Lunch Lectures Mennel - Pleasure and fear at the movies

According to the myth of the origin of cinema, when the Lumiѐre brothers showed their first film Arrival of a Train in Paris in 1896, audience members covered in fear of the oncoming train. How does film shock and thrill its audiences? How does it keep its spectators in suspense whether bad things will happen? Does the knowledge of cinema’s fictitious nature allow onlookers to find pleasure in fear? The talk takes the seeming paradox of pleasurable fear as its point of departure to discuss silent cinema’s aesthetics of shock and narrative cinema’s centrality of suspense.