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Emotion Expressions
The first important gift for which we have film to thank was in a certain sense the
rediscovery of the human face. Film has revealed to us the human face with unexampled
clarity in its tragic as well as grotesque, threatening as well as blessed expression.
The second gift is that of visual empathy: in the purest sense the expressionistic
representation of thought processes. No longer will we take part purely externally in the
workings of the soul of the characters in film. We will no longer limit ourselves to
seeing the effects of feelings, but will experience them in our own souls, from the instant
of their inception on, from the first flash of thought through to the logical last conclusion
of the idea.
--Fritz Langi
Character Emotions
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Many cognitive film theorists have argued that film and emotion are closely connected,
yet they tend to be interested more in spectator emotions than in character emotions,
expressions (principally of the voice and face) are another versatile tool that demand
to be considered in their own right. And like typing and mindreading, emotion
expressions can be shaped toward aesthetic ends. In this chapter I argue that
expressions of basic emotions such as anger and fear are universally produced and
recognized, and implicit in this discussion is the notion that one appeal of cinema is
its ability to represent these expressions that transcend time and culture. But I also
argue, more importantly, that emotion expressions can be understood only in a social
or narrative context, and that filmmakers can manipulate both the context and the
many films with an interest in character, such as American independent films, is their
argue in relation to Welcome to the Dollhouse and Hard Eight, carrying over the
emotion recognition also produces effects of complexity and depth and demands a
more active engagement with the construction of character. It also functions within
identity, making narrative form playfully engaging, and offering a contrast with the
The Face
The human face has always been a key feature of cinema’s appeal to filmmakers and
spectators alike, one source of its special powers. This is hardly surprising, given the
face’s significance as the emblem of our very identities. If you ask to see a picture of
someone, you typically aren’t interested in an image of their teeth, knees, or liver. When
you look at a picture of your face, you say, “That’s me!” The face is the only part of a
person that can be abstracted in this way from the rest of the body; it is the best
Scholars have long recognized the communicative power of faces. Study in this
field dates to the enormous interest in physiognomy in ancient Greece and “face-reading”
even before that in China and the Near East.iii The study of physiognomy, which the
Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the art of judging character and disposition from
features of the face,” has long been recognized as pseudoscience, but interest in the face
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as an index of mental states has never abated. The Darwinian study of facial expressions
as a product of evolution long ago filled the place once held by physiognomy and face-
reading, though more recently research has shown that social perceivers agree about links
between facial features and character traits, which may sometimes even have some
validity.iv
of “character” but as a primary means, along with our bodies and voices, of expressing
emotions. Indeed, from such a perspective, emotions and facial expressions have a close
recognized, such as baring teeth to show anger and opening the mouth to show surprise,
have a functional purpose that precedes the communication of emotional states. Baring
teeth threatens an enemy, while opening the mouth is part of taking in breath. Each of
these actions is practical given the situation in which one feels either angry (because one
has been wronged and will have to defend oneself) or surprised (breathing in will
facilitate alertness to the cause of the surprise and readiness in response to it).
expressions that express them. Emotions themselves have adaptive value: it pays to be
afraid of things that could harm you, to be angry at those who wrong you, to be disgusted
by things that could make you sick. The facial expressions that accompanied these
emotions, which originally had only practical functions, became habituated over time to
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the point that they took on the significant communicative role they have always since
had. The ability to communicate our emotional states in turn is greatly beneficial to any
species that requires the extensive social organizations characteristic of primate societies.
Being able to communicate your feelings to your conspecifics gives you a definite
advantage.
One of Darwin’s arguments in his classic work on this topic, The Expression of
the Emotions in Man and Animals, concerns the universality of emotions. There has long
been debate over whether specific emotions themselves, and also whether the facial
expressions of those emotions, vary from culture to culture, or whether they are universal
emotions. More recent research has basically confirmed this position, identifying several
basic emotions and facial expressions of them that are recognized pan-culturally, even by
members of pre-literate tribes who have had very little or no exposure to Western culture
and media. The seven emotions, as Paul Ekman and his fellow researchers proposed to
name them, are happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, disgust/contempt, and interest.vi
Ekman and his colleagues went farther than just ascertaining whether and how
many facial expression are universal. They set about to code the muscles of the face to
better understand how each facial expression is produced anatomically. They found that
the muscles can be divided into action units (AU’s), of which we have 43, and identified
about 3,000 meaningful combinations of these 43 action units. The catalogue of all of
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these facial actions and their combinations is called the Facial Action Coding System, or
FACS. The few hundred people who can read the face using FACS report that their
and Dreamworks use FACS to create facial expressions for characters in feature films.viii
What about cultural specificity? What accounts for differences among cultures in
the expression of emotion? The standard account in the facial expression literature holds
that what varies is not the experience of emotion itself, nor the facial expressions
corresponding to basic emotions in different cultures. It’s not as though a smile of joy for
Westerners means terror in some other culture. What does vary is customs for who may
display emotions and in what situations. These are called display rules.ix People often
try to display an expression for an emotion they are not experiencing, or to mask one
emotion with another. For example, if you are trying to tell a lie or to smile for a picture
To test this hypothesis, Ekman ran an experiment using Japanese and American
subjects.xi It is widely believed that in Japanese society, there are cultural expectations
regarding the facial display of negative emotions (which are also gender- and age-
specific). In particular, Japanese are known to mask negative emotions with smiles, and
as a result the smile means something different in Japanese culture than it does in the
West, because Japanese expect many smiles to be less than genuine.xii In the Ekman
experiment, a “stress” film is shown to two groups of students, one a group of American
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students in California and one a group of Japanese students in Tokyo. This is a film
made up of things that are difficult to watch and that leave ordinary viewers pretty
shocked. They showed each film to the students twice: once with the student alone in a
room (but observed through a hidden camera), and once with the student observed by a
technician (of their own culture) in a white coat and carrying a clipboard. Ekman found
that when alone in the room, the American and Japanese students reacted with the same
facial expressions. But when another person was present, the Japanese subjects
attempted to mask their emotions with smiles. The display rule in Japanese society is to
hide or mask emotions when in the presence of authority figures, but this is not the rule in
America. However, the Japanese subjects were betrayed by their faces, as many people
find it impossible to effectively hide strong emotions of disgust or fear and Ekman, using
the FACS, could even detect indications of emotions under the masking.
