Fictions, Narrative, and Aesthetic Enclosure
REFERENCE TO THE CREATED AND EXPERIENCED WORLDS OF individual works is commonplace in the theory and criticism of literature, art, and film. Yet there is little consistency of meaning across disciplines and various critical and theoretical approaches, or even within them, with respect to this proposed description, or analogy. The numerous and varied senses of world in these contexts, as well as in general aesthetics and the philosophy of art, range from the clearly metaphorical (and often unanalyzed) to certain contemporary attempts to invest such “world talk” with more literal (and logical) meaning and precision.
Concerning any representational art form, there is an important but too often neglected difference between the world of a work and the represented or described world (or worlds) within a work.1 Understandably, from one perspective, most theoretical treatments of cinematic worlds are confined to the latter. They seek to describe and understand the nature and comprehension of fictional, narrated, or so-called diegetic worlds of represented places and events in a common space and time inhabited by characters, which are (in some manner or another) referenced and communicated through a film’s audiovisual form. These accounts are largely self-limited to what films are about in terms of a story rather than what they also are, as created, unified works—together with what they may mean in nonnarrative (or extranarrative) and nonfictional ways.
In the position I take throughout this book, by contrast, it is vital and necessary to distinguish between the more or less skillfully constructed fictional story-worlds present within narrative films and the larger, multidimensional, and aesthetically realized worlds of films as artworks. The viability of this distinction is integral to many of the arguments that follow. To fully appreciate this, we must first look at some of the principal ways in which what I will term the world-in (as distinct from the world-of) films and representational and narrative works more generally, have been theorized. We will begin with logical and fictional worlds theory, which for some good reasons may appear to be at the most abstract remove from cinema.
LOGICO-FICTIONAL AND “MAKE-BELIEVE” WORLDS
Inspired by the theories of meaning and reference in the modern philosophical traditions of logical positivism and empiricism—associated with such figures as Gottlieb Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the early Wittgenstein, who asserted that “the facts in logical space are the world”2—one approach to the virtual and imaginary worlds presented by narrative works of all kinds regards them as built entirely out of certain kinds of abstract, quasi-semantic entities, or “propositions,” as expressed in language.3 This general view involves the adoption of what may be identified as the world variance conception of the meaning and truth status of the representational elements of works of (artistic) fiction.
Some references made by a work are factual (or ontologically grounded) as related to features of empirical reality, in the form of the corresponding, genuinely existing objects and properties that precede them. Others are said to be “objectless”; that is, they have no ontic counterparts or make no genuine references to anything that exists outside of human imagination and its many shared, cultural products. Thus, every work that communicates a story contains a kind of mixture or blend in terms of real and fictional persons, places, things, events, and so forth, as well as all their properties and relations as described by the work in words or perceived in its visual depictions.
For many thinkers who are committed to referential and causal theories of meaning and truth (and to so-called truth-conditional semantics), it has been thought necessary to identify or construct a domain of some kind in which objects of reference that are fictional maintain their special mode of existence. Fictional propositions are true, if at all, only in some sense within the cognitive domains—the discourses, or “semantic fields”—where the nonexistent is taken to exist, such as the story-world of an artistic fiction. This remains the case even when such fictions are present in primarily visual works, like films, since sequences of images also may be thought to instantiate cognitive messages that generate linguistic interpretations and construct story-worlds.
To speak, then, of worlds in the propositional sense as within narrative works, including fiction films, is to refer to numerous story-worlds, and these are basically variant and hybrid worlds of actuality and possibility, of reality and imagination.4 In every narrative fiction the true, factual, or historical is intertwined with the “false” and the merely fancied. The basic intuition here is that narrative “world-making” consists essentially of making imaginary modifications to parts or aspects of genuinely existing reality in ways that are more or less partial and subtle or extensive and obvious. In this view empirical reality—that is, the “real” or “actual” world—always remains the standard for the comprehension of every fictional and imaginary world. Representative of this propositional, world-variance position, Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick defend what they refer to as the “intuitive cosmology of fictional worlds.” This entails that “every time we encounter a new fictional story, we create a new world. The default assumption is that this world contains everything that the real world contains. We then modify this representation based on several constraints: what the story tells us explicitly, what we can directly deduce from specific conventions of the fictional genre, and, most importantly, how similar to the real world the fictional world is described as being.”5
Not just philosophers, but a number of literary theorists have embraced this general paradigm. Marie-Laure Ryan, for instance, argues that the metaphor of “textual worlds,” grounded in relations to discourse-independent objects of reference, is indispensable, in offering a less relativist theory of meaning as existing outside of texts.6 David Herman, a fellow traveler in contemporary narratology, claims that the heady contemporary works of Ryan, Thomas G. Pavel, and Lubomir Dolezel “have sought to overturn the structuralist moratorium on referential issues, using tools from model-theoretic or possible-worlds semantics to characterize the world-creating properties of narrative discourse.”7
There are also, however, a host of objections to various versions of the world-variance doctrine and what philosopher Kendall Walton calls the “Reality Principle” that it assumes.8 In terms of our actual engagement with fictions, Walton is among those who have rightly recognized that truth in the discursive and rationalist sense (appealed to in standard propositional conceptions of work-worlds) is inadequate to account for the sort of imaginative commitments that we regularly make in our encounters with representational artworks. In his important book Mimesis as Make-Believe he accepts the existence of fictional or story-worlds that, when analyzed, are found to contain large sets of descriptive propositions.9 Drawing on speech-act theories of language and meaning, Walton goes on to argue, however, that these are copresent with socially instituted “game worlds,” which all appreciators of representational artworks create by intentionally playing, in their imaginations, self-aware games of make-believe. In these activities works (or parts of them) function as guiding props. The theory of tacit game-playing in relation to the representational arts enables Walton to make a general distinction between all matters of reader or viewer engagement with fictional characters, and situations in which they are placed, and the actual truth status, if any, of assertions concerning such characters and their various attributes and actions. (Consistent with this general view, in seeking to better understand fictionality in cinema, Noël Carroll has adopted a speech-act framework and an “intention-response model of communication” inspired by the work of Paul Grice.)10
Other philosophers of art, such as Joseph Margolis and Nelson Goodman, go much further still in raising fundamental doubts about propositional conceptions of fictional worlds within works.11 Margolis also questions key aspects of the games of make-believe thesis as Walton’s proposed alternative. Arguing against the views of Walton, John Searle, and others that the “imaginative work of the novel and pictorial representation” count as “fiction and make-believe,” Margolis draws a distinction between what is “imaginative” and merely “imaginary”: “simply put the imaginative is hardly limited to the imaginary.”12 In fact, in separating these concepts, he points to the “power of modern cinema,” and to the “grand liberties in this respect afforded by filmic imagination,” as showing how “the play of imagination is subtler and freer than propositional commitments.”13 Both Margolis’s and Goodman’s positions are motivated in part by a wish to steer well clear of an age-old Platonic legacy: the pejorative sense of both the imagined and the fictional as equivalent to falsehood, and a corresponding diminishment of the full cognitive status and function of representational art.
CINEMA AND THE HETEROCOSMIC MODEL OF THE ARTWORK
Where does fictional-worlds theory and the different versions and objections to it, here only very briefly sketched, leave us with respect to cinematic worlds? Walton acknowledges that representational works are more than sets of propositions and more than imaginary (“make-believe”) realities. In what must appear to be both a truism and a very substantial understatement, he writes that the “critic or appreciator needs to be sensitive to a work’s features—the look of a painting, the sound of a poem—apart from their contributions to the generation of fictional truths.”14 It is quite clear that the complex sensory-perceptual, cognitive, and affective reality of any work of art, especially one as heterodox and composite as a film, cannot be reduced to fictional objects, representations, propositions, or a series of invitations to engage in acts of imaginative making-believe—if, that is, we are to be left with anything resembling Citizen Kane, Chinatown, Éloge de l’amour, or any other cinematic work as purposefully created and actually experienced in its full range of cognitive and expressive contents. From an aesthetic perspective a film, including its presented world, is not only or simply made (and intended) to refer viewers to aspects of common experience, as modified by creative imagination (freed from any burden of literal truth-telling). Rather, it is also something to be experienced “for itself.”
