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outcomes. The viewer and character react to such situations with tears, shudders or laughter'
(Grodal, 1999: 134); this is exemplified by the sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark when
Indiana Jones initially 'experiences fearful despair in the snakepit' before switching to a more
goal-directed response to solve the situation (Grodal, 1999: 132-134).
Using some of the sequences mentioned before as test cases, Grodal shows how the
mental flow can also have four modal qualities experienced by viewers in the following
forms: 'intense' (the film activates vivid perception, as in the opening sequence of E.T.);
'saturated' (the film activates memory associations charged with emotion; I would indicate
the scene in Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988), when the adult Toto revisits the
now derelict cinema in his home town, as an example of this); 'tense' (here, the film activates
action-readiness, such as muscular tension, as a boulder thunders towards Indiana Jones), and
'emotive 5 (activating autonomic outlets such as tears, laughter or shivers) (Grodal, 1999:
136). By contrast, an alternative viewing process may occur when films interrupt this mental
flow from perception to reaction; Grodal likens this to looking 'upstream', against the normal
experiential flow. This occurs when a film blurs or blocks the viewers' perception of forms,
Grodal's example being the first flashback to Harmonica's past in Once Upon a Time in the
West (1968), which is shot completely out-of-focus. Another form of blocking may occur
when action is halted 'as in a freeze-frame', which halts the completion of an action (Grodal,
1999: 136), one example of this being the ending to Once Upon a Time in America (1984).
In many narratives, the subject-actant on screen and the viewer-persona merge as a
consequence of close emotional and cognitive identification between the two, but more
complicated narrative forms can create distance between viewers and screen actants. One
device to reduce the immediacy of a viewer's emotional and physiological reactions to what
is perceived on screen, and to distance the viewer from the fictive world is the creation of
'contextual frames and embeddings that force the spectator to double his position of
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