better detectors of lying and cheating, but in general we are able to distinguish a true (or
“Duchenne”) smile, produced by genuine amusement, from an affected one, put on when
asked to pose for a picture. A Duchenne smile combines a movement of muscles around
the mouth (called a “simple smile”) with a movement of muscles around the eyes. A
More recent research has identified a more fine-tuned sense of cultural variability
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find that subjects identify emotions displayed by someone of a different culture at a rate
greater than chance, making the case for some degree of universalism incontrovertible.
Yet they also find that in-group subjects identify each other’s emotion expressions at a
higher rate than those of out-group members. Out-group expressions are more accurate
when the different cultures are closely connected (e.g., by sharing a national border).
Within a given culture, minority subjects judge majority members’ expressions more
accurately than the reverse. Indeed, minorities judge majority expressions more
accurately than majorities judge each other! This makes sense intuitively: the success of
minority members is increased as they are better able to interact with majority
members.xiv So this suggests that rather than absolute, the recognition of facial
The Voice
The representation of the voice is another cinematic narrative technique with functions
and possibilities similar to those of the face, yet historically the voice has been given less
attention by film critics, theorists, and historians. This lesser emphasis may be explained
by two factors. First, cinema existed for three decades before sound recording and
sound-image synchronization became standard, so the representation of the voice did not
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Second, the voice is not uniquely cinematic; music, literature, and drama used voices for
thousands of years before cinema was invented. So paying attention to the storytelling
possibilities of vocal expression in cinema did not help differentiate cinema from its rival
arts at a time when this kind of differentiation was a paramount interest of film critics.xv
Like the face, the voice is an emblem and index of an individual’s identity. Like
the face, the voice is a means communication that facilitates social organization, and like
the face, some vocal expressions of emotion are recognized cross-culturally.xvi The most
commonly identified emotions recognized vocally across cultures include anger, fear,
sadness, and joy.xvii There is evidence that the physiological and environmental
increases in rates of breathing and blood flow when a subject is taken by surprise affect
the voice. Yet cultural specificity also has its part in this story. The display rules that
apply in explaining the cultural variability of facial expressions affect vocal expressions
in more or less the same way in the same circumstances. A person smiling to mask her
fear would also try to speak in even, measured tones and not in a breathless fit of
anguish.xviii
equally significant. Vocal expressions of emotion, like facial ones, are products of
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simplistic by comparison with our own species’ vocal abilities, yet, as Darwin argued,
our non-verbal vocal expressions evolved from these ancestors of our species. Some of
the sounds produced by the human vocal apparatus, such as shrieks of pain, are produced
the same way in many other species. But only human beings have the control over the
using language.
what they may say or how they may look we can “hear it in their voice.” Research
confirms that this is indeed the case: the human voice functions to express emotions
regardless of which words are spoken. Listeners can detect basic vocal emotions when
expressions of basic emotions such as anger and sadness. Researchers into non-verbal
communication of emotion have coded the acoustic properties of some vocal emotion
expressions much in the same way as FACS correlated facial musculature to emotion
expressions. The most important acoustic aspects of the voice for emotional expression
hertz), and time, which includes both rate of speech and pauses between words.xx Each of
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these can be further broken down into components, and each may vary to greater or lesser
extents. For example, anger is generally characterized by a quick rate and a high
characterized by a slow rate, low frequency, low intensity, and little variability of these
qualities.xxi For joy, sadness, and anger, recognition of vocal expressions is four or five
times greater than chance.xxii Yet some emotions are more difficult to isolate in discrete
vocal expressions: disgust is recognized at a rate scarcely better than chance. However,
disgust may be a special case, as it is less likely than other emotions to be expressed in
ordinary conversational speech. Disgust typically comes out in very brief “affect bursts,”
which combine vocal and facial expressions. A typical case would be making a face and
Still more modes of expression exist. Gesture or body language is another means
of emotional display that psychologists have studied, though to a lesser degree than
voices and faces. Of course, the body is a significant tool in the actor’s kit. Yet more
and more, the mainstream film conventions of framing and cutting emphasize faces at the
expense of bodies.xxiv If John Wayne were acting today, his cowboy gait would be less
prominent, yet we would see more of his friendly smile and his angry glare. Bodily
but the literature on this topic is rather thin, and I leave further discussion of it for future
research.
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There are three basic claims arising out of this discussion of research on expressions of
emotion. The first is that the basic emotions themselves are universal: no matter the
cultural or historical specificity of a person’s background, she still experiences the same
happiness, fear, disgust, etc., as any other person. There are no remote tribes in which
happiness itself is unknown, or in which they have a different basic emotion, distinct
The second claim is that basic expressions of happiness (smiling), fear (furrowing
the brow), disgust (pursing the lips), etc., are also cross-cultural. There are also no
remote tribes in which no one ever smiles, or in which everyone uses some expression we
have never seen to communicate happiness. Indeed, the notion of display rules suggests
that not only are expressions of emotion universal, but that people know how to produce
asked, you could make a happy, fearful, or disgusted face without having to think much
about how to do it. Both of these universality claims have significant implications for
A third, implicit, claim of this research is more basic yet. The face may or may
thought, but it is a reliable source of information about a person’s emotions. This is the
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kind of information people seek when they scan the faces of others. By looking at
someone’s face, it’s hard to tell with much certainty whether or not they are virtuous or
ill-humored. You can generally tell their age, ethnicity, and sex (though not always).
