Abstract
Suckfüll regards movie reception as an interplay between modes of reception that serve to involve or distance the audience. In this contribution, Suckfüll focuses on the withholding of relevant information, a movie feature that triggers distancing reactions in the audience. For 52 viewers of a full-length movie, heart rate deceleration and corrugator activity were measured during reception, and narrative engagement was measured after reception. The exploratory results indicate that the withholding of information enhances attention when the viewer is provided with hints for resolving uncertainties. On the other hand, omissions, which deny cues for the viewer’s interpretation, as well as the withholding of spatial information by abstaining from establishing shots, are discrepant with the audience’s expectations. However, deviations from the Hollywood Style do not hinder narrative understanding and emotional engagement.
The study reported in this contribution was supported by seed funding from the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark, due to a collaboration with Katrin Heimann.
I would like to thank Peter Wuss and Thomas Schick from the Filmuniversity Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Germany, who recommended the movie that was used as the stimulus and helped to analyze it. I would also like to thank Isabel Baumgarten and Johannes Fertmann from the Berlin University of the Arts, Germany, who collected the data.
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Notes
- 1.
The more than 4000 facial expressions of the viewers were coded using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) by Ekman and Friesen (1978).
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- 3.
Linguistically, cohesive links are those between a name and pronouns referring to the same person: Leonard—he—he—the man—he, and so on. In film, Tseng (2013) uses it, for example, when a person is shown, and subsequently, we see that person again in various shots: someone’s hand—the person’s face—the person’s back—the person in a full shot, and so on. The formal elements are not limited to people, but could be places, color patterns, musical motifs, and so on. They may also be visual or audio (J. Bateman, personal communication, July 3, 2017).
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Suckfüll, M. (2020). The Effects of Withholding Information in Movies: Explorations into Cinema Beyond Hollywood. In: Krämer, B., Frey, F. (eds) How We Use the Media . Transforming Communications – Studies in Cross-Media Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41313-2_4
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