8/9/22 - Calvin University Receives Grant To Study Impact Of Movies

Tuesday, August 9, 2022 at 7:44 AM

A $1 Million dollar grant will help Calvin University study how movies shape our morals.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.—(Calvin University Press Release) - Carl Plantinga, professor of film and media at Calvin University, along with a team of experts has received a $1 million grant to explore how movies shape one’s moral understanding.

See full story: https://calvin.edu/news/archive/research-teams-1-million-grant-explores-how-movies-shape-morals

Their project titled “Character Engagement and Moral Understanding in Screen Stories” aims to bring further understanding around questions like: Can one’s moral understanding be shaped in just two hours, and through a movie? And, can discussions afterward shape what we take away from those 120 minutes?

The grant funding comes via the Templeton Religion Trust’s “Art Seeking Understanding” Initiative. Plantinga says that while this project will be important to academic researchers, it also will provide valuable insights to movie-viewers and filmmakers. “A movie is what people might call an engine of attention. It has very powerful ways to draw your attention while moving you simultaneously,” said Plantinga. “It’s like you’re on a train track and the conductor takes you down a path where he or she is going to give you a strong impetus to think and feel a certain way about what you are seeing. That can have a marked impact on us.”

Under what conditions this impact occurs is what Plantinga and his colleagues Allison Eden, Daniel Levin, and Murray Smith will be working to understand. Plantinga, who has spent much of his 22-year career at Calvin studying and writing about the impact of movies on viewers, including in one of his books Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience, is the project director. Eden, a professor at Michigan State University, who has spent her career thinking about the effects of media on people’s moral lives, is project co-director. Levin is a psychologist at Vanderbilt University, bringing a specialty in viewer’s bodily engagement with films and how that relates to their thinking. And Smith is a film theorist with expertise in how viewers engage with characters in a story.

"Films and film characters can move us deeply, can leave an impression, can imprint themselves into our memories," said Plantinga. "These stories we see on screens are pervasive and powerful. They aren’t going away, so we are asking ‘is there some way to understand their power on us better and how they might have a positive impact on our lives?’"

8/9/22 - Calvin University Receives Grant To Study Impact Of Movies

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