But what you are generally looking for in a face, within the parameters of a given context,
is information not only about personality traits and the intentional states, but also about
affect states such as emotions and moods. These are what faces are best at
communicating. This is also a universality claim: in all cultures, people treat faces as
emotion-indicators and scan faces for feelings. And most significantly, it follows that the
ability to read emotions in faces must universal, just like the ability to express them.
Both the sending and receiving of facial emotion information is a product of natural
selection.xxvi
The same claim applies in a slightly modified form to vocal expressions. The
voice is used to communicate more than just emotion; the words chosen may convey
many kinds of meaning. So too the face may communicate several kinds of information
(a wink might mean “yes,” a wince might say “that hurt” or “this is embarrassing”). But,
among other things, the non-verbal aspect of speech functions as an index of emotions.
In this way it is similar to music; both voices and music communicate emotion even
without the meaning conveyed by words. The Beatles’s “Help!” is a cheerful song in
spite of its desperate lyrics. There is also evidence that the acoustic properties
corresponding to particular emotional meanings in music are the same as those applying
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to vocal expressions (i.e., the high pitch and intensity characteristic of fearful speech is
These claims have significant implications for the study of cinematic narrative in
media such as cinema use images of faces as a primary narrative technique. While there
are, of course, many films that contain no close-up images of faces, rare is the narrative
feature film that eschews the face. To make such a film would be to engage in a kind of
avant-garde practice, an experimental effort to break the rules and see what happens.
There is also a distinction here to be made between moving-image media such as film,
television, and video games on one hand, and theater on the other. Since the introduction
of moving pictures, the live-ness and immediacy of theater have been its selling points.
But what cinema lacks in these qualities, it makes up for in its ability to represent faces
on a large scale.
above explain, to a large extent, the power of movies to appeal across cultures and
historical periods. Spectators approach the image of the face primed to recognize the
literary narrative creates emotions for characters too, but by other means. The
immediacy and directness of the face make for vivid and direct characterizations and
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allow the audience to connect with the characters’ interior states in a powerful way.
However, the literary comparison illustrates well that there are other means of
image media make use of these techniques too, but the availability of images of the face
Like facial expressions, vocal expressions are a more direct and vivid means of
specificity to be made regarding the voice. The silent era produced many masterpieces
that relied on an aesthetic of voiceless performance. Since then, however, the aesthetic
has changed to the point that a narrative feature film without voices would be highly
places the face and voice at the top of all stylistic hierarchies. Faces (and by extension,
bodies) are the most important component of mise en scene and are the paramount
important sound component, taking precedence over music and “noise.” In the vast
majority of scenes, filmmakers cut to follow both facial and vocal cues above all other
Underlying the above discussion are several assumptions about expressions of emotion
that must be qualified to understand how such expressions function both in real life and
vocal, conveys or displays one and only one emotion. Most research in this field follows
just this logic, asking subjects to identify emotions expressed in a static image of a face
or in a brief recording (a few seconds long) of a person speaking. The examples are
predicts the subjects will recognize clearly. The subjects are often given a fixed set of
choices from a list of basic emotions. Thus the results of the research show that subjects
identify single emotions for each display.xxxi Yet in actual settings, it is common for
subjects to experience more than one emotion, and it would follow that they also may
express more than one. When subjects were asked to describe another person’s
emotional expressions, they generally used more than one term for each emotional
episode, e.g., they described someone being angry and jealous, or sad and grieving.xxxii
There is typically far more nuance and complexity to any instance of emotional
experience and expression than the division of facial and vocal expressions into seven
Second, implicit in this discussion has been the suggestion that all instances of
expressions of emotion are equally recognizable. That is, either you are expressing anger
in your voice or face, or you are not. Similarly, it has been implicit that all of the various
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different emotion expressions are equally recognizable. I made an exception for vocal
expressions of disgust, but in general the various affect states were not shown to vary in
strength. Yet some emotions are more easily and universally recognized than others.xxxiii
degrees of intensity. It is often difficult to discern another person’s affect states, whether
because of their efforts to mask them or because of other factors. We often speculate
about what someone else is feeling—we even speculate about our own emotions. It is not
always easy to put your finger on what a given pattern of behavior really means. Some of
the most interesting filmic representations of emotion, such as European art films of the
1960s, show a character’s face and voice to be, to some extent, inscrutable. Sometimes
it’s obvious that a person is afraid; but often it’s hard to say what a face means.
Bergman’s Persona and Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad are good examples of films in
function in film, psychologists James Carroll and James Russell analyzed facial
Endearment, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Ordinary People, all of which had been praised by
Leonard Maltin for their realism, acting, or general quality. They identified more than
100 episodes in which viewers (psychology students) agreed that a character was
experiencing one of the basic emotions, and agreed on which emotion. They found that,
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with the exception of happiness, the basic emotions were rarely coupled with the facial
expressions Ekman’s influential theory would predict. Most of the time, no prototype
emotion was displayed, yet some action units, such as a brow raise, were consistently
This point underlies Carroll and Russell’s theory that facial expressions generally
function at the level of the AUs, and that the seven basic expressions are rarely—if ever
—seen in everyday life. They suggest that the seven expressions of basic emotions are
prototypes combining many of the different AUs that one would display for a given
emotion. They are mental prototypes used in miming emotions or in acting guides, but
This experiment shows that in cinema as well as in real life, emotions may be
expressed in subtle or partial ways that do not involve the classic facial patterns we think
of as an “angry face” or a “surprised face.” Yet with happiness, the Duchenne smile was
commonly observed. This is clearly the most recognizable, unambiguous, and universal
but not the other contexts in which one might smile, as in polite smiles, miserable smiles,
Third, this discussion has assumed that emotions may be detected from brief,
emotional experience is expressed in multiple modes. One does not ordinarily use an
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angry voice absent an angry face, angry body language, angry words, and a context
producing anger. While facial expressions are often seen to offer the best evidence of
emotional experience, in practice people are receptive to all of the modes of interpersonal
same subjects discussed context in narrative terms (they told a story about the person’s
situation), and referred to various vocal and bodily expressions.xxxvi This demonstrates
that emotion expressions, and the understanding we have of them, are a product of many
cues; some of them may even be contradictory. Contradictory cues may coexist just in
the vocal channel, as one’s words and one’s voice might express different feelings.
