Seeing Fictions in FilmThe Epistemology of Movies

Abstract

In works of literary fiction, it is fictional in the work that the words of the text are being recounted by some work‐internal ‘voice’—the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether in movies it is fictional that the story is told in sights and sounds by a work‐internal subjectivity that orchestrates them—a cinematic narrator. In this book, it is argued that movies do involve a fictional recounting (an audio‐visual narration) in terms of the movie’s sound‐ and image‐track. Standardly, viewers are 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 also argued that 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. There is a further question about 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 volume 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 foundation of film narration, the final chapters explore the ways in which certain complex strategies of narration in film 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.