Overview

Fiction film has been and remains the privileged site of film studies, with film history regularly being viewed as the rise of the narrative fiction film. Taking Fiction Film Seriously argues that despite this privileged position, the notion of fiction as it relates to cinema, has yet to be properly interrogated. Mario Slugan explores the significant misunderstandings concerning the categorisation of film, audience experience, and the real-life effects of fiction. He contends with the contradictory assumption that fiction films have tangible effects on audiences' beliefs and behaviours, while also intuitively being 'not true' or not to be believed in. Slugan analyses the notion of 'fiction' from a theoretical and historical perspective, considering how it manifests in a broad range of films from the past 110 years, including The Arrival of a Train (Lumière brothers, 1895-1897), The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez, 1999), and Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008). He supports his close readings with findings from philosophy, psychology, and literary studies, and in doing so seeks to challenge the current state of film studies.

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9781350505674

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Reviews

Fiction films dominate cinema history, but the very concept of fiction rarely has been analyzed from the joint perspective of philosophical aesthetics and film studies. Slugan fills this gap with an interdisciplinary monograph investigating the role of belief, emotions and imagination in fiction films with admirable competence and clarity. * Enrico Terrone, Professor of Aesthetics, University of Genoa, Italy * Slugan’s Taking Fiction Film Seriously weaves together theoretical considerations from film studies and philosophy with historical scholarship and cinematic analysis to offer an original take on the nature of fiction as applied to film. It is that rare work of interdisciplinary scholarship which genuinely advances our understanding, and will be a crucial resource for anyone interested in either film or fiction. * Stacie Friend, Reader and Director of Research in Philosophy, The University of Edinburgh, UK * Although the field of film studies confidently uses the labels of fiction and non-fiction, do we really know what fiction is? Mario Slugan dives deep into this realm of ‘mandated imagining’, attending to historical, institutional and spectatorial factors to understand how fiction works and what it does in cinema. * Adrian Martin, Professor of Film & Media Studies, Monash University, Australia * Taking Fiction Film Seriously by Mario Slugan is an immensely important contribution to motion-picture scholarship. For those interested in studying the fiction film, this book is an indispensable starting point. * Noel Carroll, The City University of New York, USA *

Author Information

Mario Slugan is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. He is author of Montage across the Arts (2017), Noël Caroll and Film (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). He is co-editor (with Daniël Biltereyst) of New Perspectives on Early Cinema History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

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