What does "emotional manipulation" mean in a medium that is fundamentally manipulative?

I think people are OK with manipulation unless it's too obvious, or affects them negatively. In which case, intellectual/rational defenses come in and prevent this from happening. Now obviously, this doesn't apply to everybody, but I find this happening a lot, myself included.

Particularly, this is the case when the traditional "weepy soundtrack" comes into play, trying to cloy out unearned emotions from the viewer.

That, or the story's designed especially to draw out certain emotional responses. This could be the traditional "sentimental"/"dramatic" flick, or even something like Antonioni or von Trier. I utterly hate Lars, the guy's sole trick is to rip apart a willing actress on screen (both the actress's persona in the story and the actress herself) as an exercise to see how far the audience will go along with it, before they get fed up. Antonioni, I like more, but I still can't help but feel that the sole idea of his "alienation trilogy" is to create a sense of discomfort in the viewer by seeing how disconnected everything is and how slow everything moves (or how events don't always have a resolution) - all from his personal viewpoint on what he saw in Italian culture and his views on the audience's expectations from a film (so why should I feel this way? I don't have to agree with him about these things).

So, really, I don't think I see a huge difference between Spielberg and somebody like von Trier (and even Antonioni, even though I like him a bit more, his films are generally more interesting). They just go about it in different ways.

Red flags are always raised with me, too, when I notice the director has a strong agenda. Bergman, for instance, is terrible about this. He largely cares about his own feelings and viewpoints, and puts this on film so you can see it. Sirk, as much as I admired that film I saw last night, fits in here too. And one of my favorite directors, Tarkovsky, is definitely guilty here.

Chaplin is, alone, a subject for a huge book on the subject. I love "City Lights" and "The Circus", even though I know its pure emotional manipulation on his part. He did this with weepy scores and obvious story set-ups. I guess I overlook this, because I think they're the best films dealing with a sort of social humanism that appeals to me. Which leads me to think, that if you agree with the director's agenda, then it's no problem really.

Ultimately, I think using the criticism of something being "emotionally manipulative" is worthless, because it can be one film's downfall, and another's bastion of strength. It is so arbitrary that its value as a critique is weak.

There's an old thread about the subject here: Emotional Manipulation

Which, raised a better question, really -- when does a film earn this emotional response and when does it not? I think it would be easier to answer this than attempt to tackle the original question, since that would involve evaluating the WHOLE filmmaking process from its beginning to see how the final manipulative effect was produced. And that's something I'm ignorant about, since I'm not a filmmaker myself.

Sentimental editorializing beyond the 'text' material necessary for the conveyance of a scene / sequence / film-whole.

I'm aware of how elastic, over-inclusive, and inspecific this is, but it's a pretty good thumbnail for me. And it seems to encompass (if reductively) all of the arguable social-humanist intricacies mj mentions an xpost ago.

But I definately fall on the side of less-manipulative cinema. That is, not dry (the "suture" films Spencer mentions), but films that present their material in a way allowing the audience to breath - interpret - without a definate 'correct' emotional valuation attached via editorial, musical, or f/x coloration. Furthermore, I appreciate filmmakers who DO have a stated political agenda, as I know it's impossible to spearhead a film project without one and the candor really helps [me] in figuring a lot about the end project.

Suture self!

I think a bigger problem in the Age of Irony is non-emotional manipulation, ie, bullshit plotting like The Usual Suspects.

Choreographing certain dramatic scenes to rising theme music where you have crashing cymbals or a complete drop to silence is also overt manipulation. Which is pretty much every thriller ever.

Which raises a sub-question. Is simple digital media manipulative? Brakhage often digitally creates very banal designs and around them adds movement. In his silent pieces (absent of people, unlike Wedlock House: An Intercourse and Window Water Baby Moving) can the presentation of repetitive abstract graphics and sometimes silence sometimes experimental sounds be considered manipulative?

The issue of emotion manipulation arises from mike h's point--does the filmmaker have some kind of specific contrived response that he is aiming to get from his audience? I don't agree that this can be said of the Brakhage works that you mentioned, because his goal is merely for the audience to emote, but what that emotion is doesn't matter. Some people will be bored, some enthralled, some angry, some daydream while others concentrate heavily. One of Stan's favorite responses is mentioned in his interview for the Criterion disks when he spoke about an engineering student who ran through the entire gambit of these emotions during a single tail-end of a screening.

This is very different from the Spielberg types who know what buttons to push to lead their audience around by the collar. Need a tearjerker? Have Williams write something in a minor key with lots of violins, and zoom in slow & tight. Want excitement? Quick cuts and hey, John, pick up the tempo & add some brass. There's certainly an art and a history involved in understanding just how to lead an audience by their psychological reactions. I have a tremendous amount of respect for those who can master it (and they often have the largest audiences because of it because they give the public what it wants), but I also think there's a question of ethics involved. Which I won't get into because mj summed it up pretty well (good call on the Bergman, BTW) and I've discussed it at length in the thread linked above.

