The Cinema in the Teaching of Medicine: Palliative Care and Bioethics

Since viewers regularly respond to films emotionally as well as cognitively, it is only natural that a student’s emotional response can occasionally overwhelm their interpretations of a film. As an instructor , I have noticed that those students who describe being bored by a given film often cannot offer much in the way of interpretation of that film during group discussions, and that consequently they often perform poorly when writing about the film. Torben Grodal argues in Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film, Genres, Feeling and Cognition that “cog- nitive and perceptual processes are intimately linked with emotional processes within a functionally unified psychosomatic whole.” He sees...