While there are emotional qualities that people express purely non-verbally, in practice
vocal expressions occur in combination with language. It may often be the case that
subjects must discern someone’s emotions when their words do not make them explicit.
Indeed, when asked to describe emotional episodes they observed, subjects would rarely
refer to explicit descriptions such as ,“I’m so angry!”xxxvii Yet it would be foolish to doubt
that the verbal component of vocal expression is negligible. Words are one part of the
This leads to a fourth point, which is that people’s understandings of each other’s
of studying expression recognition typically use still pictures of faces abstracted from any
situation. Yet contexts can make a big difference in determining what a face means. For
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example, athletes often express the joy of victory with faces that Ekman would code as
(crying). No one who is watching the game—or even highlights of it that make clear that
these are winners’ faces—would mistake the players’ affect states. Expressions of
emotion always occur in context and the judgments people make of other people’s
emotions are based on a combination of information about the person and the situation.
Indeed one of the defining features of emotion is appraisal: one generally becomes afraid
to encounter emotionally expressive faces absent any context. Even if we grant that clear
facial expressions of basic emotions exist, which the above example might cast some
doubt on, they have meaning only within the realm of the social.
This means that vocal and facial expressions are not the only way that spectators
folk psychology) and causal attributions are also possible means of establishing emotion,
as are the direct techniques of narration such as voice-over. The claim of this section is,
rather, that faces and voices are primarily emotion-expressers, and that narrative feature
films make extensive use of them for this purpose. Yet because of the interaction of
modes of characterization, the emotional content of a character cannot be split off from
the other information we have about him. A person’s environment (i.e., a narrative
Fifth, this discussion has assumed that the most significant, if not the only,
function of faces is as emotion expressers. But although the majority of research into
facial expressions is concerned with emotion expressions, there are obviously other
functions of facial expressions. Faces and voices may be analyzed on a scale of arousal,
from minimally aroused to neutral to highly aroused.xxxix Arousal can be associated with
emotion expressions (surprised faces show high arousal, sad faces low arousal) or they
may not. Someone may just look or sound sleepy or hyper. Given specific contexts,
faces and voices can be indices of many non-emotion states, such as alertness, hunger,
referential meaning about intentional rather than affect states. Rolling the eyes can
communicate doubt or derision; furrowing the brow can communicate skepticism; licking
the lips can communicate pleasure; opening the eyes wide can communicate eagerness to
learn more; and smiling and nodding can communicate agreement. Facial expressions
can also have clearly coded meanings within a given culture or subculture. Exaggerated
winking can be a silly way of saying, “I mean this ironically.” Ordinary winking can
there are still significant differences of degree of recognition among subjects of different
all subjects’ responses fall on the same point of the scale. So while cinema’s universal,
described, the preference of Americans for American cinema might also be explained by
it, since each culture is better at recognizing its own expressions of emotions than it is at
universal expressions of them does not mean that there is no room for ambiguity and
each other and may be easy or difficult to recognize. Emotion expressions are a multi-
channel phenomenon, not simply vocal or facial displays, and they are understood and
interpreted in a social context. They are combined with other facial and vocal
communication which may not contain emotion content, and which may be culturally
variable. And emotion expressions themselves are to some extent culturally variable and
thus not absolutely universal. Not all subjects are able with 100% accuracy to understand
all other subjects’ emotion expressions. There are degrees of fallibility. All of these
qualifications offer direction for the application of theories of emotional expression to the
The main obstacle to applying these ideas about expressions of emotion to film is that a
film is a representation of human actions, not the actions themselves. An actor portrays a
character who is sad or afraid because of events in her world. One might think that
unless she is a hard-core method actor, however, she is simulating the emotion. So how
do actors convey emotions so impressively that they hold audiences captivated? This is
not the topic of this project, which is concerned primarily with the spectator’s
comprehension from other levels of involvement, since one way that people ordinarily
respond to the emotional expressions of others is by feeling what they feel. This
phenomenon is known as emotional contagion. When you are around a cheerful person,
you become cheerful, but a depressed person makes you feel down it the dumps.xlii This
is true of films as well: an angry character, such as Peter Finch’s mad-as-hell newscaster
in Network, causes the audience to feel his anger. Obviously, not all film characters’
emotions are duplicated in spectators; unsympathetic characters are less likely to generate
this effect. Granting that, how do actors express emotions so convincingly that they are
recognized that many species mimic facial expressions seemingly automatically, and
there is substantial evidence showing that infants mimic their parents’ facial and vocal
expressions and vice versa. Facial expressions are caused, among other things, by
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autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity, and it would seem that the causation runs both
ways. When you smile in mimicry of someone else’s genuine happy smile, your ANS
activity is that of a smiling, happy person. In experiments, researchers had subjects form
facial expressions without telling them to display a particular emotion, by giving them
instructions about which muscles to move, and measured their ANS activity. They found
that even without any context in which to feel particular emotions, the subjects showed
the ANS patterns of someone experiencing them. Film spectators mimic facial
the idea of emotional contagion. One standard simplified description of method acting is
character going through the same emotion.xliii This is supposed to produce a more
that person. Emotion memory is an actor’s way of getting into the part and has become a
standard notion in American film acting, to the point that even if the technique is not
being used the idea of the actor taking on the character’s interiority is commonplace. Yet
contagion demonstrates. Facial and vocal expressions are both causes and effects of
emotional experience. They are all part of the same process, not the end-point results
become happy.
