Excitable Tales. Perspectivation, Gender, Empathy in Film

"Excitable Tales" analyzes the gender dimension of narrative perspectivation in cinema and shows how perspectivation evokes the viewers` empathy. The project claims that narrative perspectivation, a basic organizing principle of film narrative, must be described as an array of filmic devices that mediate ideological, moral, subjective or omniscient qualities of the point of view, focalization and narrative stance. The project will demonstrate that these devices constitute the media-specific performativity of gender in emphasizing the gendered assumptions about character traits, action evaluations or event causalities. "Excitable Tales" will show how narrative perspectivation orchestrates the viewers` empathization, i.e. their participation in the film narrative and demonstrate the role that gender performativity plays within this process by considering both embodied, quasiautomatic aspects of the cognitive process of empathization as well as its more conscious, imaginative dimensions. "Excitable Tales" asserts that empathizing is necessary for understanding narratives: only by sharing the characters` perspectives can we understand their motives of action, their feelings for other characters, and their interrelation with the whole social world of the story told. This participation in the story is generated by the ways the narrative is perspectivated. Thus, the viewers` feelings for the characters depend on the story`s narrative perspectivation and on the implicit performativity of gender. As a point of entry for studying the workings of narrative perspectivation and its gendered orchestration of empathization, "Excitable Tales" will focus on the filmic construction of "excitement" in what Linda Williams has called the "body genres" (horror film, melodrama and porn). I claim that these genre films not only present protagonists in excited states of mind (horrified, sad, sexually aroused) and aim to excite their viewers, but that "excitement" (angst, mourning, sexual arousal) is indeed the central topic of these films. The theoretical questions in this project will be formulated through examining how the gendering devices of narrative perspectivation work to set excitement in relation to empathy. Apart from devising a new (narratological) analytical approach to the body genres, and apart from filling the crucial gap of considering the gender dimension in both film narratology and empathy research, the proposed project aims to enhance the role of empathy within the pragmatics of fiction film.