In Defense of Interpretation: The Mind of the Movie/The World of the Film

Abstract

Values-oriented defenses of literature have been a staple of literary history for centuries if not millennia. But while commitments to values of various sorts have surely underwritten a good deal of film criticism and theory, defenses of the filmic, or watching films, are rare. The most common and compelling arguments made on literature’s behalf, however, apply equally well to film. Like literary fictions, fiction films can be defended as offering distinctive bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing. Like literary fictions, fiction films have the capacity, at once, to reveal the sheer “thinginess” of the world and to provide access to the felt experience of other worlds and of other ways of being. Finally, fiction films, like literary fictions, furnish, in complex and multi-layered ways, staging grounds for encountering alterity—training, that is, in the ethics of both knowing and acknowledging others.