Still, aren’t there differences between acted expressions of emotion and genuine
ones? Undoubtedly there are, but it would take a specialist in the coding of facial and
vocal expressions to detail them insofar as they constitute variations in how facial action
units or vocal acoustic parameters are utilized. On a more general level, though, we
might assume that representations of expressions function roughly in the same way as
expressions of emotion derive from and refer to phenomenal reality, especially from
social intelligence, but in what way do representations of emotion expressions seem real
and in what ways do they seem not-real? When they seem not-real, is this an aesthetic
That is to say that they necessarily bear some relation to reality, but that this relation has
many permutations and combinations. It would be a gross simplification to say that any
representation is more or less realistic than any other. (Is Rules of the Game more
realistic than On the Waterfront? According to what terms? In what ways? By whose
frustrating. There also may be variations in quality of acting technique that make some
performances more or less realistic or stylized, obvious or subtle, clear or obscure. These
variations are all historically and culturally specific, as realism at one point in film
history will later seem laughable, and realism in one national cinema may look contrived
against examples from another.xliv But the basic materials of emotion expression are the
same facial and vocal features that express emotions in reality. This is because we know
of no basic emotion terms or descriptions of facial or vocal activity that are specific to
artistic representation. There is no genre of film in which one observes emotion x and
cinema and is never observed in the real world. Like the other aspects of characterization
I have discussed, it is assumed that the same processes used in understanding people in
everyday life are those used in understanding cinematic narrative. This is the simplest
explanation I can think of; the burden of proof is on those who support a notion of
cinema-specific processes to show first that they exist and then that they explain our
emotion profile on the basis of multi-channel cues. Each character is the product of this
ongoing process combining information about narrative situations with visual and aural
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input. Dawn in Welcome to the Dollhouse is a good example because her emotional
experience is defined by simple situations and clear, basic emotions. Welcome to the
concern to the spectator, as we are invited to empathize with her plight as an awkward
social misfit. Dawn’s mental states are generally unambiguous and sympathetic. At
various points in the narrative, she experiences humiliation (shame), anger, fear, and even
happiness. Emotions are generally brief, and each one Dawn experiences is a response to
a well-defined situation.
-In the first scene, Dawn is humiliated by being unable to find a place to sit in the
forced to watch her siblings eat her cake, when Steve implies that she is
“retarded,” and when her family laughs at the video of her being pushed into the
pool.
-At the assembly, Dawn is angered when she is showered with spitballs by the
bullies. She is also angered quite frequently, as when she calls her friend Ralpie a
“faggot,” when she calls her sister “Lesbo,” and when her brother, Mark, orders
her out of his room. Her anger also arises whenever she feels she has been treated
unfairly, e.g., when she is given a detention and when she is forced to dismantle
her clubhouse.
-The best example of Dawn’s fear comes when Brandon threatens to rape her.
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She is also made to fear Lolita, Brandon’s friend, who forces Dawn to go to the
bathroom with the stall door open and speaks to her in menacing tones.
whom she has a crush on. She is happy when she watches him sing, when she
dreams about him, and when she entertains him with Hawaiian Punch and leftover
-We can also identify blends of emotion, i.e., episodes in which more than one
emotion can be identified. When she is brought before the principal for returning
spitball fire and injuring a teacher, Dawn sits next to her parents and is questioned
about her social life. Over the principal’s shoulder, we see the bullies through the
window mocking and taunting Dawn. She can see them, but the others cannot.
Like so many other scenes in the film, the overriding appraisal that the spectator
makes is that Dawn is a victim of unfairness. But her emotions are harder to pin
down: we might believe that she is shamed by being told she has no friends,
angered by being the one who got in trouble when the instigators got off, afraid of
being punished, and remorseful about having caused her teacher harm.
Note first that all of these emotion episodes are context-dependent. These emotions are
clear from these descriptions of them, whatever their representations. They are
Her voice rises and quickens when she pleads her case to her teacher and her parents.
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Her facial expressions soften with smiles and wide-opened eyes when she is around
Steve.
In general, though, Dawn’s emotions are hardly evident at all her in facial
expressions. Heather Matarozzo rarely uses any classic basic emotion faces, as
described by Ekman. Her expressions are much more often just blank. This is not
Solondz’s general style; indeed most of the other characters are facially very expressive.
Dawn and plaintive, supplicating ones to Cookie, the popular girl who snubs him. Missy
is frequently seen with smiles of happiness and Dawn’s teacher typically sneers with
stoicism in the opening scenes as well as later ones is likely a product of the suppression
of affect states such as sadness, anger, fear, and frustration. This in turn leads back into
assumptions and inferences about intentionality and dispositions. We might figure that
an awkward misfit might suppress the display of negative emotions as a means of easing
her social experiences, or as an attempt to overcome the negative emotions. This might
suggest a resilient or defiant personality, which squares with Dawn’s stubborn actions, or
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a denial of serious problems, which squares with her lack of self-awareness. The facial
display is itself a multidimensional cue, and by virtue of its inexpressiveness Dawn’s face
becomes a site of ambiguity, upping the interest in Dawn’s character and, by contrast,
underlining her emotional experience using other means. Matarozzo’s voice modulates
frequently, from quiet and endearing to loud and whiny. She mimics the bullies’ firm
tones of voice when speaking to Missy or Marc, but she speaks in a hush when threatened
by Lolita and Brandon. Her humiliation when reciting her essay on “dignity” is
conveyed by her unsure posture and her weak, hesitant voice. This is duplicated in the
assembly scene when she addresses the school and is, again, humiliated.
