Giuseppe Tornatore: emotion, cognition, cinema

The nature of the spectator’s emotional and intellectual engagement with films has attracted increasing critical scrutiny over the past decade, and theoretical frameworks have been elaborated to analyse how and why viewers are moved by what they see on screen. Viewer responses are influenced by factors including genre expectations, involuntary physiological reactions to what is seen and heard, shifting attachments towards screen characters, and by specific devices within a film’s mise-en-scène, such as lighting and colour. Giuseppe Tornatore: Emotion; Cognition; Cinema is a film-by-film analysis of the work of the Oscar-winning director, a study that examines the nature of the strong affective charge that characterizes his films, and which also explores the cognitive and intellectual appeal of Tornatore’s cinema. The volume illustrates the ways in which an affective and intellectual synergy can develop between a film’s aesthetics and its conceptual agenda, as instantiated by films such as the celebrated Cinema Paradiso. The affective power that characterizes Tornatore’s work has long been acknowledged by critics, and while analysing the configurations of visual, aural, and narrative devices that generate such intensely poignant viewing experiences, the volume also elucidates the ways in which the director’s stylistic approach intensifies the significance of a range of social and cultural questions affecting Western society, issues that lie at the heart of his films