When many critics and theorists (as well as filmmakers) discuss the worlds of individual films or directors—for example, the “world of 8-1/2” or “Fellini’s world”—they often do not limit themselves to literal contents, in the form of discrete camera-given representations, or, as Dudley Andrew argues in this context, to “a catalog of things appearing on screen.”15 Nor do they apparently mean to refer to fictional characters, places, and actions alone, or even the stories containing them, but also and more generally to a “mode of experience” (Andrew) that these films create.16 The implicit concept of world appealed to thus often extends beyond the fictional reality or story-world abstracted from a film’s formal and medial presentation; it also includes that presentation itself, making use of the properties and possibilities of cinema—entailing camera movements, color schemes, rhythms, editing styles, music, production design, performance registers, soundscapes, and so on—as all contributing to the creation and experience of a readily identifiable cinematic world as a perceptual-imaginative and affective whole. To borrow philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s phrase, while film works do indeed “project worlds” of a fictional nature, they do so in their concrete, perceptual presence, as enabled by a medium that is capable of communicating audiovisually.17
In a cinematic work sensory and affective features are closely integrated with representational and semantic content in a way that is, moreover, far more pronounced than in any literary narrative. No matter how much films share in narrative and fiction-making processes to be found in other arts and media (and no doubt they share much), they are also fundamentally unlike any founded entirely (or primarily) in discourse. In and of themselves the worlds posited by logico-fictional and speech-act (or make-believe) conceptions of representational and fictional works are neither sufficiently “cinematic” (in the above senses) nor sufficiently aesthetic to be the basis of a world-model or mapping that more fully reflects the experience of film works and accounts for more, rather than less, significant artistic features of them.
Stepping back from philosophical and theoretical conceptions of work-worlds rooted in logical and linguistic paradigms, it is important to recognize that these have been preceded by another tradition of reflection on literature and the arts. Unlike the views I have mentioned thus far, this older scholarly tradition rejects the idea that created works are (or should be) primarily experienced, understood, and judged in close conjunction with the real world, and to logical and empirical truth, as a standard of reference. The long-standing position in question is associated with what has been called the “heterocosmic” model of art and artworks. It is anchored in a sharply drawn distinction between the abstract truths of logic and reason (or didacticism) and more concrete “ways of knowing” afforded by artistic perception and imagination. The noted literary theorist and scholar M. H. Abrams has traced the long and fascinating history of this general conception of art as entailing the creation of new worlds of experience, fashioned from sensuous and imagistic, as well as semantic elements.
As Abrams points out, Joseph Addison, Karl Philipp Moritz, Alexander Baumgarten, Kant, and other early and mid-eighteenth-century writers argued in various ways that a representational work of art is not in essence a replication or alternative version of reality as it is familiarly known but a “unique, coherent, and autonomous world unto itself.”18 Artistic creation involves the construction of domains of experience that are very largely self-sufficient and self-referential. Departing from earlier conceptions of art as in one way or another anchored in the traditional Western mimetic doctrine of the imitation of nature, and instead drawing inspiration from the Judeo-Christian theological notion of the Creation as an autonomous, spiritual act, the work of art in this tradition is not as much a reflection or imitation as a human-scale analogue of the natural world freely created by God (in the form of a work created “second nature”).19
It is noteworthy that the most developed early articulation of these ideas comes with the very birth of philosophical reflection on art (and beauty) in its more modern guise. More specifically, it occurs in the writings of Baumgarten, who is generally credited with founding aesthetics as a distinct branch of philosophical inquiry. In claiming for art a more autonomous status within human activity and reflective thought than had traditionally been granted, Baumgarten defends the idea of a work as a veritable world of its own with reference to Leibniz’s logical and metaphysical conception of “compossibility” (i.e., the principle of internal coherence) as applied to poetic works: especially those Baumgarten calls “heterocosmic fictions,” which frequently violate the known laws of nature and establish their own unique relations among phenomena (Abrams 177). As Abrams discusses, Baumgarten contrasts logic, which is abstract and general and signifies essences, with poetry, which is “determinatively particular, individual, specific” (174). A poem is considered to be a matter of representation that is “qualitatively rich, abundant, imagistic” and constitutes a “concrete whole” with a pronounced “sensuous appeal.” Unlike the discourse of reason, poetry and imaginative literature convey a distinct poetic knowledge, which, in his Aesthetica of 1750, Baumgarten also describes as “esthetico-logic” (the logic of “sensuous thinking”) and contrasts with rational thought and argument (Abrams 178).
Abrams aptly summarizes Baumgarten’s subsequently highly influential position: “a poem provides sensuous knowledge of its own poetic world—a world governed by causal laws analogous to causal laws in our world but specific to itself; a world whose ‘poetic’ truth and probability does not consist in correspondence to the actual world but in the internal coherence of its elements; and a world that is not ordered to an end external to itself but by an internal finality whereby all its elements are subordinate to the progressive revelation of its particular theme” (178). Although often articulated in different idioms, and in relation to different art forms, this basic view of the artwork qua self-possessed and singular world was widespread, even commonplace, by the early twentieth century. It may be found expressed in the critical and theoretical writings of figures as diverse as György Lukács, Wassily Kandinsky, John Crowe-Ransom (as also representative of literary New Criticism), J. M. Foster, and Vladimir Nabokov. It survives, as well, with compelling force, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s theorization of the form of literary fantasy as always involving an act of “sub-creation” and the construction of a “secondary world.”20
What is of primary interest to us is the heterocosmic view’s more extensive taking into account of the fact that works not only refer to aspects of the real world, creating hybrid real-fictional alternatives to it, but also more actively transform reality via such borrowings. Thus they transcend “merely” logical or factual truth (or falsity) such as also prompts Gadamer, for instance, to write that the artwork’s world appears not to permit “comparison with reality as the secret measure of all verisimilitude.” Instead, “it is raised above all such comparisons—and hence also above the question of whether it is all real, because a superior truth speaks from it.”21 In other words, it becomes (also) a sui-generis reality, one that in some ways, at least, sets its own standards for its own experience and meaning, beyond all questions and putative problems of empirical fact and justified belief.
Although originally developed with reference to poetry (and offered in explanation of the creative genius of the poet), in its stressing of the sensuous and formal dimensions of works, this particular understanding of artistically created worlds and their experience was already in the eighteenth century also being applied to painting and music. In addition to carrying with it significant lessons for reflections on film as art, this doctrine of world-creation in and through art, going back to the very beginnings of philosophical aesthetics, also has substantial echoes in some contemporary, experience-based accounts of cinema. However, by way of phenomenology (in its post-Husserlian forms) combined with a (problematic) anti-intentionalism, and a rejection of narratological, cognitive, and auteurist approaches to cinema, some of the theories in question may be seen to take central aspects of the heterocosmic idea to an untenable extreme. In relation to theorizing films and their worlds, in certain respects they tend to confirm Abrams’s critical conclusion that the claim that “a work is to be contemplated for its own sake as a self-sufficient entity, severed from all relations to its human author, to its human audience, and to the world of human life and concerns . . . accords only with selective aspects of our full experience of great works of art” (Abrams 187).
FILM MINDS, SUBJECTS, AND A WORLD APART?
