Overview

Shortlisted for the BAFTSS 'Best Monograph' Award 2021 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Mario Slugan (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Weight:   0.395kg
ISBN:  

9781350194816

ISBN 10:   1350194816
Pages:   280
Publication Date:   20 May 2021
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Introduction 1: The Status of Fiction in Early Cinema: Train and Trick Films ARE THERE TEXTUAL CRITERIA FOR FICTIONALITY? EXTRA-TEXTUAL 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: ILLUSION, IMMERSION, IMAGINATION 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’ 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 Bibliography

Reviews

I highly recommend it. Dense with period references and informed by analysis drawn from film theory and historiography, it offers comprehensive, insightful and well-informed discussions of imagination, fiction and make-believe in the experience of film during the late C19th and early C20th. * Leonardo Reviews *

Author Information

Mario Slugan is Lecturer at the Department of Film of Studies, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Montage as Perceptual Experience: Berlin Alexanderplatz from Döblin to Fassbinder (2017) and Noël Carroll and Film: A Philosophy of Art and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). He is also Fellow of the Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, editor of the open-access peer-reviewed academic journal Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe and book reviews editor of Early Popular Visual Culture.

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