The Hollywood war film serves as a prime example for the strategic use of audiovisual means to mobilize emotions, which in turn can be systematically described and analysed. The viewer's perceptive and affective experience may be sorted out into audiovisual units of expressive movement. The development of a standard method of analysis is central to the project, allowing a verifiable reconstruction and description of aesthetic strategies.

In the first stage we distinguished standard scenes of affect-oriented dramaturgy in Hollywood war films (pathos scenes of the genre). Based on this categorization the standard scenes in each examined film are extracted and their immanent structure and dramatic arrangement are described as well as the primary patterns of affective experience formed by their aesthetic arrangement. This qualitative medial research is carried out in an advanced IT-infrastructure specifically developed for and by this project.

By systematically investigating the affective dimension of film perception, this project develops essential methodological models and tools for empirical interdisciplinary studies of emotional mobilization via media content. Therefore it provides related fields of research with a useful approach for analysing audio visually organized emotions.