Greg Smith

Georgia State University, School of Film, Media & Theater, Faculty Member

Georgia State University, Communication, Faculty Member

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Books by Greg Smith

What Media Classes Really Want To Discuss: A Student Guide

This textbook acknowledges that most students entering an introductory film/television class alre... more This textbook acknowledges that most students entering an introductory film/television class already have a great deal of knowledge about media (unlike introductory students in an accounting class, for instance).This book addresses the assumptions students bring to class about what “realism” is or how media cause violence, assumptions that we rarely confront directly when we teach about film and television.This textbook gives the introductory student a more precise language for discussing these concepts, which makes better class discussion possible about these vague but broadly held ideas.The book is written in an approachable, personal, non-“textbook-y” tone that makes the big ideas of media studies more accessible to students.

Table of Contents

A Note to the Student about Why This Book Is Different

“It’s Just a Movie:” Why You Should Analyze Film and Television

Discussing How Media Work

What Is Realism, Really?

How Do We Identify with Characters?

Genre Schmenre

Discussing Media and Society

“Studies Show:” How To Understand Media Violence/Effects Research

Role Models and Stereotypes: An Introduction to the “Other”

Discussing Media’s Future Now

What Difference Does a Medium Make?

What Is Interactivity?

Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of Ally McBeal

Beautiful TV is in part a discussion of the aesthetic innovations of a particular TV show (its ha... more Beautiful TV is in part a discussion of the aesthetic innovations of a particular TV show (its handling of music, special effects, etc.) and in part an argument that scholars need to study whole television series from beginning to end. This is particularly true for serial television, and Beautiful TV demonstrates both how we may examine a long-running serial narrative and why it is important to study television from a narrative perspective.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Ally?

Aesthetics

Chapter One: Practical Music, Personal Fantasy: Creating a Community of Song in Ally McBeal

Chapter Two: Getting into Ally's Head: Special Effects, Imagination, and the Voice of Doubt

Narration and Argument

Chapter Three: Redeeming Ally: Seriality and the Character Network

Chapter Four: "Is It Possible to Love Somebody Only Two Days?": Guest Stars and Eccentricity

Chapter Five: Victim of Love: Ally McBeal and the Politics of Protection

Afterword

Film Structure and the Emotion System

We have learned much about emotion in the last decades, thanks to innovations that allow us a muc... more We have learned much about emotion in the last decades, thanks to innovations that allow us a much more precise picture of what goes on inside people when they feel. Film Structure and the Emotion System synthesizes much of this research in neurology and cognitive psychology and then applies it to film. Given this new understanding of emotion in general, what does that tell us about people sitting in movie theaters experiencing emotion? My book presents a "mood-cue" approach to analyzing the emotional appeals of film texts, and it demonstrates the utility of that approach on a variety of movies, from classical Hollywood films (such as Casablanca and Stella Dallas) to foreign films (Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Renoir) to independent films (Stranger than Paradise).

Table of Contents

Developing the Approach

Chapter One: An Invitation to Feel

Chapter Two: The Emotion System and Nonprototypical Emotions

Chapter Three: The Mood-Cue Approach to Filmic Emotion

Chapter Four: Other Cognitivisms

Analyzing Films' Emotional Appeals

Chapter Five: "Couldn't You Read Between Those Pitiful Lines?" Feeling for Stella Dallas

Chapter Six: Strike-ing Out: The Partial Success of Early Eisenstein's Emotional Appeal

Chapter Seven: Lyricism and Unevenness: Emotional Transitions in Renoir's A Day in the Country and The Lower Depths

Chapter Eight: Emotion Work: The Joy Luck Club and the Limits of the Emotion System

Chapter Nine: "I Was Misinformed:" Nostalgia and Uncertainty in Casablanca

Afterword

Chapter Ten: An Invitation to Interpret

Appendix: The Neurological Basis of Psychoanalytic Film Theory: Metz's Emotional Debt to Freud the Biologist

Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion

Carl Plantinga and I asked scholars to apply the insights from cognitive psychology and philosoph... more Carl Plantinga and I asked scholars to apply the insights from cognitive psychology and philosophy to a range of film texts. This anthology serves as a good introduction to cognitive film studies of emotion.

Introduction

Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith

I. Kinds of Films, Kinds of Emotions

Film, Emotion, and Genre

Noel Carroll

Sentiment in Film Viewing

Ed S.H. Tan and Nico H. Frijda

The Sublime in Cinema

Cynthia A. Freeland

The Emotional Basis of Film Comedy

Dirk Eitzen

II. Film Technique, Film Narrative, and Emotion

Local Emotions, Global Moods, and Film Structure

Greg M. Smith

Emotions, Cognitions, and Narrative Patterns in Film

Torben Grodal

Movie Music As Moving Music: Emotion, Cognition, and the Film Score

Jeff Smith

Time and Timing

Susan L. Feagin

III. Desire, Identification, and Empathy

Narrative Desire

Gregory Currie

Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film

Berys Gaut

Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances

Murray Smith

The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film

Carl Plantinga

On a Silver Platter: CD-ROMs and the Promises of a New Technology

1. Introduction: A Few Words about Interactivity (PDF version) Greg M. Smith 2. Before ... more 1. Introduction: A Few Words about Interactivity (PDF version)

Greg M. Smith

2. Before the Holodeck: Translating Star Trek into Digital Media

Janet Murray and Henry Jenkins

3. "To Waste More Time, Please Click Here Again:" Monty Python and the Quest for the CD/Film Adaptation (PDF version)

Greg M. Smith

4. "Evil Will Walk Once More:" Phantasmagoria – The Stalker Film As Interactive Movie?

Angela Ndalianis

5. Busy Box Interface: The Pleasures of Winding

Brian Kelly with Scott Bukatman

6. Civilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and Space

Ted Friedman

7. Museum (Dis)Play: Imagining the Museum on CD-ROM

Alison Trope

8. Virtual Kinship in a Postmodern World: Computer Mediated Genealogy Communities

Pamela Wilson

9. Fantasies of Mastery or Masteries of Fantasy? Playing with CD-ROMs in the 5th Dimension

Vanessa Gack

10. Showing and Telling: Developing CD-ROMs for the Classroom and Research

Leslie Jarmon

11. Doing Theory in Hypermedia Practice: A Case Study of the HyperHistory Video Project

Lisa Cartwright

Papers by Greg Smith

How Much Serial Is in Your Serial?

From _Serielle Formen: Von den frühen Film-Serials zu aktuellen Quality-TV- und Onlineserien_ (_Serial Forms: From Early Film Serials to Current Quality TV and Online Series_), edited by Robert Blanchet, Kristina Köhler, Tereza Smid, and Julia Zutavern (Schuren Press, 2011)

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