In his book Filmosophy Daniel Frampton attempts to synthesize the insights of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and Vivian Sobchack’s cinema-focused interpretations of it, with Hugo Munsterberg’s now classic, proposed analogies between film viewing and the elementary processes of visual perception and thought. In notable respects, however, Frampton’s theoretical construct is also a contemporary cinematic version of the heterocosmic view, possessing some of its strengths, as well as some of its weaknesses. The latter pertain to the limitations of a conception of an artwork world, cinematic or otherwise, as an entirely self-sufficient perceptual experience, with perception, in this instance, extending to “lived” or “embodied” perception conceived in phenomenological terms.
Frampton agrees with Sobchack that a film not only presents objects and a world but also, and partly through the aegis of the camera-lens apparatus (and its movement), a cinematic seeing of those objects and that world, amounting to intentions and attitudes toward them. However, he replaces her radical model of a film as (for this reason) an “embodied” and perceiving subjectivity with that of a film as a disembodied and thinking “transsubjective” agency.22 Thus, in one of his many neologisms Frampton posits the experiential existence of a “filmind.” It is described as a creating and organizing form of distinctly cinematic consciousness governing films and taking up, purportedly, something like the awareness and perspective on phenomena of a conscious being or mind. Considered experientially distinct from the presence of the director as creator, or any implicit (or “invisible”) narrating agency within the world of a film (seeming to present it), the filmind—sometimes also simply equated with the film “itself”—engages in creative formal and stylistic “film-thinking” about characters and situations. This serves to transform, to intentionally redesign, what is automatically captured by the camera in the form of perceptually recognizable objects and features into a virtual “filmworld,” as something over and above such basic, mimetic representation; this process today extends to what Frampton regards as the particularly “fluid” and global transformations enabled by CGI technology.23 As it unfolds in a film’s viewing, this filmworld is concretely experienced as one perpetually created, intended, and maintained by the filmind (akin in this respect to the reality-creating and maintaining dream of Lewis Carroll’s Red King).
Based on what we have established thus far, this theory has some clear merits. To begin with, it recognizes that a film brings into existence a unique, creatively constructed world. This world consists of something more than representational and fictional contents alone and is also more than a simple sum or aggregation of such contents, since it also includes their highly formed artistic presentation. Such a world, within which viewers find themselves experientially immersed, is rightly seen to encompass the full formal and sensuous dimensions of films (falling under the heading of what Frampton terms “cinematics”), dimensions that, as Frampton notes with some justification, have tended to be neglected or at least deemphasized in a good deal of philosophy of film (at least to the time of his writing), as well as, we might add, in some semiotic, cognitive, and narratological film theory (Frampton 9). He persuasively insists that a better understanding of cinematic art necessitates more comprehensive study of these created worlds from the viewer’s perspective, as in some sense temporally emergent perceptual and cognitive realities. In their fundamental character as interpretative and “transfigurative” (rather than simply imitating our direct perceptions) film worlds may, in turn, have a “transfiguring effect” on “our understanding and perception of reality” (Frampton 5–6). Yet there are also problems with Frampton’s account, ones that are highly instructive in terms of our larger concerns in this chapter and those following. Some of these pertain to issues surrounding the viewer’s experience of the “filmworld” in question and the creative intentionality behind it.
Frampton is surely correct in maintaining that the actual perceptual and affective experience of films as audiovisual works and the meanings that they manifest in such powerful fashion, as rooted in this experience, always exceed the actual intentions and (fore-)knowledge of the filmmaker, as well as the cognitive resources of any individual viewer. His conclusion, however—that, from the perspective “internal” to its concrete experience, the filmmaker cannot rightly or adequately be regarded (or actually experienced as) the source or agency responsible for a film work and world’s perceptual and artistic form, meaning, and creative transformations of reality—appears highly unwarranted.24 Moreover, as ingenious and ostensibly appealing, in some ways, as the suggested alternative may be, in the form of a transsubjective “filmind,” it is inadequate and to a degree self-defeating.
Making room for this distinctly cinematic mode of sensation, “thought,” and creative intentionality in which films and viewers participate entails pushing the filmmaker and his or her collaborators out of the frame (almost literally), as it were. One of the motivations for conceiving of a film (at least to a certain metaphorical extent) either as a conscious entity (or mind) or as a perceiving self or subject (as in Sobchack’s phenomenology of film, where a film is regarded as not only a “visible object” but also a “viewing” subject) appears to be a desire to preserve the self-sufficiency and experiential autonomy of a cinematic world as one wholly given to perception.25 This enables this world to be seen and heard (as well as theorized) as the concrete result, or object, of the “thought,” “perception,” and “vision” of both the film and the viewer existing in a purported relation of immediate intersubjective communion—without, that is, any necessary reference to the filmmaker (including as a self-expressing “auteur”) and his or her subjectivity, intentions, actions, and so forth. The supposed advantage of this strategy is, in Frampton’s words, to avoid “watching a film with the idea that the film’s actions are directly the result of an external historical person [which] removes the filmgoer from the film. Each action reminds them of the director making decisions and the mechanics of filmmaking” (31). Films and their worlds are thus seen to be safeguarded as self-enclosed perceptual and affective realities, generally free from extraperceptual biographical, historical, and personal-intentional mediations and distractions. It is difficult to accept, however, that a viewer’s being aware before seeing a film, or being “reminded” while watching it, of directorial decisions, of the mechanics of filmmaking, or of the actual creator(s) responsible for its existence (and for at least some of its meaning content) necessarily removes him or her from its created world—especially when this world is defined (as in Frampton’s account) as somehow more than a fictional (and imaginary) one. To assume this last is to court the dubious notion that engaging with, caring about, and taking seriously the presented world of a cinematic work during its experience requires a naive “belief” in its actual existence (or an active, global suspension of disbelief concerning it) as supported by a film’s creation and maintenance of so-called diegetic illusion.
Moreover, at least some major portions of the reality-based cognitive background of film experience, culture, and context are not somehow optional to a film world’s “concrete” perceptual and affective being and to its characteristically cinematic experience but are partly constitutive of that very being and experience. For instance, the inescapable fact, which withstands any phenomenological, or indeed, “perceptualist” reduction of films, is that salient aspects of a film world as experienced are to varying degrees reliant on viewer awareness not only of the existence of a filmmaker (as the cinematic “world creator”) in the abstract but also, often, of the authorial acts, intentions, and experienced “presence” of a particular director in his or her film. In other words, we must accommodate in theory as well as film viewing experience the real individual qua intending artist who may be appropriately considered chiefly responsible for a film world’s singular existence and many of the artistic features (in some cases self-reflexive and autobiographical) it possesses (not wholly responsible for these, of course, given that cinema is also a collaborative enterprise and art).
Whatever position one adopts on notoriously difficult issues surrounding artistic intentionality, and whatever distinctions one wishes to suggest between cinema and other, more traditional, art forms concerning these, there is, at least, no contradiction or insurmountable difficulty in holding a position of what has been referred to as “moderate actual intentionalism.”26 This would entail, in this context, that (a) the filmmaker (or makers, to include the collaborators working under his or her artistic direction) is the true and full creator of a film’s cinematic and artistic world (as a full perceptual and narrative-fictional reality), and yet (b) that the significance, meaning, and truth of any and every film world (and its parts) always, and necessarily—and for reasons that we will trace—exceeds the filmmaker’s (or filmmakers’) life (or lives), intentions, and activities. Indeed, to appropriately recognize and accept a filmmaker’s actual artistic and expressive intentions is not necessarily to engage in any form of psychology that compromises either the objective status of a film work and world or the immediacy of its perceptual-affective experience on the part of viewers.
