When watching the latest instalment of Batman, it is perfectly normal to say that we see Batman fighting Bane or that we see Bruce Wayne making love to Miranda Tate. We would not say that we see Christian Bale dressed up as Batman going through the motions of punching Tom Hardy dressed up us Bane. Nor do we say that we see Christian Bale pretending to be Bruce Wayne making love with Marion Cotillard, who is playacting the role Miranda Tate. But if we look at the history of cinema and consider contemporary reviews from the early days of the medium, we see that people thought precisely in this way about early film. They spoke of film as no more than documentary recordings of actors performing on set.
In an innovative combination of philosophical aesthetics and new cinema history, Mario Slugan investigates how our default imaginative engagement with film changed over the first two decades of cinema. It addresses not only the importance of imagination for the understanding of early cinema but also contributes to our understanding of what it means for a representational medium to produce fictions. Specifically, Slugan argues that cinema provides a better model for understanding fiction than literature.
Author(s): Mario Slugan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 280
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The status of fiction in early cinema: Train and trick films
Are there textual criteria for fictionality?
Extratextual criteria of fictionality
Reception and exhibition context
Train films and The Arrival of a Train
The importance of exhibition context and magic theatre
A Trip to the Moon and trick films
Production and promotion context
2 Hale’s Tours and adjacent cultural series: Illusion, immersion, imagination
Panoramas and terminological conflation
Travelogues as ersatz-tourism: Any place for imagination?
Phantom rides: From fiction of travel to non-fiction of place
Hale’s Tours
The myth of a ‘demented fellow’
The troubles with hybridity
Historicizing the imagined seeing thesis
3 Re-enactments in early cinema: Fake, fiction, fact
What is a fake?
Fakes, indexicality and fictionality
Fakes and imaginary participation
4 The lecturer and make-believe: The borders of the text and explicit mandates
The relation of the film lecturer to the text
Ideal, printed and delivered lectures
The lecturer and the performance of the film narrator through deixis
5 Implicit mandates and fictional narrators
Narrative and narrator in early cinema
Narrative
Narrator
Contemporary narratological discourse
Genette’s theory of voice
The near-ubiquity thesis for literary fiction
The near-absence thesis for fiction film
The enunciator as the filmic narrator
The return of the great image-maker
Exceptions to near-absence thesis for fiction film
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
