Color and Empathy

Christine N. Brinckmannis professor emerita of the Department of Cinema Studies at the University of Zürich. She has published widely on the poetics of film, on documentary and experimental work, on narrative, and on viewer response.

• Preface (1) Color in Film and Film Posters (2) Structural Film, Structuring Color: Jenny Okun's STILL LIFE (3) Cinematic Color, as Likeness and as Artifact (4) Chords of Color (5) The Tension of Colors in Hand-colored Silents (6) DESERT FURY: A Film Noir in Color (7) The Work of the Camera: BEAU TRAVAIL (8) Empathy with the Animal (9) Motor Mimicry in Hitchcock (10) Abstraction and Empathy in the Early German Avant-garde (11) The Role of Empathy in Documentary Film: A Case Study (12) Genre Conflicts in Tracey Emin's TOP SPOT (13) Viewer Empathy and Mosaic Structure in Frederick Wiseman's PRIMATE (14) CASTA DIVA: An Empathetic Reading, Acknowledgments.

An extraordinary collection of essays addressing core issues of how we experience moving pictures. Brinckmann brilliantly discusses what watching films is all about: our cognitive, emotional and sensual engagement with the images on the screen - Prof. dr. Frank Kessler, Utrecht University, I highly recommend this text for undergraduate and graduate courses, and because the translation from German to English is excellent, the writing style is jargon-free and clear.- Angela Dalle Vacche in Millennium Film Journal No. 62 , The strength of this collection lies in the diversity and range of Brinckmann's six case studies on color, from silent film to the avant-garde, melodrama, and musicals [...] Brinckmann is especially alert to color's sensual and perceptual effects in unexpected cinematic places. - Kirsten Moana Thompson in Film Quarterly