Paper ID: 2411.10018

Once More, With Feeling: Measuring Emotion of Acting Performances in Contemporary American Film

Naitian Zhou, David Bamman

Narrative film is a composition of writing, cinematography, editing, and performance. While much computational work has focused on the writing or visual style in film, we conduct in this paper a computational exploration of acting performance. Applying speech emotion recognition models and a variationist sociolinguistic analytical framework to a corpus of popular, contemporary American film, we find narrative structure, diachronic shifts, and genre- and dialogue-based constraints located in spoken performances.

Submitted: Nov 15, 2024