Film Scenes Research Articles

Dial P for psychiatry: two short essays about Alfred Hitchcock

Dial P for psychiatry: two short essays about Alfred Hitchcock

A psychology of the film

The cinema as a cultural institution has been studied by academic researchers in the arts and humanities. At present, cultural media studies are the home to the aesthetics and critical analysis of film, film history and other branches of film scholarship. Probably less known to most is that research psychologists working in social and life science labs have also contributed to the study of the medium. They have examined the particular experience that motion pictures provide to the film audience and the mechanisms that explain the perception and comprehension of film, and how movies move viewers and to what effects. This article reviews achievements in psychological research of the film since its earliest beginnings in the 1910s. A leading issue in the research has been whether understanding films is a bottom-up process, or a top-down one. A bottom-up explanation likens film-viewing to highly automated detection of stimulus features physically given in the supply of images; a top-down one to the construction of scenes from very incomplete information using mental schemata. Early film psychologists tried to pinpoint critical features of simple visual stimuli responsible for the perception of smooth movement. The riddle of apparent motion has not yet been solved up to now. Gestalt psychologists were the first to point at the role of mental structures in seeing smooth movement, using simple visual forms and displays. Bottom-up and top-down approaches to the comprehension of film fought for priority from the 60s onwards and became integrated at the end of the century. Gibson’s concept of direct perception led to the identification of low-level film-stylistic cues that are used in mainstream film production, and support film viewers in highly automated seamless perception of film scenes. Hochberg’s argument for the indispensability of mental schemata, too, accounted for the smooth cognitive construction of portrayed action and scenes. Since the 90s, cognitive analyses of narration in film by film scholars from the humanities have revolutionised accounts of the comprehension of movies. They informed computational content analyses that link low-level film features with meaningful units of film-story-telling. After a century of research, some perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that support our interaction with events in the real world have been uncovered. Today, the film experience at large has reappeared on the agenda. An integration of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms is sought in explaining the remarkable intensity of the film experience. Advances are now being made in grasping what it is like to enjoy movies, by describing the absorbing and moving qualities of the experience. As an example, a current account of film viewers' emotional experience is presented. Further advances in our understanding of the film experience and its underlying mechanisms can be expected if film psychologists team up with cognitive film studies, computer vision and the neurosciences. This collaboration is also expected to allow for research into mainstream and other genres as forms of art.

Mirage and Reality Interplay in Tom Tykwer’s A Hologram for a King

This article discusses 2016 film A Hologram for a King, directed by Tom Tykwer in the context of the interplay between mirage and reality. Set in Saudi Arabia, this film revolves around the story of an American consultant, Alan Clay, who attempts to sell a hollographic teleconferencing system to the king. The film is imbued with captivating and symbolic visuals that point to the interplay between mirage and reality. This article will focus on how the cinematography and mise-en-scene of the film help supporting the interplay between mirage and reality, and to show what the film comments on the interplay in regard to our contemporary world. The method used is a film scene analysis by focusing on the important scenes in the film. The findings show that the director cleverly utilizes cinematic techniques to emphasize the main theme of the film and to offer his own viewpoint on the interplay between mirage and reality.

The impact of music and stretched time on pupillary responses and eye movements in slow-motion film scenes.

This study investigated the effects of music and playback speed on arousal and visual perception in slow-motion scenes taken from commercial films. Slow-motion scenes are a ubiquitous film technique and highly popular. Yet the psychological effects of mediated time-stretching compared to real-time motion have not been empirically investigated. We hypothesised that music affects arousal and attentional processes. Furthermore, we as-sumed that playback speed influences viewers’ visual perception, resulting in a higher number of eye movements and larger gaze dispersion. Thirty-nine participants watched three film excerpts in a repeated-measures design in conditions with or without music and in slow motion vs. adapted real-time motion (both visual-only). Results show that music in slow-motion film scenes leads to higher arousal compared to no music as indicated by larger pupil diameters in the former. There was no systematic effect of music on visual perception in terms of eye movements. Playback speed influenced visual perception in eye movement parameters such that slow motion resulted in more and shorter fixations as well as more saccades compared to adapted real-time motion. Furthermore, in slow motion there was a higher gaze dispersion and a smaller centre bias, indicating that individuals attended to more detail in slow motion scenes.

