Cognitive dissonance as an effect of watching Amator

Abstract

In this paper, it is shown how Amator [Camera Buff] (Kieslowski, 1979) poses a problem to engagement theory. Spectators begin noticing a friction between the expected behaviour of the characters and how they turn out to be. The psychological theory of cognitive dissonance is a theory that helps to explain how people process this kind of conflicting information. One of the most peculiar outcomes of this theory is that the more a favourite character acts against the spectator's expectations, the more the spectator will like him. After describing cognitive dissonance in psychology, I will describe how cognitive dissonance (in the spectator) has been sporadically described in film theory, and how cognitive dissonance theory can be incorporated into film theory. Subsequently, this model is applied to the film Amator. The film is used as just one example of European art cinema.

Keywords:

• cognitive dissonance
• character engagement
• social cognition
• Kieslowski
• morals
• art cinema

Notes

1. Strictly speaking, ‘the importance of enlarging the consonant cognition’ was initially only implicitly suggested by Festinger.

2. In line with Festinger (who had already described this in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance), various scholars have researched how voters appreciated an elected politician (Frenkel and Doob 1976; Mullainathan and Washington 2006; Nail, Bedell, and Little 2003). It was found that when voting for a particular politician (in the year in which that politician is already in power), people actively look for the politician's positive deeds. Negative aspects of the elected politician are ignored. Moreover, the politician who wasn't elected is judged negatively.

3. For an exhaustive account of cognitive dissonance and its aftermath in public life, see Tavris and Aronson (2008).

4. There are two divergent theories. A number of theorists explain the results of Festinger's research from social psychology and due to this are of the opinion that there is no dissonance. Bem's self-perception theory explains the results of Festinger and Carlsmith's forced compliance study without dissonance, and simply argues that people use their behaviour to determine their attitude when there is freedom of choice. Moreover, when they don't feel they had that freedom of choice, they do not use their behaviour to determine their attitude (Bem1967). On the contrary, impression management theory explains it using the fact that people adjust their behaviour to determine what others think of them (Tedeschi, Schlenker, and Bonoma 1971).

5. They argue that ‘dissonance begins when people commit a behavior and then assess the behavior against some meaningful criterion of judgment. Only when an action is measured against a relevant criterion does it take on a mantle that is aversive or threatening to the self. In the current model, the criterion used to assess the meaning of behavior is represented in memory as self-attributes and self-standards or guides for behavior’ (Stone and Cooper 2001, 228–9; see also Nail, Misak, and Davis 2004).

6. In his paper ‘Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances’, Smith (1999) deals with another problem in character engagement: the perverse allegiance with characters like Hannibal Lecter (which is comparable to the contemporary discussion about the television character Dexter). Although there may seem to be similarities to the argument in this paper, it is essentially different. In those cases, the spectator is already aware that the character is morally problematic, and thus protects himself from allying too much. This is contrary to Filip in Amator, where the spectator knows nothing about Filip and interprets the character only as morally good.

7. ‘The choice between these different explanations of our response seems to depend upon whether we see the example as different in degree or in kind from the typical functioning of affective mimicry, as a probe and an affective “interface”’ (Smith 1995, 106).