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the film's narration eliciting affective and cognitive responses towards the character. The
importance of Smith's delineation of concepts such as alignment and allegiance should not be
underestimated, as they enable film studies to move away from the nebulous notion of viewer
'identification' with characters. In the context of my study, Smith's concepts, when applied to
Bertolucci's films, are invaluable in terms of the light they shed on the viewer's difficult
engagement with protagonists such as Marcello Clerici in TJw Conformist.
Noel Carroll's articulation of the relation between fiction films and emotions stems
again from a cognitive-affective methodology. The symptoms of anger at a lover's betrayal
may be a sense of 'inner bodily turmoil' and stomach churning, and the link between these
bodily sensations and one's lover is the cognition of a situation of betrayal, either real or
imagined (Carroll, 1999: 25). Emotions are therefore more than just bodily feelings, because
cognitions are 'necessary constituents' of the process of most emotions, apart from
autonomic responses such as startled reactions to horrific scenes. In this way cognition not
only causes the feeling, but it also allows the identification of the emotional state that we are
in, since it involves a categorization of the cause of the emotion, in this case, a sense of
wrongfulness (Carroll, 1999: 25-26). Carroll's view is that the emotional states 'are governed
cognitively by criteria of appropriateness'; for example, situations that are cognitively
assessed as harmful or dangerous lead to fear (Carroll, 1999: 27). hi cinematic contexts, an
example of this governing criterion might be found in Deliverance, (1972) in which suspense
and fear originate from the harmful/threatening presence of the three strangers accompanying
the friends on their trip.
Carroll asserts that once the objects or stimuli for emotional states are detected, such
as a source of danger to trigger fear, emotional states are episodic and 'endure over time
intervals' (Carroll, 1999: 27); the individual's emotions guide his/her perceptions to further
elements in the scenario (whether real or fictitious, on screen) that are relevant to the
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