The Art of Attention in Documentary Film and Werner Herzog

In this article I examine the role of attention as a defining aspect of photography and documentary film. When we pay attention to how the world looks it might sometimes surprise us. It might perhaps show us that we are too set in our ways of seeing and that the world can reveal things unknown, or as Stanley Cavell remarks: “how little we know about what our relation to reality is, our complicity in it”. This is, I claim, the task in which the documentary image can guide us. In order to arrive at this conclusion I will start by examining how the documentary image adheres to knowledge, without falling back on a generic epistemological or representational framework. I start by discussing the final scene in Werner Herzog's film Echoes from a Somber Empire (Echos aus einem düsteren Reich, Werner Herzog, 1990) as an example of the aspect of documentary film, that aids us in refraining from projecting our preconceptions on the uncanny. I continue by discussing Nietzsche's understanding of knowledge as a process of domestication and contrasting it with Merleau-Ponty's and Bernhard Waldenfels's phenomenological account of perception, in which the role of attention becomes paramount. This is an attempt to show how the question – what makes the documentary image unique – is entangled in epistemological questions concerning the relationship between vision, image, self and object. A closer investigation of the ambiguities inherent in the concept of “documentary” reveals something important concerning how the unknown becomes known.

Watching More Closely: Shot Scale Affects Film Viewers’ Theory of Mind Tendency But Not Ability

Recent research debates the effects of exposure to narrative fiction on recognition of mental states in others and self, referred to as Theory of Mind. The current study explores the mechanisms by which such effects could occur in fictional film. Using manipulated film scenes, we conducted a between subject experiment (N = 136) exploring how film shot-scale affects viewers’ Theory of Mind. Specifically, in our methods we distinguish between the trait Theory of Mind abilities (ToM ability), and the state-like tendency to recognize mental states in others and self (ToM tendency). Results showed that close-up shots (compared to long shots) of a character was associated with higher levels of Theory of Mind tendency, when the facial expression was sad but not when it was neutral. And this effect did not transfer to other characters in the film. There was also no observable effect of character depiction on viewers’ general Theory of Mind ability. Together the findings suggest that formal and content features of shot scale can elicit Theory of Mind responses by directing attention toward character mental states rather than improving viewers’ general Theory of Mind ability.

Caught Between a Thot and a Hard Place

As a Black woman with a voracious appetite for media and who has worked behind the scenes in film and television for over 25 years, I have consumed a plethora of moving image content, much of it re...

The Staunch Book Prize: Feminist Initiative or Not?

