Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies

by George M. Wilson

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'tThere.

Genres: Film

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 13, 2012

Reviews

[Martin Riexinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intellectual challenge: What is fiction in a film (or in general)? And who is thus the author? And what do we do, when we watch a fiction film?

The answer the author gives, can with considerable simplification be summed up that we imagine to watch scenes from a fictional universe. The fiction is, however, not identical with the scenes shown on screen, but also of what is only implied, but "not filmed". Before coming to this conclusion describes very diligently other positions, demonstrating their strength but also highlighting what he considers their flaws.

Unfortunately the book's weakness is the application of the theoretical approach to actual films. Whereas he has elaborated important points convincingly with cursory references to Psycho, M - eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder and others, his analyses of late Sternberg films with Marlene Dietrich or the Coen Brothers' The Man who wasn't there are rather general interpretations of these works that do not focus on the deciphering the underlying "fiction."