cal properties of the film medium. While film has been justly
called an “emotion machine,” it is also a strongly multi-sensory
medium. More than any other medium of entertainment and
communication, movies richly represent the swirl of flesh,
ideas, pain, pride and laughter, symbols, and images that define
what we call “the human condition.”
But film isn’t without its shortcomings. Although research
has shown film to be the premier emotion generator, research
has also shown that books can explain and explore complex
issues far more effectively than can films. In essence, film
arouses and print elaborates. A wedding of film self-help books
can offer the best of both media. This is what the field of cin-
ema therapy has to offer a cinema-savvy society.
Dr. Wolz advises that therapeutic value can be harvested
from good or bad films, from agreeable or disagreeable char-
acters, or from exhilarating or depressing endings. It is not the
aesthetics of the film that is of moment for Wolz, but how the
film resonates with the troublesome narratives of our lives.
Moreover, films can show us, with equal salutatory value, what
works, what doesn’t work, what’s functional, what’s dysfunc-
tional, what we should incorporate into our lives and what we
should jettison. Films become vicarious learning machines for
those who pay attention to how the myriad film muses speak to
us in darkened theaters or dimly-lit living rooms.
The wisdom of Dr. Wolz’s understanding of how films can
speak to us in unanticipated ways is cleverly evidenced in the
“negative” instance. She notes that one needn’t like or even be
moved by a character to learn from him or her. I would add that
you don’t even have to like an entire film to learn something
about yourself. For example, how or when a movie doesn’t move
us is often as important as how or when a movie does move us.
If the entire audience is weeping when the lights go on at the
end of the show, and your eyes are desert-dry, a river of emotion
may be running through the dry gulch, just below the surface.
Dr. Wolz clearly has a comprehensive agenda in mind for her
readers. Drawing from multiple academic and philosophicalForeword ixemotion book final 8/30/04 10:11 AM Page ix