Fiction Film and the Varieties of Empathic Engagement

Vaage, Margrethe Bruun

doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.2010.00200.x

Cited by 26 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 30 publications

(28 reference statements)

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“…This he tellingly calls ‘allegiance’ – a moral and emotional engagement with a character. POV shots thereby encourage the viewer to imagine and empathise with the interior experience of the POV character (Vaage, 2010). Through the use of a single POV in reality TV show Cops (1989), viewers are enticed to identify with the police officer and be distanced from the suspect, reinforcing an ‘Us-Them dichotomy’ (Doyle, 2003: 42).…”

Section: Perspective Pov and Truthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body-worn images: Point-of-view and the new aesthetics of policing

McKay

Lee

2019

Crime, Media, Culture

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Police organisations across much of the Western world have eagerly embraced body-worn video camera technology, seen as a way to enhance public trust in police, provide transparency in policing activity, reduce conflict between police and citizens and provide a police perspective of incidents and events. Indeed, the cameras have become an everyday piece of police ‘kit’. Despite the growing ubiquity of the body-worn video camera, understandings of the nature and value of the audiovisual footage produced by police remain inchoate. Given body-worn video camera’s promise of veracity, this article is interested in the aesthetics of the camera images and the socio-cultural construction of the cameras as tellers of truth. We treat body-worn video cameras as image-making devices linked to techniques and technologies of power, which construct and frame police encounters in specific ways, and we suggest that the aesthetics and point-of-view nature of the image contribute greatly to the truth-value that the images acquire. This article begins by providing an historical context for the use of cameras and images in policing. We then introduce our framework of visual criminology and present theories of point-of-view as a construct in the diverse areas of gaming, pornography and the visual arts, as well as in television and cinema. The article deploys the cinematic use of point-of-view to unpack the affective impact and aesthetic of the police body-worn video camera footage. We suggest that viewers of the footage are placed in the position of the corporeally absent police officer whose experience has been recorded by a viewfinderless device. This generates a vacillating interplay between subjectivity and objectivity, given that the alleged faithful recording of the event by the body-worn video camera presents a singular perspective and incomplete document that may not necessarily capture the full context of the law enforcement event.

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Section: Perspective Pov and Truthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body-worn images: Point-of-view and the new aesthetics of policing

McKay

Lee

2019

Crime, Media, Culture

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“…Most scholars (cf. Coplan, 2004;Keen, 2006;Gaut, 2010;Tan, 2011;Vaage, 2010) associate empathy with the attempt to consider the perspective of another person. This then has significant ethical implications, for empathy arguably has the potential to communicate new feelings, and to break down prejudices and stereotypes by creating emotional connections between others (cf.…”

Section: Relational Empathy As a Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documentary subjects speak out: Relational empathy and ethics in intercultural documentary film education

Nåls¹

2018

Film Education Journal

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The teaching of documentary film faces particular ethical and practical challenges in intercultural environments when working with marginalized groups. The author of the paper was one of the acting teachers for an intercultural group of film students making documentaries on sex workers in rural South African communities in 2015. The paper explores the pedagogical and ethical dimension of the encounters between students and the documentary subjects. It argues for the benefits of creating shared meaning – a third culture – through the fostering of relational empathy between student film-makers and their subjects. The focus of the analysis lies in the emotional reactions of the documentary subjects, observed in community screenings in 2016. Conclusions suggest that the concept of relational empathy can help us understand and develop the teaching of documentary in novel ways. It represents a pedagogical choice that is ethical, as it allows for consent that is truly informed.

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“…Murray Smith and Margrethe Bruun Vaage, among others, have argued that cinema has different ways of aligning spectators and characters (Smith 1995; Vaage 2010). Point-of-view structures, close-ups, voice-over, and other cinematic devices can be used to create what Bruun Vaage calls empathic understanding (Vaage 2010). She distinguishes in her work between two different forms of empathy: embodied and imaginative empathy.…”

Section: Portrait Of a Perpetrator: Individual Guiltmentioning

confidence: 99%

Outsiders and bystanders in Erik Skjoldbjærg’s The Pyromaniac (2016)

Gjelsvik

2018

Journal of Aesthetics & Culture

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This article discusses the Norwegian film The Pyromaniac (Erik Skjoldbjaerg 2016) as an artistic attempt to come to terms with terrorism, and as a cinematic treatment of the Norwegian terror attacks of 22nd of July 2011. The film is discussed in relation with several written accounts on 22nd of July and focus is on the role of the individual, the family and the society when it comes to guilt and shame following incomprehensible events.

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Fiction Film and the Varieties of Empathic Engagement

Cited by 26 publications

References 30 publications

Body-worn images: Point-of-view and the new aesthetics of policing

Body-worn images: Point-of-view and the new aesthetics of policing

Documentary subjects speak out: Relational empathy and ethics in intercultural documentary film education

Outsiders and bystanders in Erik Skjoldbjærg’s The Pyromaniac (2016)

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