Stimmung: exploring the aesthetics of mood

Film Mood and Its Quantitative Determinants in Different Types of Scenes

“…Though dimensional affect models are most commonly used to characterize human affects, their applicability to the assessment of the affective content of artworks has been shown with music [21]. However, since this concept of an "art mood" has only recently gained popularity in film studies [10], [11], there is not much precedent in the use of dimensional affect models in the assessment of film mood. One exception is our earlier study [22], which used the UWIST Mood Adjective Checklist [26].…”

“…Combined with information about a given viewer's personal preferences, such a description of a film's objective affective content could also be used to estimate the film's subjective effect on the viewer [8]. To avoid confusion, affective content defined as the film's affective character, atmosphere, or tone can simply be called the film's mood [10], [11].…”

Clarice Beckett and Mood

“…Robert Sinnerbrink, for example, describes mood in film as the evocation of a cinematic world . By this term, he means to designate “an encompassing fictional setting in which the film's dramatic performances and narrative elements take on a particular style and meaning” (Sinnerbrink , 148–9) . One use of mood in film, which Sinnerbrink calls the disclosive mood , seems especially applicable to painting.…”

“… Sinnerbrink adds, “It is not simply a subjective experience or a private state of mind; it describes, rather, how a (fictional) world is expressed or disclosed via a shared affective attunement orienting the spectator within that world” (Sinnerbrink , 148). Later, Sinnerbrink also writes that mood is “an expressive way of revealing time and meaning” (156). …”

Guest Editor's Introduction

“…And, as I also remarked above, cognitivism provides rich explanatory theories of relevant aspects of cinematic experience, but these stand to benefi t from supplementation by phenomenological descriptive accounts in order to track more accurately the phenomena that they are attempting to explain. Early cognitivist fi lm theory lacked an adequate phenomenology, for example, of the overlapping relations between affect, emotion, and mood, and hence tended to focus on cognitively discrete emotions at the expense of affect and mood, offering theories that risked being overly mentalistic or rationalistic (a defi ciency that has recently been corrected) (see Plantinga 2012;and Sinnerbrink 2012). Phenomenologically oriented "affect" theories, on the other hand, attempted to avoid the charge of subjectivism via strategies of projecting and distributing affect across bodies and milieu, but such approaches risk becoming overly speculative by confl ating heuristic, descriptive, hermeneutic, and explanatory modes of fi lm theorization concerning related aesthetic and ethical aspects of cinematic experience.…”