‘Do you know what the world will do to you? It will make you understand that these things bring you great shame and wrong you: the tolling of the bell, the reading of the condemnation, your being tied and led before the people…’

Bologna Comforters’ Manual in The Art of Executing Well, ed. Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2008)

This paper looks at how the emotion of shame was conceived around early modern public execution, and further, how shame was then portrayed in the broadside ballads that broadcast information about executions. It seems paradoxical that in the moments before their death condemned criminals were deeply concerned about the shame their punishment would create. Why would a person about to die care about feeling shame? I explore how, in contrast to our current understanding of it as a private, personal emotion, shame was conceived as a communal emotion in the early modern period, one that people shared, and which had tangible consequences for one’s family and friends. In that sense, can shame even be considered an emotion in early modern thought? I discuss these issues from the perspective of the ballads that were sung about these executions. How did balladry perpetuate – or subvert – the message of shame that was central to the purpose of execution?

You can watch the film here.

This was one of a series of events as part of the AHRC-funded ‘Embodied Emotions’ project.

See also: 
Embodied Emotions AHRC webpage.
Embodied Emotions leaflet [PDF]
Feeling Differently’ Report by Thomas Dixon [PDF}

Introduced by Dr Andrea Brady
Nostalgia for the Light is a documentary by Patricio Guzmán (The Battle of Chile, The Pinochet Case).  In the arid landscapes of the Atacama Desert, Guzman encounters cutting-edge technologies for probing the origins of the universe, archaeologists recovering the remains of the 19th century, and women seeking out their dead, prisoners ‘disappeared’ after the military coup of 1973. The film contrasts these different investigations into place, memory, and the past, tragedy and rationality, science and kinship.

See also: 2014 Film Series flyer [PDF]

Introduced by Adrian Garvey
Film melodramas, sometimes denigrated as ‘weepies’, are indelibly associated with emotion, both representing and evoking heightened states of love and loss. Active in Europe and Hollywood, German-born Max Ophüls (1902-57), who made such films as Letter From An Unknown Woman (1948) and Madame de… (1953), is among the most acclaimed directors of the genre. La Signora di Tutti was produced in Italy where Ophüls worked briefly as a refugee from Nazism. Narrated in flashback, the film relates the tempestuous romantic life of a film star, Gaby Doriot. Less widely seen than his later work, it demonstrates the director’s characteristic synthesis of motion and emotion, as the expressive fluidity of the mobile camera intensifies the action and our responses to it.

See also: 2014 Film Series flyer [PDF]

Introduced by Dr Elena Carrera
Poppy Shakespeare is Benjamin Ross’s award-winning Channel 4 film adaptation of Clare Allan’s novel about a psychiatric day hospital in North London. Its protagonist, N, is given the job of showing the ropes to the reluctantly admitted, self-declared ‘sane’ Poppy, who has to learn to play ‘mad’ to be able to afford a lawyer who might get her out. In showing the mirroring relationship between these two ill-fated women as they cross shifting boundaries between sanity and insanity, the film mobilizes the viewer’s sense of alienation, and poses crucial questions about the role of empathy in mental healthcare.

Tickets now available from eventbrite.

See also: 2014 Film Series flyer [PDF]

Introduced by Dr Katherine Angel
Shame is written and directed by Steve McQueen, Turner Prize-winning video artist and director of Hunger and 12 Years A Slave. Widely glossed (including by McQueen himself) as a film about sex addiction, Shame is a fine-grained portrait of sexual compulsion and suffering. Michael Fassbender plays Brandon, an office worker in New York in his mid-thirties whose routine is peppered with somewhat joyless pornography use, masturbation, the chasing of casual encounters, and visits from sex workers. Brandon’s sister (Carey Mulligan) comes to visit, which creates tensions in which Brandon’s suffering peaks. Shame is a film that reveals contemporary anxieties about pornography and addiction, while reflecting deftly on questions of humiliation, aggression, gender, and power.

See also: 2014 Film Series flyer [PDF]