Shared or spread? On boredom and other unintended collective emotions in the cinema

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterAcademicpeer-review

    Abstract

    This chapter pursues two goals. First, I want to extend a critique that – despite their indebtedness to it – Gernot Böhme and Tonino Griffero have levelled against Hermann Schmitz’s notion of atmospheres: that atmospheres can be actively produced and that we can even reconstruct a poetics of atmospheres. However, and here I see a potential to add to Böhme and Griffero’s aesthetics myself, atmospheres are not only intentionally created by artists, architects or designers who want to evoke an atmospheric art experience, but also – voluntarily and involuntarily – by audiences who collectively perceive an opera, a theater performance, a concert or a film. Second, I aim to add to the discussion about collective emotions and emotional sharing by introducing the term spread collective emotions. Both shared and spread collective emotions are a subclass of collective emotions more widely conceived. But while shared emotions have garnered attention recently, spread collective emotions have flown below the radar. As an example I will look at the emotion of boredom: the boredom an audience collectively endures while watching an excruciatingly tedious film is not something they share—boredom is a spread collective emotion.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationAtmospheres and Shared Emotions
    EditorsDylan Trigg
    PublisherRoutledge
    Pages135-151
    Number of pages17
    ISBN (Electronic)9781003131298
    ISBN (Print)9780367674199
    Publication statusPublished - Nov-2021

    Keywords

    • emotions
    • film
    • cinema experience
    • shared emotions
    • emotional contagion
    • boredom

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