Features “Death is its own invention with its own effect and its own observances. You regard the failing body. The body is the vessel.” – “Closer to Where You Will Find Him,” by Michael Mattes Read Mattes’s story and more in the Illness & Literature feature starting on page 46. PHOTO: FEDERICO PICCIRILLO WORLDLIT.ORG 9 PHOTO: EVELYN/PEXELS O n November 25, 2018, a new book prize for crime novels where “no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered ” will be awarded for the first time. The Staunch Prize has been initiated and financed by author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless as a reaction to the rising body count in film and television. As a crime novelist and president of the largest European female crime writer association, Mörderische Schwestern e.V, this new prize grabbed my attention. And not just mine. Rarely have I witnessed such a controversial reception of a new and—with a monetary award of £ 2,000—relatively small prize. It took me by surprise, as my first reaction was entirely positive, if not to say enthusiastic. This is an award for novels that don’t contain the kind of brutal and voyeuristic violence against women which make me stop reading a book. I don’t want to read every gory detail of how a woman gets raped, tortured, slaughtered, disembodied. I don’t want to get these atrocious pictures into my head, and I am not alone in my distaste. About twenty-five years back, when it first became in vogue to take the crime novel reader into the depths of sadistic slaughter scenes, I simply brushed over the brutal scenes and carried on with the story; often I The Staunch Book Prize Feminist Initiative or Not? by Janet Clark CRIME & MYSTERY 10 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 liked the characters and the side plots that carried the characters from one book to the other. In the meantime, I try to avoid those books. Still, often enough, drastic sexual abuse and sadistic violence finds its way even into books where you don’t expect it, even worse since it turned into an inflationary-applied thrill-enhancing spice for TV and film scenes. With this in mind, I thought a prize encouraging writers to break with the spiral of obsessive violence against women would be a great initiative. Then I read and heard the critical voices, such as best-selling novelist Val McDermid and film critic Sonja Hartl, and plunged into heated discussions about the usefulness of the Staunch Prize to raise awareness toward violence against women. Val McDermid, who insists on the importance of writing about violence against women to ensure that these acts of violence do not go unnoticed, claims that “to impose a blanket ban on any writing that deals with this seems to me to be self-defeating.”1 I totally agree that writing about violence against women has been and still is important to highlight the unacceptable fact that such violence is a societal problem of pandemic proportions, with one out of three women having experienced physical or sexual violence, according to UN Women. Actually, neither of my adult crime novels would qualify for the prize, as each of them contain few but necessary scenes of violence against women—necessary, as it would arguably be difficult to write about domestic violence without depicting any violent scenes, and it would be unrealistic to write about a strong, female protagonist chasing down the murderer of her husband or, in another story, the abductor of her child, without her getting into some trouble when fighting the perpetrator. Still, I do not see this prize as a “blanket ban.” It’s one prize out of many, and most of the literary prizes carry some kind of limitation: age of the author, debut, region of the book setting, and many more. In my view, the prize is one way of drawing attention toward an undeniable trend of using horrific and perverse brutality as cheap plot devices. And it works: people talk about it. Let’s look at some facts surrounding violence toward women: 1. Most murder victims in real life are men. Most murder victims in...

