What Movies Show: Realism, Perception, and Truth in Film

 

Film

Film-viewing is a unique aesthetic experience, and it seems to possess a unique sort of tension. On the one hand, a film’s story seems to just be there before us: we’re directly presented with sights and sounds and can perceive the objects, people, and places depicted in the same sort of way we perceive things in the world. On the other hand, there’s an important sort of constructed-ness in film. Film-viewers have to cognize what’s represented by a film’s perceptual prompts; we have to bring our awareness of convention to understand shot transitions and montage, and we have to extrapolate from what’s shown in order to pick up on what’s implied by the shots we see. These two aspects—perceptual immediacy and constructed-ness seem opposed. And theorists typically treat them as opposed, with cinematic realists focusing on film’s perceptual content, semioticians focusing on how movies communicate, and narrative theorists focusing on how we cognize a film’s fiction, and each of them engaging in those analyses independent of the others. In this dissertation, I argue for nuanced ways in which what we see and hear, what we know, and what we imagine interact throughout film-viewing. I argue that film’s perceptual content and representational content entwine insofar as we perceive a film’s fictional world. I argue that because movies show (in ways that other art forms, like novels, cannot), they have an epistemic directness they present their fictional truths immediately.

 I argue that movies communicate, in a roughly Grecian way, and that they do so partly through showing with their perceptual content helping imply certain fictional truths. My analyses pave the way for a full theory of film meaning that does not treat as separate different, intertwining layers of meaning. I use and apply concepts from the philosophy of perception, philosophy of language, and epistemology in order to clarify what precisely goes on when we watch movies and to motivate ties between the philosophy of film and other areas of philosophy.

Cinematic realists argue that film has an especially strong tie to reality because of (various aspects of) its visual and aural presentation of information. Extreme versions of the view claim that, because of film’s photographic basis, we see objects, people, and places in or through the movie screen.

            1.        Less extreme versions either point to how our perceptual experiences during film-viewing are very much like our ordinary perceptual experiences,

            2.        They claim that a movie’s realism centers on its ability to comment on or express thoughts about reality.

            3.        While they vary in highly divergent ways, all versions have one thing in common: they prioritize film’s perceptual nature, pointing to the sights and sounds movies actually show us. At the other end of the spectrum are semiotic theories that prioritize the use of convention in film. For semioticians, the film is a coded, sign-based medium much like language. Individual shots in a movie are connected and given meaning via various transitions to form sequences; this gives film (1) a syntactical, or grammatical, structure and (2) conventional meaning, insofar as our familiarity with film conventions is required for our deciphering what those shots (and sequences) mean. According to semiotic theories, when we try to make sense of what a movie means, we move away from the particular perceptual nature of its medium and analyze it as we would any other art form (and any language). In this respect, semioticians prioritize convention and code over perceptual presentation. Another focus for film theorists and philosophers of the film is on what Noël Carroll calls “nominal portrayal:” film’s representation of fictional characters, worlds, and events.

           4.       This theoretical focus centers on film’s narrative constructed-ness: its ability to tell stories. Rather than constitute a separate theory like cinematic realism or semiotics this ‘representationalist’ approach tends to exist in various accounts of various theories. Cinematic realists acknowledge that fiction films show us real people, objects, and places in order to represent fictional people, objects, and places; and semioticians discuss the ways in which movies use convention and editing techniques in order to build their narratives (and in order to enable us to understand those narratives). In analyzing film’s narrative construction, theorists generally discuss how we cognitively engage with a film’s narrative: how we either falsely believe (during film-viewing) that narrative events are occurring, or how we imagine that those narrative events are occurring. Thus theorists like Gregory Currie, Noël Carroll, and George Wilson provide accounts of imaginative engagement;

            5.       Theorists like Amy Copland and Murray Smith flesh out accounts of, more narrowly empathetic engagement with characters;

           6.       Accounts of illusionism maintain that we falsely believe that what’s fictionally depicted is occurring.

           7.       In each of these cases, theorists generally attend to cognitive engagement in a way that excludes perceptual engagement. They focus on how we imagine or falsely believe or feel when we engage with a movie’s fiction, and they fail to examine how we see throughout that engagement. More specifically: they don’t examine how we perceptually experience the fictional as we cognitively experience it. Even theorists who emphasize film’s perceptual presentation as cinematic realists do typically turn towards an analysis of the purely cognitive when they acknowledge nominal portrayal, in precisely the way that imaginative engagement and illusionism theorists do. Within this discussion of narrative construction and engagement, theorists spell out notions of ‘fictional truth:’ what settles the facts of a fictional world. Here, discussion of ‘principles of a generation’ is common, with theorists like Kendall Walton and Anthony Everett specifying that whatever is true in fiction is whatever we’re prescribed to imagine about the fictional world.

          8.       There isn’t much specific focus, here, on the fictional facts of a movie; and, when there is, theorists generally do not change their commitments or clarify them in light of the film’s perceptual nature. The idea that a movie’s perceptual content helps it construct its fictional facts or the idea that our perception of a film’s sights and sounds allows us to pick up, directly, on fictional facts: both are generally overlooked. Each of these approaches gets something right about film. Movies do have an important tie to reality, and that tie consists in how they can show us the world in a way that other art forms can’t. In order to analyze movies, and work towards a proper theory of film meaning, we need to acknowledge film’s presentation of sights and sounds, and how that presentation makes it importantly unique. We also need to try to make sense of a concept of film communication, and all the while we’d be very mistaken in talking about fiction film without talking about the fiction: without making sense of how movies are narrative art forms that tell stories with their images and sounds and construct facts within those stories. It isn’t problematic to adopt elements of each of these aforementioned approaches, then. What is problematic is treating each of these aspects separately: with cinematic realists, only focusing on the perceptual; with semioticians, only focusing on the communicative and conventional; with narrative theorists, only focusing on cognitive and not also perceptual engagement with the nominal; or focusing on fictional truth independent of film ‘showing.’ Not only do these approaches fail in capturing film’s aesthetic complexity; they fail in capturing its aesthetic uniqueness. From the start, we might be wary of any claims of medium specificity according to which film is somehow distinct from other art forms in virtue of its medium; indeed Noël Carroll has raised important objections against it.

          9.       But I think we can, and should, maintain a version of medium specificity that avoids Carroll’s objections. The above approaches generally don’t do so. Extreme versions of cinematic realism don’t distinguish movies from photographs, and weaker versions (which appeal to the expression of thought or the ability to comment on reality) don’t distinguish movies from other expressive works of art. Semioticians don’t distinguish the film from language or from any other art form; typically for them (e.g., for Nelson Goodman) all art is coded in just the way that film is. And imaginative engagement theorists (who attend to our cognitive engagement with a film’s fiction) don’t distinguish between how we interact with a movie’s fiction and how we interact with a book’s fiction. What this means is that cinematic realism isn’t really cinematic realism; that semioticians haven’t mapped out a communicative ability peculiar to film; and that imaginative engagement theorists aren't really talking about our interaction with a movie’s fiction.