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107 7 Three Views of Facial Expression and Its Understanding in the Cinema Ed S. Tan THE POPULARITY OF American mainstream movies has been immense over virtually the whole world since the 1920s. As is known, part of the success is best explained by economic push factors, such as affluent production and distribution, and the ubiquity of the English language and American culture. However, there must also be something in this cinema that attracts such large audiences. Imaginary wish-fulfillment has often been mentioned as a crucial asset of Hollywood’s dream factory. However, in order for any film to offer vicariously experienced happiness forever, the people, things, events, and other story existents have to be recognized by the viewer. A damaged car, a tender caress , a bold stance, and an escape plan need to be recognized as such if the viewer is to indulge in the story world and empathize with characters. It is with this very fundamental recognition process and, in particular, recognition of character emotion that this contribution deals, advancing a number of hypotheses that may be starting points for experimental tests. Also, in outlining the contribution of current research in the psychology of facial expression, I will attempt to frame a discussion about the role of nature and nurture in recognizing character emotion from facial behavior. A simple example may illustrate some basic observations about facial expression in the cinema. Figure 7.1 presents three frame enlargements from a sequence of Alfred Hitchcock ’s I Confess (1953). Before reading on, try to name the emotions that you see expressed by the faces. Montgomery Clift is Father Logan, a priest who has heard the confession of the murderer, Mr. Keller. His priestly oath prevents him from conveying his knowledge, and he becomes a suspect himself. By the end of the film, he stands to trial and is released for lack of evidence. Outside the courtroom a crowd, in a lynching mood, awaits him. In figures 7.1a and 7.1b, we see Mrs. Keller, the murderer’s wife, who appears to be appalled. Figure 7.1c shows the murderer, Mr. Keller, shouting in anger at his wife after she has run forward to help Logan. In figure 7.1a, next to Mrs. Keller, and in figure 7.1c, there is a woman eating an apple. This “woman from the people” expresses a kind of “malevolent curiosity,” as François Truffaut (1985, p. 205) has put it. The shots are interspersed with images of the priest being shouted at, threatened, and attacked by the crowd. How does recognizing character emotions, important for understanding the plot and appreciating the film as a whole, come about through perceiving facial expressions such as these?1 I shall consider three alternative explanations. First, an explanation based on the socalled universal theory of facial expression (UTFE), which rests on the assumption that people have an innate capacity for recognizing certain emotions from other persons’ facial expressions. UTFE is the dominant paradigm in the psychology of facial expression and 108 / ED S. TAN appears to be the best candidate in answering the question of how film viewers understand character emotion and has been elucidatingly applied to this end in a recent contribution to film studies by Carl Plantinga (1999). Second is an explanation based on the observer’s learned conventional knowledge of facial signals, which has gained some support in the last five years, the communicative function theory of facial display. Third, I shall consider an explanation based on a culturally shared knowledge of artistic codes for representing emotional expression. The UTFE and Character Understanding The universal theory of facial expression. Due especially to the work of Paul Ekman and his research group (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1975), there has been consensus among researchers of facial expression about the relative universality of facial expression. The theory holds that across all cultures: • There is a set of five to seven so-called basic emotions that are experienced in response to distinct situations. The set includes anger, fear, sadness, surprise, happiness, disgust, and contempt; • These same emotions are expressed in more or less the same fashion by facial actions; and • The expressions are recognized as reflecting the basic emotions. Fig. 7.1. Frame enlargement from I Confess. THREE VIEWS OF FACIAL EXPRESSION / 109 Ekman and his group collected an impressive amount of evidence in favor of the theory (e.g., Ekman, 1989; Keltner & Ekman, 2000), and the work of these researchers has become to be known as...

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