Brakhage, and a million other directors have stated in the past, the objective is a bouquet of excremental (emotional) seepage. Since humans desire accolades, a professional director will diminish the possibility of any "contrived" response, leading the audience to emote orchestrally.

Yeah, 'cause god knows I'm emoting a Mahler symphony every time I watch Amistad....

In a cinematic utopia maybe. You're absolutely right about 95% though, because I've seen wool pulled over the sheep's eyes too many times to count. I appreciate the pedantic prose, but alas, I cannot agree.

I can't help notice the oxymoron of the last phrase, juxtaposing "leading" and "emote orchestrally".

It comes directly from Lacanian analysis. Lacan's follower Jacques-Alain Miller coined the term and Jean-Pierre Oudart first used it in film studies (although others seem to have been hinting at it concurrently). Kaja Silverman's economical definition: "Suture is the name given to the procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer subjectivity upon their viewers." I think there's another discussion of the political importance of this on ILE somewhere.

Spielberg Symposium
Introduction
Every time a new Steven Spielberg film opens, a divisive critical discourse emerges. Are Saving Private Ryan and Amistad heavily critical of American history, or are they glowing tributes to democracy? Is The Color Purple a progressive portrayal of a region mostly ignored by Hollywood, or a sugarcoated bastardization of Alice Walker's far grittier novel? Is A.I. sentimentalized Kubrick or cynical Spielberg? Does Schindler's List's high-contrast aesthetic provide a clear-eyed document of the horrors of the Holocaust, or does it overly stylize and even trivialize the genocidal atrocities? And is the film more fixated on life or death? And does one make it more valid than the other?

That the world's single most financially successful filmmaker can provoke so much debate with the release of each new work makes him the perfect candidate for this issue's Reverse Shot symposium. Rather than commissioning each writer to tackle a single film or to trace a glib trajectory through a large and quickly expanding body of work (over 30 films directed since 1971, along with TV and countless producer credits), we have five long pieces taking on works from the forgotten (Sugarland Express), to the reviled (Always), to the almost universally lauded (Schindler's List) and placing them in the context of his entire career. The symposium format is an approach that we think opens up provocative possibilities not found in other publications, and is especially useful in trying to get at a director like Spielberg, whose films are so complex and contradictory.

We feel that there is hardly enough serious critical writing concerning this one-of-a-kind filmmaker, a man who has used the Hollywood system to his advantage time and again, and even managing to occasionally impress the elitists. Is there any other studio director that seems to so often summarize film history itself? Within Spielberg's oeuvre, we can intermittently get Kubrick's visual grandeur, Hitchcock's audience penetration, Ozu's moral capacity, Renoir's social critique, and Ford's classical formalism, yet all of it arrives with Spielberg's own ethical baggage, a specific set of values and themes that pop up in whatever genre he's playing with. Ironically, the career of the world's most visible director deserves a second look. Hell, even if it was filtered through a succession of flat slapstick gags, 1941 now seems infinitely more politically advanced than any film that has since dealt with Pearl Harbor.

It doesn't hurt that Spielberg is coming off a two-year golden streak that has even heightened the inherent schism in his career: Minority Report (dystopic roller-coaster ride or serious political inquiry?), Catch Me If You Can flippant nostalgic breeze or melancholy rumination on withering patriarchy?), and, most dramatically, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, have all pushed the director (who publicly disavows auteurism itself, preferring to think of film as a collaborative medium) into even more contentious realms of audience response. A rumored Secret Life of Walter Mitty adaptation slated for 2004 only points towards a further probing of themes examined in these masterworks. Certainly since Schindler's List, his films have seemed more sober, more infected with a dubious view of humanity; he now more delicately treads between the light and the dark, the moral and the corrupt.

His ability to so easily make us cry leaves many viewers distrustful of their own tears. Perhaps the claims of manipulation are valid (movies are fundamentally manipulative), but the more important question would be, "What's he really touching upon?" No other Hollywood filmmaker wrings more earnest or honest emotions from his audience, and their anger at being moved deep in those alcoves of recollection long forgotten reflects his greatest strength. Does Spielberg seriously examine his oft-explored themes of historical remembrance, spiritual transcendence, and broken families, or are they just means to an end for a superior visual storyteller who's interested in finding ways to test out the technology he has at his disposal? Either way, everybody has their one "Spielberg moment," the one that surpasses the rest and lodges in the brain with sheer iconographic force: Jaws's skinny-dipper being pulled below the murky depths, the beatific landing of Close Encounters's mother ship, Empire of the Sun's Christian Bale exulting from the internment lookout tower as the B-51, the "Cadillac of the Skies," zooms by. This fact alone makes him impossible to ignore- validating Spielberg is like giving credence to our collective memories. - The Editors

But, what I really like about suture as an element of manipulation is (and this is especially true of my favorite political and feminist films) how often they are cerebral.