Audiences often speak of the "atmosphere," "tone," or "mood" of films, and scholars have suggested that a film's mood is related to its aesthetic presentation. In this exploratory study, we investigated how aesthetic features of film relate to one another and contribute to film mood. Participants assessed 14 film clips according to their perceived mood as well as 27 aesthetic features: 13 so-called low-level features related to specific stylistic devices of film and 14 high-level abstract features general to all art forms. We found impressions of beauty and pleasantness to be similarly related to several stylistic devices, whereas interest was mostly related to temporal aspects of style, such as rhythm. Of the 2 categories of aesthetic features, low-level features were the better predictors of mood ratings; valence ratings were strongly predicted by brightness alone, whereas the prediction of arousal ratings involved a more complex set of features. The results indicate that low-level features can be used to predict the mood of film scenes with moderate success even in the absence of any other information about the scene, such as genre, plot, or theme.
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