Top Left To Right: Moments Of Gentle Body Horror Throughout Grace

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Top Left to Right: Moments of subtle body horror throughout Grace.

One thing about creating empathy is that there will be a spectrum among audiences in, to what extent empathy is felt. Naturally, attempting to generate empathy will have its success and its failure. One of the obstacles to generating empathy is that it is like likely that those who understand the position of the protagonist, or feel anything for her, are those who have already experienced or felt the same or a similar feeling. It is difficult to create new empathy and easier to generate it from where it already exists. Hence, the body horror aspects in the film - empathy through disgust and uncomfort - unpleasantness one would like to avoid. Reasons and Reynolds suggest …show more content…

We did an entire cut that was intended to promote the feeling I wanted to recreate through editing. This did not work. The editing should have imitated the psychological state of Grace throughout the film - beginning with continuity editing, following this style throughout, enough to show the audience the character arc clearly. Within each individual scene the editing could be more disturbed in particular character moments or after specific interactions. This idea was inspired by a scene from Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’, one which feels almost out of place because of its sudden repetition of a character’s movement and line of dialogue (Scorsese, 1976). My editor and I tried to achieve this in certain parts of the film where we thought it was justified. I previewed the cut to a friend, and while he thought the cut was interesting, he concluded that it took him out of the world of the film when the relatively slow pacing had only just drawn him in. Instead of creating discomfort we created disconnect, so we used other aspects to try and generate empathy, such as body …show more content…

Because of this I thought about the specific styles that would influence my work very carefully. In dance and sport, films that exhibit athleticism on screen the audience experiences embodiment of some kind that occurs due to the lack of touch (between screen and viewer), the spectator must fill in the gaps (Rutherford, 235). I considered what genres or stylistic choices, could encourage embodiment in some form or another and therefore empathy in the audience. The decision to manifest feeling as a real being was key, but as part of this I thought it necessary to include elements of body horror - physical empathy for a characters position. Seeing a character move in a particular way, whether that be through dance, or sport, or injury creates empathy because of the familiriality it has to our own bodies. We imagine ourselves in the position of the performer to varying extents, mild body horror is a way to access uncomfort - an essential element of feeling anxiety so bad that forms of physical pain exist, whether that be a heavy chest, or picking at nails, or something more

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