Other stylistic means de-emphasize Dawn’s face. Solondz cuts to long or extreme
long shots at moments of heightened feeling to detract from Dawn’s face as an expressive
device. For example, when Dawn runs away from Brandon, in the scene in which he has
said he is going to rape her, she races to a chain link fence, where we are shown her in an
extreme long shot. Similarly, her humiliation at being pushed into the pool is a long shot
seen on a (TV) screen within the screen. Solondz also uses a musical cue, with distorted,
rhythmic electric guitar, up-tempo bass, and tom drums in scene transitions. This cue
becomes a shorthand for Dawn’s frustration, anger and humiliation, a refrain to sum up
Murray Smith has discussed how Takeshi Kitano, Robert Bresson, and Wong
enigmatic, each fitting this approach to the face into a larger aesthetic system, achieving
specific effects. He contrasts this with the clear basic expressions in films by
Hitchcock.xlv I would suggest that facially inexpressive acting is one baseline technique
of modern independent and art cinema, which may function to involve the spectator in
constructing the character’s interiority, to increase narrative ambiguity, and to make the
characters seem complicated and interesting. Dawn’s emotions are fairly clear from her
situation; but there is something intriguing about the stoicism with which she faces her
circumstances. This sets her apart from characters in more conventional dramas about
adolescence. It makes her experience seem highly specific and individuated, but it also
routine humiliation, and an almost nihilistic expectation that it will continue unchecked
for as long as Dawn is a child, and in many other children after her. He suggests that this
is a natural state for adolescents and that their best chance at surviving it is by accepting
it as a fact of life. In the film’s final scene, Dawn sings the Hummingbird theme song on
the bus to Disney World, with the saddest happy face one can imagine, which
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underscores both the pathos of her character and the extent to which situations determine
our attribution of character emotions. Extracted from the film, this scene would have
little emotional impact, but in context it is powerfully pathetic. Ultimately, the effect of
individuality. It is typical of both the film’s director and of independent cinema more
For much of Hard Eight, the character emotions are much less evident, largely
because of the enigmatic nature of the exposition. There are virtually no unambiguous
basic emotion episodes at all in the first third of the film, which include the scenes of
Sydney and John’s meeting and the development of their friendship, the episodes
introducing Jimmy and Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), and the development of the
generated by the film in these scenes we do best to speak of mood rather than emotion.
Moods are more generalized and longer lasting than emotions.xlvi Those moments that
seem like they might build into genuine emotion moments tend not to. For example,
John seems to get angry at Syd for suggesting that they return to Las Vegas together,
because he is wary that Syd might have a sexual interest in him. But Syd assures him
that this is not the case and John’s feelings are defused. Similarly, in the scene in which
John introduces Syd to Jimmy, it seems that Syd is angry with Jimmy for making
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sexually explicit comments about the cocktail waitresses, but their discussion of it never
builds into a genuinely angry dispute. In the scene in which Syd observes the cocktail
waitress Clementine emerging from a customer’s room, clearly indicating that she was
having sex with him for money, it is suggested that Clementine might feel shame. Yet
her words might contradict this inference, as she insists that she doesn’t do anything she
doesn’t want to. It could be that she feels mixed emotions: perhaps she is proud to earn
facial or vocal expressions clearly display the classic basic emotion expressions.
What the first scenes of the film do have in significant quantity are smiling faces.
Especially in the encounters in the cocktail lounge, the characters smile at one another
frequently but never, it seems, from genuine happiness or amusement. These social
Sydney smile at each other even though Sydney tells her of his disapproval of her
behavior. Jimmy and Sydney smile at each other even though they clearly have some
mutual dislike. In these cases, facial expressions serve to obscure rather than illuminate
the characters’ interior states, and spectators’ inferences about other aspects of
In Hard Eight, the tone shifts dramatically in the scene beginning with Sydney’s
appearance outside a motel room. Inside, he discovers that John and Clementine have
kidnapped a man who hired Clementine as a prostitute and then refused to pay. The man
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is lying unconscious, with his face in a bloody pillow and his hands cuffed to the
headboard. In this scene, the characters express their emotions boldly using every
available channel. They bare their teeth in anger, cry in sadness, raise their voices in fear.
They shout at each other and pace back and forth. Clementine covers her face in shame
and cowers on the floor. As the situation is made clear, the narrative context supports
these responses. Clementine and John have committed several felonies and are at risk of
being discovered by the police. By asking Sydney to come, they have involved him as an
accessory. They also say that they have contacted Jimmy, so that he too is involved and
could potentially affect their effort to escape without getting into trouble with the law.
We are suspicious of Jimmy not only because of a snap judgment based on his character
type (slick casino security consultant, which is made to sound somewhat euphemistic) but
because Sydney tells John that he doesn’t like Jimmy. We are inclined to trust Sydney,
who takes on a protective, fatherly concern for John. The situation prompts our
interpretation that the characters are angry, afraid, and anguished. As is so often the case
In the final third of the film, Clementine and John have fled to Niagara Falls, and
the story turns to a drawn-out confrontation between Jimmy and Sydney. Jimmy tries to
shake Sydney down, blackmailing him by threatening to reveal Syd’s secret to John.
