Strange Feelings: Experimental Film, Cognition, and Emotion

The study of cognition and emotion in film viewing has preoccupied the field of cinema studies for decades, resulting in some of that field’s most important and cutting-edge scholarship. The exception is the sub-field of experimental film studies, which has by and large ignored cognition and emotion despite experimental cinema’s long history of representing and attempting to elicit intense subjective states. This essay takes a tentative, exploratory step in the theorization of cognition and emotion in experimental film, focusing upon non-narrative films in particular. The reason for this emphasis is that the theorization of emotion among scholars of more conventional cinema at least implicitly takes narrative as a necessary condition of affect, as well as a privileged model of human cognition, thereby making non-narrative films effectively invisible to their theorizing and perpetuating the hegemony of narrative film. This essay intervenes in this situation, arguing that non-narrative experimental films can elicit emotion uniquely, in large part because of their epistemic differences from narrative films. The essay draws upon theoretical work on emotion in narrative cinema, though adapting it to the distinct cognitive and affective character of non-narrative experimental films. It also draws upon research in psychology, particularly in Need for Cognitive Closure, a personality trait that experimental films challenge, and the distinction between emotions and moods. The essay attempts to demonstrate, provisionally, that non-narrative experimental films are more “epistemically diffuse,” deliberately withholding clearly defined objects of emotion, and hence are better understood as eliciting moods, which are more diffuse, objectless affective states than emotions.