The Staunch Book Prize: Feminist Initiative or Not?

Features “Death is its own invention with its own effect and its own observances. You regard the failing body. The body is the vessel.” – “Closer to Where You Will Find Him,” by Michael Mattes Read Mattes’s story and more in the Illness & Literature feature starting on page 46. PHOTO: FEDERICO PICCIRILLO WORLDLIT.ORG 9 PHOTO: EVELYN/PEXELS O n November 25, 2018, a new book prize for crime novels where “no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered ” will be awarded for the first time. The Staunch Prize has been initiated and financed by author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless as a reaction to the rising body count in film and television. As a crime novelist and president of the largest European female crime writer association, Mörderische Schwestern e.V, this new prize grabbed my attention. And not just mine. Rarely have I witnessed such a controversial reception of a new and—with a monetary award of £ 2,000—relatively small prize. It took me by surprise, as my first reaction was entirely positive, if not to say enthusiastic. This is an award for novels that don’t contain the kind of brutal and voyeuristic violence against women which make me stop reading a book. I don’t want to read every gory detail of how a woman gets raped, tortured, slaughtered, disembodied. I don’t want to get these atrocious pictures into my head, and I am not alone in my distaste. About twenty-five years back, when it first became in vogue to take the crime novel reader into the depths of sadistic slaughter scenes, I simply brushed over the brutal scenes and carried on with the story; often I The Staunch Book Prize Feminist Initiative or Not? by Janet Clark CRIME & MYSTERY 10 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 liked the characters and the side plots that carried the characters from one book to the other. In the meantime, I try to avoid those books. Still, often enough, drastic sexual abuse and sadistic violence finds its way even into books where you don’t expect it, even worse since it turned into an inflationary-applied thrill-enhancing spice for TV and film scenes. With this in mind, I thought a prize encouraging writers to break with the spiral of obsessive violence against women would be a great initiative. Then I read and heard the critical voices, such as best-selling novelist Val McDermid and film critic Sonja Hartl, and plunged into heated discussions about the usefulness of the Staunch Prize to raise awareness toward violence against women. Val McDermid, who insists on the importance of writing about violence against women to ensure that these acts of violence do not go unnoticed, claims that “to impose a blanket ban on any writing that deals with this seems to me to be self-defeating.”1 I totally agree that writing about violence against women has been and still is important to highlight the unacceptable fact that such violence is a societal problem of pandemic proportions, with one out of three women having experienced physical or sexual violence, according to UN Women. Actually, neither of my adult crime novels would qualify for the prize, as each of them contain few but necessary scenes of violence against women—necessary, as it would arguably be difficult to write about domestic violence without depicting any violent scenes, and it would be unrealistic to write about a strong, female protagonist chasing down the murderer of her husband or, in another story, the abductor of her child, without her getting into some trouble when fighting the perpetrator. Still, I do not see this prize as a “blanket ban.” It’s one prize out of many, and most of the literary prizes carry some kind of limitation: age of the author, debut, region of the book setting, and many more. In my view, the prize is one way of drawing attention toward an undeniable trend of using horrific and perverse brutality as cheap plot devices. And it works: people talk about it. Let’s look at some facts surrounding violence toward women: 1. Most murder victims in real life are men. Most murder victims in...

