Cinema Representation of Cruelty: Genre Conventions and Spectators’ Interpretations

Abstract

Despite the abundance of plots and genre diversity in modern feature cinema, images of cruelty are present both in most blockbusters to stimulate the audience with bright effects, and in auteur cinema as a form of search for original aesthetic solutions. In genre cinema, the semantic and syntactic ordering of signs is artistically motivated and aimed at creating a certain emotional effect in the audience, in particular, cruelty can be perceived as a tragic spectacle, an ominous picture, a funny episode from life. The purpose of this study is to identify patterns between the specifics of the representation of images of cruelty and the reception and interpretation of movie scenes by the audience. The multimodality of the film text determines the use of various methods - semiotic, video-oculographic and questionnaire ones. In the course of the study, it was found that the interpretation of cruelty depends on genre conventions and the viewer's knowledge of the film language subcode, genre constructs. Consideration of the issue of cinematic cruelty in such genres as action, comedy, drama, thriller, horror allows us to formulate the basic rules for interpreting film texts, which is significant both in the context of studying mass culture and for the practical development of effective communication through cinema.