Beyond the specific issue of authorship and intentionality and their place in cinematic experience, although not solitary and sealed off, like the privacy enjoyed by each individual mind, films are, of course, recognizably singular from any aesthetic or critical standpoint, as the heterocosmic view suggests. Nonetheless, and not in opposition to their singularity, cinematic works are still highly situated and “networked” in a great many ways, participating through their symbolic aspects in external reference relations that are more or less proximate and unequivocal or remote and tenuous. Moreover, interpretation by viewers, as well as by critics and theorists, is in part the very process of determining the possible relevance and proper application of “external” knowledge (from the patently obvious to the esoteric) to a film, including what pertains to other films, styles, and genres, to the filmmaker’s possible intentions, to relevant critical and theoretical ideas, and so on. This is a process that, in addition, occurs (as it must) during the real-time, perceptual experience of a film and its world, which from one perspective brings it into (full) being. In the appropriate application of such relevant (prior) knowledge, as opposed to its mental bracketing or willed ignorance, viewers may literally experience more of the singular, irreducible, presented world of The Passenger or Casino, for instance, and not (necessarily) less. Such relatively more knowledge informed perception often leads to quite literally seeing and hearing something more, or different, on the screen than one otherwise might, not to mention to often feel more deeply in relation to it.
I have raised these related, perhaps familiar, points rather emphatically because any adequate theorization of cinematic art, and of film experience as aesthetic experience, must (one would think) fully acknowledge not only the sensory, perceptually given and affective dimensions of films but also the full extent of their intentional, cognitive, and symbolic (referential) ones (extending in some cases to what is sometimes simply referred to as a work’s “context”). In our present view the latter are as constitutive, in principle, of their artistic nature—and of their perceptually, cognitively, and affectively immersive and transformative aspects as “worlds” of their own—as the former. If we must continue to be wary of the pitfalls of the so-called intentionalist fallacy with respect to a film as much as a novel or poem, we must also seek to avoid the equally insidious doctrine that Peter Wollen, with respect to cinema, has aptly termed the “contamination fallacy.” This involves considering “any work as complete in itself, an isolated unity whose intercourse with other films, other texts, is carefully controlled to avoid contamination.”27
Of course, in some ways a film work is appropriately described as “complete in itself.” It is, for instance, the source of a unique and novel sensory experience, set in its own given temporal and spatial continuum, and a created object or event to which (normally) nothing is added and from which nothing is taken away once it is released to a public. But none of these well-known aspects of its singular mode of existence lend support to assumptions that it is freestanding or autonomous in the quite different sense of semantic isolation or muteness or that a film’s understanding and appreciation as audiovisual art, or as cinema in its “purest” form, somehow requires no, or only minimal, extrawork knowledge during (as well as after) its viewing, on potentially all levels. Whether forwarded in the context of a formalist, perceptualist, or phenomenological account of cinematic art, it is a notable, if perhaps understandable, mistake, I would suggest, to conflate the distinctive and sui generis character of a film work and world with the idea that once its basic material—drawn from ordinary reality—has been “transfigured” in a film’s creation, it has little in common with any other worlds (of film, or art, or otherwise) and is no longer in a highly active, and work-constituting, experiential relationship with these. In part through the recognized or imputed intentions of its real-world creators, a film’s world is clearly in just such a relationship. A film present a new and singular cinematic reality—or “world”—yes, but one that is made, experienced, and has meaning only against the mental background of the old, the existing, the familiar, and the “real,” even if by contrast alone. Although possessing a particular iconic and spatial-temporal concreteness, owing both to the photographic basis of the film medium (whether analog or digital) and its presentational (as distinct from merely representational or symbolic) nature, a film’s created and presented reality, taking the form of what may be rightly described as a constructed and presented world, is always defined by what exists “outside,” as well as “inside,” it, strictly speaking—even if, although not, as must be added, not in logical, propositional, or didactic terms alone.
Many intervening, historical articulations of the heterocosmic model of artworks (including as part of the romantic movement and its successors) have, as Abrams points out, tended to overstate or misconstrue the nature and extent of the separation between the world of the work and what we take to be the real and familiar common world in some of the ways noted above. Yet, and as the more compelling ‘neo-heterocosmic’ aspects of Frampton’s account may also be taken to usefully suggest, it nonetheless does bring us closer in many ways to what I will subsequently describe as the total created world of a film, as a formal and presentational construction (rather than only a representational and symbolic one), than the propositional and “make-believe” models discussed thus far. This said, however, although the heterocosmic view helps bring into clearer focus the aesthetic limitations of logico-fictional (and imagination-centered) accounts of the worlds associated with representational works, this should also not blind us to the central insights of the latter, rooted in so-called commonsense metaphysics. For the acknowledged existence (however existence may be precisely defined here) of a vast plurality of imagination-enabled story-worlds, which sometimes engage Coleridge’s famous “willing suspension of disbelief,” is an important part of any theoretical account of the artistic dimension and potentials of narrative cinema. In accordance with philosopher Peter Lamarque’s position, it is seemingly indispensable for making rational sense of the copious assertions we make concerning the unreal or “nonexistent” entities and animate beings found everywhere in literature and other arts, including narrative films, as well as for a coherent account of fictionality.28 As we will see shortly, such story-worlds also transcend, in some ways at least, the individual works, forms, and media in which they are encountered.
THE TRUTH ABOUT FICTIONAL WORLDS AND FILMS
Despite notable differences among them, all concepts of fictional-narrative worlds—including propositional worlds, Walton’s make-believe worlds, and Bordwell’s “fabula” worlds of films, as highly constructed by viewers through perceptual-cognitive interpretations of their sights and sounds—are an attempt to capture our primary intuition that in some sense the actions of the characters of a fiction-film story (in this case) take place in a specially created, imagination-enabled or -assisted realm of being, not directly accessible to our senses (and including such characters and actions). If the traditional heterocosmic conception supports a view of the “sensuous” artistic singularity of film works, in their concrete totality, contemporary approaches in terms of the nature of fictional narratives support the idea, not necessarily contradictory, that films are, in part, also “texts” (of an audiovisual nature). They are figuratively “read” and comprehended always to some degree against the background of the world of empirical fact (among other things) and, more generally, require substantial interpretation of many kinds and with many (sorts of) objects.
For our purposes in relation to cinema, the key points concerning fictional worlds, or “story-worlds,” and the characters and objects that populate them, are as follows. First, whether taking the form of the most psychologically rounded and identification-desiring worlds of the most conventional Hollywood films, for example, or those strange environments found in more experimental works from all periods that push at the outermost boundaries of narrative (and fictional) cinema normally conceived, such worlds are present within narrative films as experienced and comprehended by viewers. This applies regardless of how these worlds come about, are specifically engaged with, or are theorized.
Second, to varying degrees fictional and represented worlds (or, perhaps more precisely, some of their contents) transcend any one film or film narrative. In this sense, at least, they possess a certain autonomy and “ideal” existence. The “same” person, place, object, or event, whether fictional (Gotham City, Norman Bates) or existing in an actual past or present (Paris, Alexander the Great) yet fictionalized, may, for instance, be represented in more than one film. They may find form, that is, in as many different versions as there are films representing or making reference to them, for their own narrative (and artistic) purposes. Likewise, a number of different films, by the same or different maker(s), may be set in the same recognizable fictional world, e.g., that of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, charting the lives of the same protagonists (played by the same actors) as they evolve through time. As in the case of so many sequels and remakes (and underpinning their very possibility, in one sense), each such film constitutes a different spatial-temporal view or version of a shared fictional world. Making this same point, Wolf recognizes that not only are imaginary worlds fully “transmedial” (constructed by other means than written texts) but logically independent of the narrative structures with which they are frequently conjoined or associated: “worlds function apart from the narratives set within them, even though the narratives have much to do with the worlds in which they occur, and are usually the means by which the worlds are experienced.” For this reason, he adds, “storytelling and world-building are different processes.”29
Third, and following directly from these observations, as Victor Perkins has argued in his suggestive article “Where Is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction,” to some degree at least, a “film’s form and method are incomprehensible outside of a recognition that its story takes place, and its images both are made and found, in a world.”30 As Bordwell and other theorists also maintain, film theoretical and critical recognition and exploration of exactly how such fictional and imaginary worlds are conveyed and constructed in films is essential if we hope to better understand processes of cinematic storytelling, some aspects of film style, and how fictional and narrative features and processes interact with other artistic (or distinctly aesthetic) aspects of films.