Cardiology and Films: An Important Teaching Tool

Conclusion The use of films or film scenes is an important tool to discuss heart conditions, not only regarding the disease’s technical aspects, but also the social, ethical and existential aspects involved in the diagnosis of a severe heart disease. To quote Arthur Kleinman, the laureate films “Manchester by the Sea” and “I, Daniel Blake” are examples that can help us practice medicine in a more sensitive and reflexive, alert and morally responsible way in face of the emotional and [...]

“Running down the Oars”: Gilbert Highet’s Reading of Vergil, Aen. 10.290

The phrase per remos alii (Aen. 10.290) has baffled Vergil scholars for centuries, in which regard they have all just guessed at its meaning without citing any evidence to justify their views. During the 1960s, Gilbert Highet proposed a solution to the problem after seeing a scene in a Hollywood film in which a famous actor “ran down the oars” (i. e., ran over or along or across the oars)-a solution Highet would mention in his Vergil classes but never researched for publication. This article attempts to justify Highet’s suggestion by considering, beyond the cinematic and related contemporary evidence, a variety of classical, medieval, and archaeological sources of information.

David Bowie On-Screen

David Bowie On-Screen Toija Cinque (bio), Angela Ndalianis (bio), and Sean Redmond (bio) Not Here David Bowie has always been a significant figure of the screen. Through appearing in experimental music videos, tense television interviews, controversial live performances, biographical documentaries, and auteur and genre films, he was a seminal, shimmering part of screen culture for more than forty years. His first television appearance was on the BBC’s Tonight program, in 1964, where he was interviewed about his newly founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men. At this stage, when he was still called David Jones, we are introduced to not only his hunger for publicity but also his closeness to difference, of not quite fitting in. David Bowie is, of course, not a single or singular star image: he has appeared as David Bowie and in and through various high-voltage, liminal, gender-bending personae, including Aladdin Sane (1971); he has appeared in self-reflexive cameo roles in such films as Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001); and he has taken on various serious acting roles, including the outcast poet-musician Baal in Baal (Alan Clarke, BBC, 1982), the vampire John Blaylock in The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), the murderous Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), and the enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006). Across the body of David Bowie’s screen work, one finds a great diversity in the type of roles he has taken on and the performances he has given, even if they are, nonetheless, all loosely bound by a profound alterity—a signification of difference. David Bowie is a significant screen figure even when he is not on camera, with numerous performers, artists, and film and television texts drawing on his imagery and titular iconography to shape their texts. This is most famously the case in Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998), ostensibly a Bowie biopic that Bowie famously disapproved of, [End Page 126] refusing to grant Haynes the rights to his music.1 While Bowie is not in Velvet Goldmine, he is nonetheless presented there as Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), with events and relationships culled from Bowie’s own biography. Bowie’s songs are often used to score a film scene or as the backing soundtrack, to historicize and affectively shape the mood and feeling of the world being brought into view. Bowie’s music, his voice, his fantastic embodiment enchant the screen worlds his soundscapes are used for. In Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn, 2014), for example, “Moonage Daydream” plays as the rebel crew of the spaceship Milano enters the spectacular galactic corpse-planet Knowhere. David Bowie’s voice and the psychedelic imagery found in the song lyrics bring his alien messiah identity into the spectacular vistas on display.2 Since his death in January 2016, David Bowie has appeared on the screen in a different and particularly moving way as a type of fan wish fulfillment and cultural haunting. For example, in the Doctor Who episode “Smile” (BBC, 2017), the Doctor faces an army of robots who are programmed to incinerate people if they detect that they are not happy. Retreating while smiling, the Doctor calls out, “I’m happy, hope you’re happy too,” linking the scene to the lyrics of the song Ashes to Ashes (1980). Peter Capaldi’s Doctor was also initially modeled on the Bowie star image, the Thin White Duke, and so Bowie is constantly rematerialized in the body of this alien time traveler who has the ability to resurrect or rejuvenate.3 Even in his death, then, Bowie lives on in screen culture. And in living on so strongly, if in part as apparition, he perhaps points to the material thinness of how our cultural world is held together: Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be, that we would do...

Leitura crítica de texto multimodal em língua inglesa: uma proposta didática

Inserido na área da Linguística Aplicada, no campo de ensino e aprendizagem de língua estrangeira, com foco em multiletramentos, este trabalho tem como objetivo principal apresentar uma proposta didática de leitura em língua inglesa a partir de conceitos de multimodalidade e letramento crítico. Essa proposta parte de uma cena de filme, considerado como texto multimodal, para desenvolver trabalho que proporcione reflexão sobre questões de preconceito, retratado em sociedade diferente da dos alunos. Com isso, buscamos propor uma atividade de ensino de língua inglesa que contemple as linguagens utilizadas em textos multimodais, assim como reflexão crítica sobre um tema que entendemos necessário de ser debatido em sala de aula.

Educational Potential of Animated Films in Poland

The paper describes events which are focused on Polish animation, with special regards to their educational values. The thesis refers to the importance of the Polish Film Institute, higher education, film workshops and film festivals for Polish animations. The most important part of the paper describes animation film festivals. Film festivals are portrayed as the most extensive educational platform, because of which the whole paper centres on an understanding of the issue through festival studies. The author evokes theories of the field configuring events by Bernard Leca, Charles-Clemens Rüling and Dominique Puthod. In the paper the Polish animation film scene is described as heterogeneous, however, filmmakers who make animations are evolving a coherent vision of it. Helpful in this process is the Polish Animation Producers Association. In the final part of the paper the author focuses on O!PLA. The Festival of Polish Animation. This event can be interpreted as a something more than a field-configuring event, and described as a communicator of the convergence of expertise (term of Grzegorz D. Stunża and associates).

