Step right up and take a whiff! Does incorporating scents in film projection increase viewer enjoyment?

Abstract

Cinema has always sought to be an art of synthesis, not only by wedding art and science and integrating the aesthetic beauty of the other art forms, but also through attempting to involve all of the viewer’s senses, not just the dominant ones of sight and hearing, in the artistic experience of motion pictures. Bearing witness to this are the previous century’s myriad initiatives to transform the movies into a multisensory experience. Nonetheless, none of these proposals has managed to take hold and, for now, film is an art form enjoyed strictly in audiovisual terms. That said, given the context of ever-dwindling movie theater audiences, could the incorporation of the olfactory attract spectators once again? In this paper we employ an empathy and identification with characters (EIC) scale to analyze whether the incorporation of smells increases enjoyment in the viewing of an audiovisual production – in this case, the multisensory short film Xmile – by an experimental group (with scents) and a control group (without scents). The results indicate that with the incorporation of scents viewers’ identify much more with the fictional characters and further enjoy the experience.