This is when the narrative’s revelation is made: Sydney acts as he does toward John
because Sydney killed John’s father. Sydney seeks, in effect, to take the place of John’s
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father without letting John know who he really is. What is remarkable about this last part
of the film is the extent to which Sydney maintains his stoical, generally expressionless
demeanor. With the exception of a single short scene, in which Jimmy threatens him
with a gun, Sydney’s face is a blank screen. This is in contrast to images of Clementine
laughing in the wedding video that Sydney views, of Jimmy shouting and showing anger
and excitement, and John’s soft sobs and sad expression when Sydney tells him, over the
phone, that he loves John as though he were his own son. Sydney typically stares straight
ahead. At times, Anderson de-emphasizes the face, as Solondz does in Welcome to the
with the camera set up behind Jimmy and Sydney’s heads, and by cutting away to
seemingly irrelevant objects such as Sydney’s waist and a coffee cup on a table. But
these techniques are brief and function more as punctuation or pause than as a dominant
aesthetic.
Philip Baker Hall’s face. As Sydney, Hall makes the most of his face’s craggy lines,
deep-set eyes with multiple bags under them, and distinguished, angular features. The
audience studies Hall’s face to try to get insight into Sydney’s emotion. This is not
unlike Solondz’s use of Matarozzo’s face in Welcome to the Dollhouse, and in each case
the face seems to suggest an underlying default stance or attitude. Dawn’s face is an
index of her suffering, even when she is not shown to suffer, because her character is
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defined most of all by this quality. Sydney’s face, on the other hand, is constantly
purposeful. Sydney is always thinking, it seems, but never lays out his thought processes
in words. He feels no less than the others, but his love for John and his hatred for Jimmy
are almost always kept to himself, as are his anger and his fear. This is a classic tough-
guy image from gangster pictures and films noirs. The stoical thinking man never shows
his cards until it is most advantageous to him. Like Welcome to the Dollhouse, the
protagonist’s face functions in contrast to all of the other faces, which are more
conventionally expressive. But in Hard Eight, as in Welcome to the Dollhouse, there are
key moments in the narrative in which the character’s shell is cracked and Sydney’s
passion is displayed. When Jimmy threatens him with a gun, Sydney looks and sounds
afraid, just as in the hotel room he looks and sounds angry. These bursts humanize him
and establish that he does feel as strongly as the others. They underline the significance
of these scenes in the narrative, as they are rare expressions from Sydney.
mysterious fashion. It is not at all clear why the characters are behaving as they do. This
is the case of large-scale narrative developments, such as Sydney’s taking John on as his
protégée. It is also the case of smaller-scale details, such as Sydney’s habit of passing
many hours in a casino hotel cocktail lounge playing keno. It is typical of independent
film narration to create enigmatic characters based on genre or social types; the work of
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spectatorship becomes the effort to decipher the clues leading to an interpretation of the
character’s identity. Thus they are able to combine their most basic appeals: on the level
of the fascinating individual who stands for a particular social experience (in Syd’s case,
an old man, a father, a Vegas hustler, a mentor); on the level of formal play (uncovering
the mysteries of the character as a game we play with the narrative); and on opposing
Midway through the film, the emotion tone shifts from being cool and
behalf of the central characters who are caught in a bad situation. We still do not know
enough about their backstories at this point to feel the full emotional weight of the
relationships they have with each other. In the end, what is most fascinating about Hard
Eight is Sydney, who is capable of acts of selfless love for John at the same time that he
is capable of vicious cruelty toward Jimmy, who is foolish enough to think he can out-
stoicism with flashes of full emotion, and relying on modulations in narrative situation to
further sketch out the character’s psychological states. The clarity of the other
interesting.
200
which focuses attention on some traits and not others, and guides attention and interest.
They are given explicit information through dialogue and subjective techniques. They
infer intentionality from narrative scenarios and observed actions using folk psychology.
They attribute the causality of narrative events to character dispositions and thereby
create a sense of the character’s personality. And they read emotions in characters’
expressions or attribute emotions in spite of those expressions on the basis of other cues
and inferences. All of these processes are mutually reinforcing. Information about any
one aspect of characterization impacts upon the others. For example, a sense of the
character’s personality may bear upon any understanding of their emotional states. A
deceitful character may be more likely to mask his or her true emotion. Knowledge about
the character’s intentions may also affect emotion assessments. A character who is trying
to pull off a swindle will be expected to display different emotions from a character who
is the victim of the crime. All of the techniques of characterization can tilt our
understanding of character, which affects spectators’ use of all of the techniques. The
importance of narrative context cannot be overstated, yet each technique is part of the
overarching goal of narrative comprehension: the data of the narrative must be made to
201
cohere as best they can. We prefer that all the parts of the social puzzle fit together, so
that my inferences about your behavior, your intentional states, your emotions, and your
traits and types are not mutually contradictory, and that explanations of some of these are
see what we are looking for, so narrative contexts direct our expectations and make
coherence more attainable. This is why exposition has come up so often in these
discussions: the design features of narrative demand that beginnings clarify a context—at
least minimally—so that social cognition processes can function efficiently and
Maximum coherence is the spectator’s goal, but not always the filmmaker’s.
Most narratives challenge our abilities to make character psychology inferences and
judgments cohere in a modest fashion by making traits and actions inconsistent with each
challenge our coherence goal more than modestly, making character comprehension a
more involved and extensive process, but also potentially a more satisfying one. Of
course, narratives can go too far into incoherence or can fail to cohere because they are
badly made, and there is little satisfaction in that. But the best independent films pose
interesting and well-developed challenges of coherence that seek to maximize our interest
202
.
iFritz Lang,, “The Future of the Feature Film in Germany” in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward
Dimendberg (eds.), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994), 623.
ii Carroll, Philosophy of Horror and A Philosophy of Mass Art; Tan, Greg M. Smith.
Alan J. Fridlund, Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View (San Diego: Academic P, 1994),
iii
2.
ivCharles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Oxford, 1998).