Finally, apart from their theorization, and as reflecting the mental schema and “intuitive cosmology” of fictional worlds that Bloom and Skolnick point to—coupled with the experience of many narratives and cinematic works—film viewers clearly and routinely do compare, contrast, and complete the represented, fictional domains appearing onscreen with whatever is taken as relevant (aspects of) reality, in the form of some aspect of the “real” and “true” world at any point in time. They determine for themselves, that is, what is to be taken as real or unreal in a film, what comports or deviates from offscreen reality, and, potentially at least, why these recognized similarities and differences are being offered. Indeed, to appreciate and understand films not just as stories told, and imaginary worlds with just enough “furniture” to produce a coherent and meaningful chronology of events, but also as the created and more broadly meaningful works of art they are, such comparisons (founded on the conscious fictional world recognition Perkins identifies) are often necessary. This is not least because film creators routinely take distinctly artistic advantage of this apparently natural human propensity (or, at least, one shared by many cultures at many times) to distinguish the real from the imaginary or fictional when confronted with artistic representations: as when, for instance, actual, historical figures (or places, or objects) are placed alongside fictional ones in order to generate particular meanings and affects in films. Such juxtapositions are a familiar vehicle throughout cinema for all sorts of formal thematic, allusive, reflexive, and conceptual significances, as well as a means to elicit emotions.
In sum, fictional story-worlds qua such worlds are clearly the object of considerable attention on the part of film viewers—even if they are only one of a number of experientially and (potentially) artistically significant parts of a cinematic work of art—and, in the case of a narrative film, the fictional story-world is not always, in its appreciative experience, the most important or primary aesthetic object of viewer attention. Therefore, although they are seriously incomplete in aesthetic terms, as the heterocosmic perspective may be taken to have long suggested, logical and fictional-narrative models of worlds have a proper and, indeed, necessary place in any rounded account of narrative cinematic art, not least for that which they rightly recognize as existing within films and the minds and attention of viewers. Our present concern in this and the following chapters, however, is not with such fictional realities (and worlds) in and of themselves but with how they may be seen to be integrated with, and contained within, cinematic works as aesthetic wholes, in their interrelated perceptual, affective, and reflective dimensions—together, that is, with the nature of this integration and containment, insofar as it may be addressed and theorized in general terms. This focus now brings us rather naturally into perhaps more familiar film theory territory.
DIEGETIC WORLDS
If the fictional world of a work considered in something like propositional terms is defined in opposition to the real world of fact (as the standard of nonfiction), according to the widespread concept of diegesis, the “diegetic world” is associated with the content of cinematic representation or narration as distinct from the formal or medial (or “textual”) processes of it. As one half of a purported, binary opposition, everything that falls outside of the diegetic is said to compose the “nondiegetic.” Thus the musical underscore of a film sequence, for instance, or an insert shot of an object that cannot be plausibly located within the world the characters inhabit or know of (insofar as that world is established by the film), are often regarded as included within the mixed bag of a film’s nondiegetic elements.
Like the logico-linguistic concept of a fictional world (and bearing similarities to it) the diegetic/nondiegetic division is not, as such, particular to cinema but may in theory be applied to all narratives. Etienne Souriau is credited as having first used the relevant concept in relation to cinema, in his 1951 article “La structure de l’univers et le vocabulaire de la filmologie.” Souriau regarded the diegesis as the total “denoted” field or level of reference of a film, which contains represented characters and events, as comprehended by the viewer. Following Souriau, an aesthetician engaged in comparing the forms and functions of different art forms, Christian Metz and Noël Burch, from their respective semiotic-structuralist perspectives, also regard the diegetic in these terms. In Metz’s film semiotics the concept is understood as pertaining to a film’s narrative “but also the fictional space and time dimensions implied in and by the narrative, and consequently the characters, the landscapes, the events, and other narrative elements, in so far as they are considered in their denoted aspect.”31 Burch argues that the diegetic aspect of a film is a matter of the “imaginary space-time” of its story-world and the sum total of its specific significations; as such, and counter to other theorists’ strictly narratological use of the term, “there is much more to diegesis than narrative.”32 These are important attempts at definition to which we will return shortly.
Some earlier commentators, including Jean Mitry, expressed reservations concerning Souriau’s appeal to the ancient concept of diegesis, counterpart of mimesis, in relation to cinema.33 It is only in the past few decades, however, that the whole notion of the diegetic dimension of a film, and what is and is not properly considered within its confines, has come under more widespread and detailed critical scrutiny, in film music and sound studies, in particular. This is not at all surprising, given that its most frequent and familiar application is to music in film, which has been traditionally classified in binary terms as diegetic or nondiegetic.
Critics of the distinction and its necessity or value have highlighted instances in films—including recent mainstream Hollywood productions—where the presence of a specific piece or section of music can be neither easily nor usefully classified as wholly nondiegetic.34 It is not always clear, that is, what sounds or music characters are or are not (represented as) hearing at any one point in a film or the exact nature of the source as being within or without the local and more global space in which the characters are seen to exist and act. Rescuing the distinction, as it were, has involved introducing a great deal of qualification and invoking other, intermediate classifications such as the “metadiegetic,” “extradiegetic,” and so forth.35 These and other similar considerations have prompted the more fundamental question of why we need to erect such a divide between a world of characters and the total audiovisual experience of a film on the part of a viewer (which of course includes characters and their perceptions) in the first place?
One reason we might want to do this, although not necessarily the best, is that such a bifurcated model is necessary to support some postclassical theories of film narration, deriving from largely Continental accounts of language, discourse, and narrative (as rooted for the most part in Saussurean structural linguistics). These theories hinge on a posited distinction between the assumed invisible or self-effacing (i.e., nonexperiential) nature of a film’s narrating processes, particularly as found in more conventional cinema, in contrast to the experienced reality of its product. In this view the attention of the majority of film viewers (with respect to the majority of narrative films) is mainly, or only, focused on the latter: that is, narrated content in the form of diegetic sound, image, sequence, and “world.” But if this particular narratological model is largely rejected, as seems reasonable on a number of other grounds,36 why still insist on the binary conception of film works it reinforces?
Musicologist Ben Winters has recently argued that the claimed division should be abandoned and that what are normally thought of as nondiegetic features of films, such as musical underscoring (e.g., The Third Man’s famous zither score), be posited as existing within the world of films. This is justified, in his view, by the fact that all music heard by the viewer is simultaneous and copresent with his or her actual perception of characters, and comprehension of their perceptions and actions, with the music (in this case) dramatically effecting how the characters and their actions are perceived and understood. In other words, for the viewer the diegetic and nondiegetic belong equally to one and the same perceptual or phenomenological reality of a film. According to Winters, as joined by other theorists, for this reason there is little sense in considering nondiegetic music and other features as somehow detached or detachable from, and “outside of,” the fictional reality of a film’s story-world.37 In wider terms the whole concept of the nondiegetic is seen to be little more than a convenient film theoretical abstraction, ultimately resting on a number of unduly realist assumptions (some of which we have previously discussed) about the fictional worlds of films and of cinematic characters, as being essentially like real worlds and real people. It should be jettisoned, Winters and others suggest, in favor of viewer-experience-based models of cinematic works and worlds in their actual experiential concreteness (Winters points to Frampton’s “filmosophy” as such a model, and other theorists suggest Michel Chion’s conception of cinematic “audiovision”).38
Apart from issues specific to film and music studies, such observations and arguments are part of a larger, more encompassing, challenge within some recent film theory that may usefully by termed the “phenomenological objection.” This source of criticism targets not only the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction but other prominent aspects of film narratology, in both its structuralist-semiotic and cognitive-constructivist forms, which for the above-noted reasons are regarded as unnecessarily intellectually abstract and abstracting from the presumed actual experience of films. Its principal idea (as reflected in Frampton’s Filmosophy) is that the represented and fictional dimension of a film is part of a wholly independent, self-enclosed, and fully concrete perceptual-affective reality, of the sort already discussed. In this view perceptual cinematic form and narrative content cannot be meaningfully separated (on any level), as they may be in the case of literary narratives—which, as discursive and imaginary, rather than perception-based, are inherently amenable to semiotic and cognitive models and distinctions (having their origins in the study of literary texts) in a way that films simply are not.
