Emotional Structure of Dialogues in Aging-Themed Movies: An Analysis on Text Mining

Abstract

Emotions play an important role in the process of media messages transforming the audience. In our study, starting from the question of what might be the dominant emotions in old age-themed cinema texts, it is aimed to obtain clues about how old age is constructed in cinema through these emotions and what kind of emotional structure about old age is imposed on the audience. In this direction, emotion analysis was applied to the dialogues of 379 old age-themed films shot in a period of 100 years to determine what kind of emotional structure is constructed in all old age-themed cinema texts. As a result, it was found that the most dominant emotion was anger and disgust. The findings were categorized according to three different periods (1920–1969, 1970–1999, 2000–2020) and interpreted in a descriptive approach in a historical perspective and within the framework of the cinemas of the in addition to the EU, Germany, France, the UK, and Japan, Turkish cinema to make a comparison, where the most old age films were made. It is expected that our study will set an example for text mining research in cinema and offer an alternative perspective to the discussions on the phenomenon of aging in cinema.