On physiognomy, see Leslie A. Zebrowitz, Reading Faces: Window to the Soul? (Boulder: Westview
P, 1997).
v Ibid; see also Fridlund; Ross Buck, The Communication of Emotion (New York: Guilford P, 1984);
Richard S. Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation (New York: Oxford UP, 1991); Robert Plutchick,
Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis (New York: Harper & Row, 1980); Jonathan H. Turner, On
the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2000). Paul Ekman (ed.), Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in
Review (New York: Academic P, 1973); and Paul Ekman, Joseph J. Campos, et al. (eds.), Emotions
Inside Out: 130 Years After Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New
York: The New York Academy of Sciences, 2003).
vi Paul Ekman, Emotion in the Human Face vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982). 43.
Ibid; see also Paul Ekman and Erika Rosenberg (eds.), What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied
vii
Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) (New York: Oxford
UP, 1997).
Malcolm Gladwell, “The Naked Face” The New Yorker (5 August 2002), available online at
viii
http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.htm.
Paul Ekman, “Expression and the Nature of Emotion” in Klaus R. Scherer and Paul Ekman (eds.),
ix
xOn facial expressions and lying, see Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace,
Politics, and Marriage (New York: Norton, 2001).
xii Daniel MacNeill, The Face (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 242-243.
Antonio Damasio describes the neurophysiology of this distinction between two kinds of smiles and
xiii
applies it to distinguishing between method acting and its alternatives: Damasio, Descartes’ Error:
Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Quill, 1994); for a detailed discussion of smiles,
see Mark G. Frank, Paul Ekman, and Wallace V. Friesen, “Behavioral Markers and Recognizability of
the Smile of Enjoyment,” in Ekman and Rosenberg, 217-242; and Millicent H. Abel (ed.), An
Empirical Reflection on the Smile (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen P, 2002).
Hillary Anger Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady, “On the Universality and Cultural Specificity of
xiv
One influential—and typical—example of this position is Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley:
xv
U of California P, 1957).
Klaus R. Scherer, “Vocal Affect Expression: A Review and a Model for Future Research”
xvi
Tom Johnstone and Klaus R. Scherer, “Vocal Communication of Emotion” in Michael Lewis and
xvii
Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, Handbook of Emotions 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford P, 2000), 220-235.
xx Ibid.
Patrik N. Juslin and Petri Laukka, “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music
xxi
Performance: Different Channels, Same Code?” Psychological Bulletin 129 (2003), 770-814.
Klaus R. Scherer, “Affect Bursts” in Stephanie H.M. Van Goozen, Nanne E. Van de Poll, and
xxiii
Joseph A. Sergeant (eds.), Emotions: Essays in Emotion Theory (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994), 161-
193.
David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film” Film
xxiv
xxvThe existence of basic emotions and universally recognized expressions of them is a matter of
debate among experts in the field. See James A. Russell, “Is There Universal Recognition of Emotion
from Facial Expressions? A Review of Cross-Cultural Studies” Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994),102-
41; Paul Ekman, “Strong Evidence for Universals in Facial Expressions: A Reply to Russell's Mistaken
Critique” Psychological Bulletin 115 (1994), 268-87; Carroll E. Izard, “Innate and Universal Facial
Expressions: Evidence From Developmental and Cross-Cultural Research” Psychological Bulletin 115
(1994), 288-99; and James A. Russell, “Facial Expressions of Emotion: What Lies Beyond Minimal
Universality?” Psychological Bulletin 118 (1995), 379-99. However, no one denies that some
emotions are recognized cross-culturally at a rate of better than chance; the questions motivating these
debates refer to the extent of recognition.
xxvi Buck.
and the Directors: Film, Emotion and the Face in the Age of Evolution,” Times Literary Supplement 7
February 2003, 13-14.
Smith, Engaging Characters; Carl Plantinga, “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on
xxix
Film,” in Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (eds.), Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), 239-255.
Unusual but not unheard of: in the “Hush” episode of Buffy the Vamire Slayer originally aired 14
xxx
James A. Russell and José Miguel Fernández-Dols, “What Does a Facial Expression Mean?” in
xxxi
James A. Russell and José Miguel Fernández-Dols (eds.), The Psychology of Facial Expression
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 3-30; James A. Russell, Jo-Anne Bachorowski, and José Miguel
Fernández-Dols, “Facial and Vocal Expressions of Emotion” Annual Review of Psychology 54
(February 2003), 329-349.
Sally Planalp, “Communicating Emotion in Everyday Life: Cues, Channels, and Processes” in Peter
xxxii
A. Andersen and Laura K. Guerrero (eds.), Handbook of Communication and Emotion: Research,
Theory, Applications, and Contexts (San Diego: Academic P, 1998), 29-48.
James A. Carroll and James A. Russell, “Facial Expressions in Hollywood’s Portrayal of Emotion,”
xxxiv
Planalp; Ursula Hess, Arvid Kappas, and Klaus R. Scherer, “Multichannel Communication of
xxxvi
Emotion: Synthetic Signal Production” in Klaus R. Scherer (ed.), Facets of Emotion: Recent Research
(Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1988), 161-182.
xxxvii Planalp.
José Miguel Fernández-Dols and James M. Carroll, “Is the Meaning Perceived in Facial
xxxviii
James A. Russell, “Reading Emotions From and Into Faces: Ressurecting a Dimensional-
xxxix
The emotional response of spectators is a topic addressed in many cognitivist film theories, e.g.,
xli
Carroll; Smith, Engaging Characters; Plantinga and Smith; Greg M. Smith; Tan; and Torben Grodal,
Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film, Genres, Feeling, and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (Cambridge:
xlii
The idea of “emotion memory” comes from Constanin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans.
xliii
Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton: Princeton
xliv
UP, 1988).