The desire to be more authentic to the concrete audiovisual experience of cinematic works that drives this point is entirely appropriate with respect to these issues. Yet however much they are experientially coupled with the represented, fictional contents of a film—and that they are would seem odd to deny—those audio and visual features frequently termed nondiegetic are quite properly regarded as being outside and certainly distinct from a film’s story-world (i.e., including all that the characters as characters are known to be aware of). That is, they are neither fictional nor “fictionalized,” and in many instances are presentational but not representational, in the sense of making reference to particular objects in a way that characterizes all fictional worlds. Moreover, as I previously pointed out, these perceptual and stylistic features may sometimes be concretely experienced by viewers as so distinct, even when also perceived and interpreted as very closely conjoined with represented contents of images, sequences, and stories. All this said, and getting to the core truth of the “phenomenological” or experientialist argument in question and what it rightly emphasizes, it is also the case that such formal, audiovisual, and musical features of a film are never somehow “external” to its total aesthetic reality—that is, the experienced world of a film as an artwork.39
Thus we return, and predictably, to the difference between the (fictional) world in a film and the strongly suggested existence of another, “larger” world of a cinematic work, yet also, in this context, to some unnecessary and rather misleading confusion between the two. Nondiegetic sound and music, for instance, certainly should be conceived as existing within a total perceptual-immersive and affective reality of a film as this is in some respects “directly” known and experienced by viewers. And as I have already begun to argue, there is good reason to regard the reality in question as a unique world, at some (at least) notable remove from all that falls outside it. But, as duly recognized by Souriau, Mitry, Metz, Burch, Perkins, Bordwell, and other theorists, whatever name this perceptual-affective (and meaning-bearing) totality goes under, it is surely distinct from that fictional-represented “world” that grounds the existence of characters and the coherence of their actions as constituting the narrated story of a film. A main source of the difference in question resides in the fact that, for the reasons considered earlier, the contents of the represented and fictional world exist as logically and “ontologically” distinct (imagined or imaginary) realities within a film (as in any representational work) as if on a different plane or level than other experienced features and aspects of it (not least because the features and aspects in question are “real” and not fictional).
Undoubtedly there are often substantial gray, or shadowy, areas for both viewers and theorists alike in terms of what may or may not be diegetic or nondiegetic within a given sequence, or even with respect to an entire film—that is, what is or is not part of the fictional reality in which the characters may be said, and seen, to exist and behave, and when. And a given feature of a film such as a piece of music, or an image-object, may move from one sphere to the other in the course of its temporal unfolding or, indeed, may exist in both simultaneously. Many classic film soundtracks (e.g., Forbidden Planet, The Birds, A Clockwork Orange), and more contemporary ones, are celebrated for continually entering and exiting the “diegetic world” and generating substantial emotion and meaning as a result. As Robynn Stilwell has convincingly argued, however, such borderline, and border-crossing, cases tend only to experientially reconfirm the “ontological” difference at the root of the distinction itself, as well as the more intuitively felt “fascinating gap” between the diegetic and nondiegetic.40 Rather than abandoning the theoretical impulse behind the diegetic and nondiegetic distinction (in its original film-related sense), by virtue of denying the existence of the nondiegetic, what is needed is a recognition that, as a matter of viewer interpretation to some degree, whether any specific feature of a film belongs to the diegetic world or is outside of it at any given point in time is highly relative to the film in question. More specifically it is relative to a film’s style, narrative and artistic intentions, interpreted meanings, genre considerations, and so on.
Indeed, and in wider terms, the specific nature of the relation between the created domain of characters and story events as a whole, on the one hand, and their cinematic, stylistic presentation, on the other, is hugely variable. Perkins writes perceptively that while it may be “normal for a movie to stress and sustain the separation between the fictional world and the world of the viewer,” some films present a fictional world in which “beings can respond to our watching. . . . In another, the film may have its actors step aside from their character roles and move apart from the fictional world so as to appear to address or confront us in their own right.”41 Whether conventional or unconventional, “transparent” and self-effacing or opaque and self-reflexive (in generally recognized ways), any specific relation between the (fictional) objects of representation, on the one hand, and their cinematic presentation, on the other (together with at least some of the meaning and affect generated by this relation) is still ultimately founded on the recognized difference in kind between the two. (As I noted earlier, this difference is likely a psychologically and culturally conditioned one, which is also reaffirmed through the experience of many narratives and narrative films.)
It is right to stress, as Perkins does, that the story-world of a film may range from relatively more fragmentary, unstable, pretextual, and implausible, on the one hand, to more “three-dimensional,” detailed, and realistic, on the other. All this will be the result of artistic choices and intentions on the part of filmmakers, as well as commitments to stylistic patterns and genre forms and expectations. Yet if the precise nature and characteristics of this fictional reality (the world-in a film), together with its relation to other cinematic and artistic features and meanings of a film, is always work-specific, its basic “ontological” and experiential durability (which Perkins also points to) would appear to be more universal. This is true especially since the fictional world of a work does not simply “go away” when in all manner of different ways it is brought to more conscious attention, and thrown into relief, by its specific cinematic presentation—and when, in addition, this presentation itself becomes a greater object of viewer attention and consideration.
The conceptual task at hand is to retain the fictional world-in a narrative film as created through a given work’s literal representations taking on a fictional character and grasped and pieced together by viewers, however easy or challenging this may be in specific cases. Yet we must also fully acknowledge and describe a narrative film’s singular cinematic and artistic (i.e., wholly work-specific) reality, as a perceptual, cognitive and affective one. One way to do this, I suggest, is to grant the world-of a cinematic work, as corresponding to this latter reality, and as transcending both the literal and the fictional in all sorts of different directions, toward all manner of objects of meaning, feeling, and attention that are neither fictional nor denoted directly. (Nor, moreover, are they in all cases the “narrated” products of cinematic narration, and thus “diegetic” in this specific sense.)
A promising starting point for elaborating on such a created and experienced world-of, at least as it pertains to the level of semantic meaning, is to be found in returning to Metz’s particular version of the diegetic field of a film as largely a matter of “denotation.” He argues this position most persuasively in his earlier, prepsychoanalytic writings (collected in Film Language). Metz’s claims bear a close relation to ideas developed in nonsemiotic French aesthetic theory of the mid-twentieth century, and via this route they are clearly connected to one strand of the theory and philosophy of artistic worlds that I wish to bring to bear on narrative cinema, starting with these issues.
REPRESENTATIONAL, EXPRESSIVE, AND AESTHETIC DIMENSIONS
Metz’s conception of the diegetic in cinema addresses the fundamental difference between a film work’s core denotations and its other equally referential levels and aspects, wherein the two are in a relation of interdependence but not identity. Drawing on the standard denotation/connotation distinction central to Saussurean linguistics and semiotics as inspired by it (but predating both), Metz contrasts cinematic denotation—and, by extension the whole diegetic reality of a film as made up of denotations—with all figurative connotation. So, for instance, a film image (or image-sequence) from The Seventh Seal may denote (literally represent) an itinerant circus couple and their young child. But through their positioning within the frame, or the way they are lit, together with the narrative, thematic, and allusive contexts in which these figures appear in the film, they may also be seen to connote, or figuratively refer to, Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus. Even more in the direction of metaphor, they may represent a hope for the future in the midst of a world struck through with existential despair.