Sztuka nawijki, czyli jak uczyć cudzoziemców polskiego slangu młodzieżowego

Język polski, do którego chce mieć dostęp cudzoziemiec, to nie tylko oficjalne komunikaty, poważne artykuły naukowe, książki czy gazety. To także ta część polszczyzny, zazwyczaj mówionej, którą posługują się młodzi ludzie w barach, na imprezach i niemal w każdej prywatnej rozmowie. Zdaje się, że słownictwo to, choć jest doskonałym przykładem i kolejnym medium kultury popularnej, bywa często pomijane na lektoracie języka polskiego jako obcego (JPJO), szczególnie w kręgach akademickich. Artykuł koncentruje się wokół problemu nauczania slangu młodzieżowego cudzoziemców. Autorka omawia tę odmianę języka, wskazuje jej cechy, a także wymienia wady i zalety nauczania slangu. Dzieli się swoim doświadczeniem w tym zakresie. Przedstawia również przykłady ćwiczeń. Wskazuje źródła, z których można czerpać leksemy na zajęcia, a także wymienia zagadnienia, które należy rozważyć, pisząc własne ćwiczenia. Autorka uważa, że wyrażenia slangowe są bardzo ważne w zrozumieniu, czy wręcz „wyczuciu” codziennej kultury polskiej. Sądzi, że „odwaga” lektorki/lektora w prezentowaniu słownictwa nietypowego dla większości zajęć językowych wpływa także na odwagę studentów w posługiwaniu się polszczyzną. Uważa, że nie ma nic bardziej zniechęcającego do nauki niż sytuacja, w której uczący się, operujący już nieźle polszczyzną, nie może zrozumieć sceny z filmu, czy wątku w prywatnej rozmowie, ponieważ nikt nie nauczył go specjalnego kodu językowego – slangu młodzieżowego, z którym właśnie miał okazję się zmierzyć.

"It looks kind of cool when cool people smoke, but…" Norwegian adolescents' decoding of smoking scenes in films.

Aims:Exposure to smoking scenes in films is seen as contributing to smoking initiation among young people. This has triggered calls to include depictions of smoking as a criterion in film ratings. All the same time, little is known about how adolescents interpret different smoking scenes. This study analyses how young people decode smoking scenes by contextualising identification with, and evaluation of, various characters who smoke, as well as the significance of film genres.Design:In order to explore how adolescents conceptualize smoking scenes in different film genres, we conducted eight focus-group interviews with adolescents aged 13–17 years (n = 54), using purposive sampling. The discussions were semi-structured with a standard guide, and we used clips from eight films containing various positive and negative moods and character types as stimuli for the discussions. To analyse interpretations qualitatively, thematic coding was applied.Results:The adolescents acknowledged that smoking is a narrative ingredient designed to illustrate and amplify character traits and situational moods. Characters who smoked were usually interpreted in terms of smoking stereotypes: stress relief, romantic seduction, social interaction between equals, habitual smoking, and as a symbol of “bad guys”. The adolescents identified more strongly with elegant, positive, and self-assured smoking characters than with negative, anxious, or ambiguous characters.Conclusions:Adolescents interpret smoking scenes in accordance with encoded meanings: they tend to get the messages inscribed by the filmmakers. As positive and glamorous representations are more likely to stimulate smoking experimentation and initiation among adolescents than negative representations, future research should distinguish more clearly between exposure to positive and to negative representations.

Comparison of the Temporal Structure of Music and Scenes in Film - focused on Philip Glass's background music ‘I'm going to make a cake’

