, and melancholy – which draw the spectators to reflect in unique ways about contradictions in their own feelings.

Hauke Lehmann

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