For Metz, as for many other film theorists past and present, denotation in cinema (as literal representation) is largely “given” by the camera in the form of the iconic and what he refers to as the “analogical” character of film images, as highly recognizable pictures of things in the world. Such iconicity and a recognition of basic representational contents of images on the part of viewers is, in most cases, so direct and easily apprehended that it may appear, at least, entirely natural in the sense of an act of direct unmediated visual perception.42 Connotation, in contrast, is that nonliteral level of meaning in a film’s representational dimension that, while rooted in such camera-enabled iconicity, also substantially transcends it, in being always (more) interpretive. This is to say, it is more fully (sometimes wholly) dependent on cultural and background knowledge (if still to varying degrees in specific instances, and not always specific to any one culture or community). Metz associates this entire “extra,” nondenotational, and “cultural” significance with a film’s “aesthetic” dimension, which by nature is subject to much greater creative control on the part of filmmakers than may be exercised over cinematic denotation (as recognizable representation) given the latter’s more immediate, “natural” and near-universal (hence preaesthetic) character.43
Although philosopher Mikel Dufrenne is cited in Film Language, the fact that his phenomenological distinction between the represented and expressed worlds of works of art, as articulated in his pioneering Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, was an important inspiration on Metz’s early views has received little comment, particularly in English-language scholarship. More specifically, Dufrenne’s distinction (and the reasons for it) informs Metz’s conception of the diegetic in film as the total field of literal and fictional representation, as well as the equation of the distinctly aesthetic aspect of narrative films with associational and figurative meaning (and an affective expression tied to it), which surpasses this representation.44 Moreover, Dufrenne’s own brief but important discussion of this underlying distinction in relation to narrative cinema, specifically (a subject to be treated in more detail in chapter 7), has not received the attention it merits.
Briefly encapsulated, Dufrenne maintains that although marked by all of the symbolically mediated “distance that separates the real from the represented,” the represented, fictional world of an “aesthetic object” (that is, an artwork as it is experienced) is instead a kind of pseudo-world.45 Unavoidably incomplete and schematic, it consists of relatively fragmentary hints or cues of a more expansive and extensive fictional and imaginary reality-continuum. Such a reality is, of course, impossible for a work in any form or medium to somehow perceptually convey in its entirety but rather may be only suggested to the mind of the reader or viewer for its necessary completion in (as we say) imagination. (Here it may be added that as far as cinema is concerned, even given current technically sophisticated digital and multimedia productions and virtual environments, this schematism remains no less true today—and for the foreseeable future—than it was at the time of Dufrenne’s writing in the mid-twentieth-century celluloid film era.) However, as partial and merely suggestive as it is in comparison with actual perceptually given (nonrepresentational) reality, basic representation in art provides a work with stable and generally recognizable spatial and temporal foundations, together with a “norm of objectivity” of which the audience is the standard or guardian.46 In other words, as Dufrenne makes the familiar point, representational works, including narrative films, require audiences to make the imaginative contribution that brings a plausible physical and social context in which characters live and act into experiential existence, with the necessity for such a reality understood and readily granted.
Similarly, in Film Language Metz describes the cinematically “denoted reality” of basic film representations as a reality that “comes only from within us, from the projections and identifications that are mixed with our perceptions of the film.”47 Although expressed quite differently, Dufrenne’s and Metz’s views are in general accord, as it may be added, with the working assumptions of Bordwell and other more recent film theorists’ and philosophers’ so-called cognitivist and constructivist accounts of narrative film perception and comprehension. These thinkers likewise regard a narrative and successively represented story-world of a film as coming into existence through “scattered indications whose synthesis we continually effect,” as Dufrenne writes of the aesthetic object’s represented world. While always necessary, this task may be more or less demanding according to the work (and style) in question.48 A film, like any representational artwork, may thus be seen to borrow, and actually represent, only what it needs from the real world for both its particular narrative and extranarrative artistic ends—whether these latter are more form-centered in nature or, as Dufrenne stresses, expressive-affective. Thus a film may be rightly seen as willingly dependent on familiar, extrawork reality, in this dimension, or level of its apprehension.
The key idea here (as the reader may already have gleaned) is that while both inevitable and necessary, the viewer’s imaginative actualization or “completion” of the schematic represented (fictional) world of a visual work, including a film, is not the primary goal of an aesthetic experience of it, nor is it necessarily the source of its most significant symbolization or artistically conveyed meaning and “truth.” This is the case even if, as it must be added, and as will be a major topic of discussion in subsequent chapters (including with reference to Mitry’s film theory) most artistic meaning and affect in narrative cinema is still built on, and works through, fictional representations, and narrative structures and processes as tied to these.
According to Dufrenne, beyond the primary (or first-level) representation of a manifold of both real and fictional objects, people, and places and their spatial-temporal coordinates, “if the aesthetic object offers us a world”—that is, one more complete, free-standing, and entirely specific to the work, in short, a singular aesthetic world—it is “in another manner and according to another mode which should be common to all of the arts, representational or not” (176). Cinema, he argues, is a case in point. Even in a medium in which represented worlds are conveyed with a perceptual immediacy, concreteness, and, in some cases, deliberate illusionistic intent, with respect to cinema made and experienced as art, the difference between the represented and what Dufrenne terms the aesthetically “expressed” (as the “other mode” quoted above) still remains powerfully in evidence. In film, as in any other form of representational work, in this view it is only a total work-generated affective “expression” that is capable of aesthetically rounding out and peering behind the representational face as it is seen, as it were. Such affective depth of a particularly artistic sort is achieved, Dufrenne argues, in and through a unique, unified, and all-pervading atmosphere of feeling coalescing into a recognizable whole. Genuinely artistic films, he maintains, use cinema’s “technical possibilities,” together with “all the resources of the image” (174), to achieve such a total expressivity.
Metz, like Mitry before him, was surely right to recognize the relevance of Dufrenne’s insights to cinema (in ways not pursued in detail by Dufrenne himself). These notably include the idea of a schematic world-in a work (as we are calling it), which corresponds to its basic representational task or function—namely, that of establishing a fictional reality of characters and situations that is more or less clearly comprehensible, on the basis of its familiar elements, to viewers. The reality in question is therefore able also to serve as the jumping-off point for other forms or levels of creative meaning and expression. However, owing to the particular constraints of the conventional semiotic-structuralist framework in which he was operating (to which, in a cinematic and artistic context, both Dufrenne and Mitry were opposed), what is largely lacking in Metz’s film theory, and any semiotics of film, it can be argued, is the taking of the crucial and justified next step. This step, following Dufrenne, is to conceive this represented realm of character being and action as distinct from, but also integrally related to and combined with, a larger aesthetic whole that is equally if not more deserving of the description of “world.” The meaning(s) and feeling(s) of this totality notably exceed what a “semiotics of connotation” (as a concept borrowed from linguistic and poetic studies) is itself able to identify and encompass.49 While for Dufrenne, this larger aesthetic construct is primarily defined by a work-specific, affective, and aesthetic “atmosphere” (as we will later explore in detail), it is also, as he acknowledges, more than this. For an artwork “world” must also be seen to contain significant first-order formal features and aspects (known and experienced as such) and must be open to the entire domain of nonliteral symbolic meaning that Metz (but not Dufrenne) files under the heading of “connotation.”
