Torben Grodal

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Torben Grodal is a professor of film studies at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He was born in Denmark on January 25, 1943. He was married to Birgit Grodal, a professor of economics at the University of Copenhagen, until her death in 2004. In his early career he was a professor of literature at the University of Copenhagen. Over time his interests drifted towards film analysis, which led him to change careers and join the department of Film and Media Studies. He has written many essays including Love and Desire in the Cinema. His breakthrough work within film analysis is Moving Pictures - A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition published by the Oxford University Press in 1997. In Moving Pictures Grodal provides a bold new theoretical account of the role of emotions and cognition in producing the aesthetics effects of film and television genres. It argues that film genres are mental structures which integrate sensations, emotions, and actions, activating the viewer's body and mind. Using recent developments in neuroscience and cognitive science in combination with narrative theory and film theory the book provides and alternative account to that offered by psychoanalysis explaining identification and the correlation of viewer reaction with specific film genres¹. Grodal's use of cognitive and evolutionary theories as the basis of his theoretical framework has raised some controversy among film scholars. For his 60th birthday his colleagues wrote a series of essays in his honor, which were published as the book Film Style and Story: A Tribute to Torben Grodal edited by Lennard Hojbjerg, Peter Schepelern and Torben Kragh Grodal².

¹ Torben Grodal (1997): Moving Pictures - A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition, Oxford University Press

² Lennard Hojbjerg, Peter Schepelern and Torben Kragh Grodal, Eds. (2003): Film Style and Story: A Tribute to Torben Grodal, Museum Tusculanum