This brings me to the second way in

This brings me to the second way in which films move viewers: by touching them emotionally. The cognitive film scholar Carl Plantinga has asserted that “affect and emotion are fundamental to what makes films artistically successful, rhetorically powerful, and culturally influential” (2009a, 5), and so we do well in paying attention to the ways in which films cue affective responses. Viewers’ embodied simulation of characters’ motions and emotions is perhaps most central to their involvement in a film, but this should not lead us to disregard the role of cinematic environments in cueing viewer emotion. As Siegfried Kracauer observes in his eory of Film, it is not only a “face on the screen” that can “attract us with a singular manifestation of fear or happiness,” but a “street serving as the background to some quarrel or love affair may rush to the fore and produce an intoxicating effect” ([1960] 1997, 303). In Kracauer’s account, that unexpected “rushing tothe fore” of the background is more or less unintended by the filmmaker. It is a moment in which the viewer’s attention shifts away from both protagonist and narrative and toward the surrounding cinematic environment. Such unintended—and highly idiosyncratic—moments of shifting attention may indeed happen during the viewing of any film, and they often depend on previous personal experiences and the cultural context of individual viewers. Yet, most of the time the sudden shift of attention, experienced as a “rushing to the fore” of the cinematic environment, is a result of cinematic foregrounding and therefore a response that has been deliberately cued by the filmmakers through the ways in which certain aspects of the environment are made salient.