Visual Perception and Motion Picture Spectatorship

Abstract

Watching his parents' home video, I see Erik, who is capering happily at his second birthday party. Gazing at a Polaroid snapshot, I look at Julie, who looks ravishing in a royal blue dress. Screening the documentary Unzipped (Douglas Keeves, 1995), I see fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, who is getting a haircut in his studio. While perfectly ordinary, these sentences seem to have the philosophically troubling implication that I, the viewer, am having the same sort of perceptual experience of the depicted objects as I would have if the objects themselves were right in front of me. Could it actually be that, for a time, I think or believe myself in the presence not of images but of that which is portrayed?' Or is there a sense in which I really am seeing, as if through a window, Erik, Julie, Mizrahi, their observable features, and their actions? Or are these ordinary linguistic expressions concerning relations to photographed items just conceptually inconvenient ways of communicating the fact that the speaker sees one and only one thing, namely, a picture of so and so? While one or two film scholars might have gone so far as to suggest that spectators are prone to an illusionistic mode of reception, others have tried to explain how viewing photographic images could be both like looking through a window and free of egregious perceptual errors. Kendall Walton, who does not think that people tend to forget that they're looking at movie images, argues that even when watching films about imaginary creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, viewers really do see something, like a large wooden model, through the moving picture.2 Against their putative transparency, Gregory Currie takes the more austere position-I shall call it a representation thesis-that when we look at photographic and cinematographic images, we see representations but not the things represented, our perceptual access being to the image and not to the referent.: In this paper, I propose a perspective designed to avoid some of the weaknesses of transparency, representation, and, of course, illusion theses. I do not use the term realist in connection with a program of descriptive or normative claims about film style or the cinema's aesthetic telos. Rather, I associate it with