본 연구는 영화 ‘디 아워스’에서 글래스의 악곡 ‘나는 케이크를 만들려고 해’가 배경음악으로 쓰인 한 장면에 나타난 음악과 장면의 시간적 구조를 비교하였다. 본 악곡의 형식은 리듬 및 화성진행에 의하여 구성되었다. 글래스의 작곡기법 중 부가되고 감소하는 패턴이 본 악곡의 일부분에 사용되었으며, 이는 영화장면에 나타난 비박절적인 편집에 상응하기 위함이다. 본 악곡의 형식에 나타난 거시적인 전환점은 장면의 등장인물 전환 및 시제적 변화를 구별하지 않고 연결되게 보여주고 있다. 이는 장면에 나타나는 등장인물 및 시제의 전환을 유사한 이야기적 상황으로 연결시킨다. 반면에 본 악곡에서 반음계적 화음이 최초로 사용된 시점은 장면의 등장인물 전환 및 시제의 변화시점과 일치되면서, 음악에 의한 장면 간의 연결과 구별이 동시에 충족되고 있다. 그리고 악곡의 각 부분에 나타나는 화성진행의 단순성 또는 다양성은 영화장면에 나타난 장소 변화의 단순성 또는 다양성과 관계된 시간적 전개와 서로 관계를 맺는다. 이와 같이 본 연구에서 다룬 영화의 배경음악과 장면은 시간적 구조의 측면에서 서로 상호보완적 관계를 보여주었다.This paper compared the temporal structure of music and scenes in a scene of Philip Glass s ‘I m going to make a cake’ presented in the feature film The hours as a background music. The form of the music was composed by rhythm and harmonic progression. Additive and reductive patterns have been partially used in the composition of Philip Glass s composition technique in order to correspond to the non-metric editing of the movie scene. The macroscopic turning point in the form of the music shows the transition of the characters of scenes and the temporal change more than the distinction. This links the characters and tense transitions in the scene into similar narrative situations. On the other hand, the first use time of the chromatic chord in the music satisfies the connection and the distinction between the scenes by the music, while being consistent with the transition of the characters of the scenes and the temporal change of the scenes. And the simplicity or diversity of chord progression in each part of the music ties with the temporal development related to the simplicity or diversity of the place changes in the film scene. In this way, background music and scenes of the film covered in this paper showed complementary relationship in terms of temporal structure.

Exploring the patient experience of chronic illness through literature and film

Objective: Caring for patients with a chronic illness requires a holistic approach. To help RN-BSN nursing students in a course focusing on chronic illness see the patient as a unique individual and to foster empathy by emphasizing the person behind each patient, literature and film were used to make the patient’s lived experience of chronic illness real.Methods: Students read autobiographies or biographies and viewed film about the patient experience of chronic illness. Materials were selected based on the illness and patient issues described. Using the Socratic Seminar, students prepared questions based on weekly reading assignments; faculty prepared questions for each film, encouraging active participation and group discussion of underlying insights. Many discussions revolved around select film scenes or quotations students selected from the text and the comparison to their practice experience with similar patients in the clinical setting.Results: Satisfaction with the course was overwhelming, with all students rating every evaluative category as a “5”, strongly agreeing that the course advanced their empathy towards patients with chronic illness. Comments detailed students’ having a better understanding of how chronic illness truly affects the patient and family. The books resonated with the class more than the films, as the books had more detail and put the reader into the setting as if they were the person.Conclusions: The use of literature and film is an effective means to enhance RN-BSN nursing students’ ability to understand and empathize with a patient’s needs and was successful in helping students understand the patient experience.

New Ecuadorian cinema: Small, glocal and plurinational

Abstract This article conceptualizes New Ecuadorian cinema as small, glocal and plurinational. It makes the case that it is a propitious time to study this emergent cinema. However, while it is a heterogeneous film scene, this article argues that it is still traversed by long-standing ethno-racial, class and regional inequalities. After inserting Ecuador’s largely unknown film history into regional trends, different spheres of production are analysed, including mestizo fictionalized narratives, activist documentaries, indigenous and community filmmaking and coastal ‘guerilla’ filmmaking. The article looks at both the accomplishments of the sector and current challenges. It proposes that more state and private funds invest in fostering plurinational and regional initiatives, and cultivating diverse makers and audiences.

Dispositional and Situational Emotion Regulation in Younger and Older Adults

Abstract. Younger and older adults (N = 207) viewed a film scene eliciting strong negative emotions and then indicated how they had regulated their emotions. Dispositional emotion regulation was measured prior to stimulus presentation. Older adults showed higher levels of dispositional suppression than younger adults. Furthermore, individual differences in dispositional expressive suppression were predictive of reappraisal and suppression in the given situation. However, dispositional suppression was more strongly related to situational suppression among older adults than among younger adults. Future directions concerning the importance of and possible implications for age differences in coping with stressful situations are discussed.