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Staging atmosphere: collective emotional labour on the film set

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-11-08, 13:34 authored by Allan WatsonAllan Watson, Jenna Ward, James Fair
Despite a significant multi-disciplinary body of work on emotional labour, its application to geographical debates regarding space remains thin, and the role of emotional labour in the interrelations that produce space is poorly understood. In contrast, a substantial literature has developed in social and cultural geography concerned with ‘affective atmospheres’, understood as the relational and collective nature of affects. Within this literature, consideration has been given to the ways in which atmospheres might be staged to affect people’s moods for a variety of artistic and commercial reasons. Placing the concepts of emotional labour and atmosphere into dialogue, this paper offers a relational account of the film-set as a space in which directors, cast and crew engage in performances of individual and collective emotional labour in order to stage particular atmospheres. Drawing on primary qualitative data, we present the on-set work of film directors as attending to three relational projects; comportment, corpsing and conflict. In so doing, this paper offers a new understanding of the staging of atmosphere through performances of collective emotional labour. Such a perspective goes beyond the material to consider the emotional qualities of space and brings agency and intentionally to the fore in accounts of atmosphere.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Social and Cultural Geography

Volume

22

Issue

1

Pages

76 - 96

Citation

WATSON, A., WARD, J. and FAIR, J., 2021. Staging atmosphere: collective emotional labour on the film set. Social and Cultural Geography, 22 (1), pp.76-96.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social and Cultural Geography on 29 November 2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14649365.2018.1551563.

Acceptance date

2018-11-02

Publication date

2018-11-29

Copyright date

2018

ISSN

1464-9365

eISSN

1470-1197

Language

  • en