Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies
Oxford University Press (2011)
| Abstract | In works of literary fiction, it is a part of the fiction that the words of the text are being recounted by some work-internal 'voice': the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether the story in movies is told in sights and sounds by a work-internal subjectivity that orchestrates them: a cinematic narrator. George M. Wilson argues that movies do involve a fictional recounting (an audio-visual narration ) in terms of the movie's sound and image track. Viewers are usually prompted to imagine seeing the items and events in the movie's fictional world and to imagine hearing the associated fictional sounds. However, it is much less clear that the cinematic narration must be imagined as the product of some kind of 'narrator' - of a work-internal agent of the narration. Wilson goes on to examine the further question whether viewers imagine seeing the fictional world face-to-face or whether they imagine seeing it through some kind of work-internal mediation . It is a key contention of this book that only the second of these alternatives allows one to give a coherent account of what we do and do not imagine about what we are seeing on the screen. Having provided a partial account of the foundations of film narration, the final chapters explore the ways in which certain complex strategies of cinematic narration are executed in three exemplary films: David Fincher's Fight Club , von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress , and the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There | |||||||||
| Keywords | Motion pictures Philosophy Motion pictures Aesthetics Motion picture audiences Narration (Rhetoric | |||||||||
| Categories | No categories specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Buy the book | $32.94 used (27% off) $32.95 new (27% off) $40.50 direct from Amazon (10% off) Amazon page | |||||||||
| Call number | PN1995.W5845 2011 | |||||||||
| ISBN(s) | 9780199594894 0199594899 | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,709 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesCherry Potter (1990). Image, Sound & Story: The Art of Telling in Film. Secker & Warburg.
David Bordwell (1985). Narration in the Fiction Film. University of Wisconsin Press.
K. J. Thomson-Jones (2012). Narration in Motion. British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (1):33-43.
Nitzan S. Ben-Shaul (2012). Cinema of Choice: Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies. Berghahn Books.
Warren Buckland (ed.) (2009). Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Wiley-Blackwell.
Veijo Hietala (1990). Situating the Subject in Film Theory: Meaning and Spectatorship in Cinema. Distributor, Akateeminen Kirjakauppa.
Katherine Thomson-Jones (2009). Cinematic Narrators. Philosophy Compass 4 (2):296-311.
Noël Carroll (2008). The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Blackwell Pub..
Gaston Roberge (1992). The Ways of Film Studies: Film Theory & the Interpretation of Films. Ajanta Publications.
John David Rhodes & Elena Gorfinkel (eds.) (2011). Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image. University of Minnesota Press.
Trevor Whittock (1990). Metaphor and Film. Cambridge University Press.
Richard De Canio (1994). Cinematic Readings: A Primer of Film Culture. Chiu Yo Pub. House.
Yvette Bíró (1982). Profane Mythology: The Savage Mind of the Cinema. Indiana University Press.
George M. Wilson (2007). Elusive Narrators in Literature and Film. Philosophical Studies 135 (1):73 - 88.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2012-03-25Total downloads10 ( #106,476 of 549,671 )Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #25,807 of 549,671 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