Indeed, as equally true of Dufrenne’s conception of the represented world of the aesthetic object, from the perspective of narrative cinema as art, the strength and resilience of Metz’s, Burch’s, and other theorists’ idea of the denoted or diegetic level of a film—as including everything from the recognizable representational contents of specific images and sequences to the entire comprehensible, imaginary world and its space and time—lies in just this recognition of the difference between it and all non literal symbolic meaning and affect. This includes all figurative and associational semantic contents requiring relatively more, and sometimes much more (and more specialized), cultural, artistic, and cinematic knowledge and experience on the part of viewers. Certainly this is the case when such meaning is compared with the primary, literally denoted, dimension, which is often sufficient for the purpose of a film’s basic narrative comprehension on the viewer’s part.
A MULTILEVELED WHOLE
As we have now seen, the diegetic in cinema may be rightly understood in the manner of the concept’s first users as consisting of the totality of a film’s representations, or “denotations” (including singular versions of both fictional and real but fictionalized objects, places, people, and events). To this must be added the connecting thread of visually rendered narrative in a dynamic medium, as explained in detail by Bordwell, George M. Wilson, Edward Branigan, and other prominent theorists. But this all still amounts to a fictional, represented world in a film work and not of a film as a whole and as an artwork. Clearly, to create a fictional narrative is already, at least in the institutional context of the cinema, to make art, in some broad sense. However, although the fictional and uniquely cinematic world-in can be seen to represent a crucial and creative selection on the part of the work (or, more precisely, the filmmaker) from aspects of the “real world,” the aesthetic experience, meaning, and value of this selection can only be determined holistically. Such will be a matter of the interface and interaction between these representational and fictional aspects and other nondenotational, nonnarrative features and intentions manifested in films. Moreover, any attention paid by the filmmaker to these connections or copresences will already be moving well beyond the denoted and the diegetic in or for itself (i.e., in Souriau’s, Metz’s, and Burch’s original sense).
To reiterate, a film’s fictional-represented reality, or world-in, is logically and ontologically autonomous and ideational yet still schematic, heavily real-world dependent, and in itself aesthetically incomplete. Constituting but one referential level of a cinematic work, its nature compels us to recognize the profoundly leveled, multiaspect (or dimensional) character of films. This in turn points to the advisability of a topological model of the cinematic work, in accordance with which the fictional world-in is but one level or layer, however important its presence or use with respect to the artistic meaning and interest of others. I use the term topological here in a quasi-scientific or mathematical sense, as referring to how the constituent parts or levels within a structure or system are spatially interrelated to both each other and the whole. Of course, such spatial arrangement of cinematic ingredients is not to be taken as literal, or confused with the composition of film images, or as separable from temporal, dynamic aspects of films in their event-like progression and character. Crucially, these different registers or levels of meaning and to some degree attention—diegetic and nondiegetic, literal and figurative (in different ways), fictional and nonfictional—may be present in what are the same sensible forms, signs, and perceptual vehicles, whether visual or auditory, simple or complex. Consequently, and for reasons to be further elucidated, despite this appeal to “levels,” in these respects it is perhaps better to approach both the film image and the cinematic work as a whole less like layered geographical strata and more in the nature of a complex, chemical mixture of formal and differently oriented symbolic elements, which remain for the duration of each film in fluid, temporal interaction. Although the represented world-in is but one level or aspect of a cinematic work—if, admittedly, the necessary or foundational basis for many others—viewers, in watching films, no less than theorists and critics in analyzing them, may by conscious choice, by mere habit, or by what amounts to mainstream cinematic conditioning, engage almost exclusively with it, and with the fictional narrative with which it is closely bound.
Some filmmaking modes, or types of narration—such as what Burch defines as the (now) ubiquitous “Institutional Mode of Representation” and the particular version of it at work in classical Hollywood cinema (as founded on the power of the “diegetic effect” of psychological, if not strictly perceptual, illusion in the represented dimension) together with what Bordwell analyzes as “classical film narration,” which encourages viewers to see a film “as presenting an apparently solid fictional world”—may in various ways prescribe or emphasize such engagement.50 And this attention to the fictional-represented world-in a film, as an in- and for-itself reality, may be maintained throughout a film’s entirety or change during its experience in accordance with the strength and direction of individual viewer attention. Yet every film, regardless of its representational mode or general type of cinematic narration, still possesses the extranarrative (and extrarepresentational) levels and meaning dimension(s) here recognized, at least for all viewers attuned and attentive to them. These levels and dimensions are rightly associated with the artistic (or “aesthetic”) features and capacities of films not least (but also not only) in relation to the affect they generate.
If the existence of such distinct but interrelated levels of meaning and attention in a film work is acknowledged, many sorts of recognized features of films may occupy one or more such “positions,” or they may change, unpredictably and creatively, from one to another. So music, images, words, and sounds originating in the represented fictional reality (or with a discernible source there) can be seen to expand outward (or perhaps upward, as it were) to be or to become (as a film develops) part of its allusive or allegorical or reflexive or attended to technical and formal dimension. This point was made earlier (with reference to Perkins) in relation to the self-reflexive relations sometimes obtaining between the fictional world-in a film and its particular cinematic (audiovisual) presentation. Another, more specific example concerns the “free indirect” or “mindscreen” presentation that filmmaker and theorist Pier Paolo Pasolini and, subsequently, Bruce Kawin and John Orr each have discussed in relation to postclassical cinema.51 Bypassing the use of more conventional subjective point-of-view constructions, in films like Red Desert and Three Colors: Blue, this involves a disturbed central character’s mental state or perception of his or her world (that is, the fictional, represented world-in, insofar as it is known to the character) gradually taking on a more global, meaningful, and objectified correspondence with specific audiovisual or structural features of the world-of a film work (e.g., as pertains to its color, rhythm, editing, soundtrack, etc.). In these cases such a correlation (assuming the aforementioned difference) between fictional-representational and formal-presentational features, and their levels, is not “invisible” in any sense, as perhaps in some more conventional films. Rather it is recognized and contemplated by attentive and artistically appreciative viewers and is very likely intended to be so recognized, in drawing attention to itself as an artistic and stylistic feature (meaningful as such)—in addition, that is, to this presentation also conveying and explicating the psychology of characters and their actions.
In sum, we have now started to develop a clearer picture, at least intuitively, of what the suggested world-of a film (as distinct from the world-in that it includes) may be seen to comprise. Represented and fictional realities, and the larger story-world of which they are a part, are contained within it in the manner of an active, functional, and interdependent integration toward specific artistic ends (with such integration obviously lacking from nonnarrative, abstract, and experimental films). While the fictional reality constructed and communicated is fundamentally representational and denotational, the world-of a film—as corresponding to the totality of a cinematic work as made and as experienced—should be thought of as (also) fundamentally presentational. Although the former has the uniqueness and stability of a representational schema that must be completed through viewer attention and knowledge, it is the latter—typically when combined with representation—that possesses much of the perceived singularity of form, affect, and nonliteral meaning associated with works of art, be they paintings, poems, dance performances, or films. Whereas, further, as both represented and imaginary, the world-in, on its own terms possesses “only” a represented and fictional time and space (i.e., that of a story), the world-of also possesses an actual time and “space” (that of a film, and the images it comprises, as screened or projected), and also, as will be discussed in detail, an experiential or durational time (with some space-like properties). As we have already begun to see, but as I will attempt to show further, the very fact that the fictional world of a film and its represented events are enclosed within such a created and experienced spatial-temporal world of a film qua artwork—that I will refer to henceforth as a film world—has significant implications with respect to the theorization of cinematic emotion and feeling (or affect, more generally), temporality, immersion, reflexivity, authorship, and interpretation. In short, this “film-world hypothesis,” as it might be termed, is a fertile one, with the potential to help us conceive of narrative film works in new and more illuminating ways.
The common theme that attaches to the approaches and positions surveyed in this chapter is that while all contribute something essential to its proper theorization, they are too limited to better encompass the full aesthetic dimension of a cinematic work and its world considered in more than (potentially reductive) fictional-representational, narrative, perceptual, and phenomenological (or neophenomenological) terms. They shed substantial light on some aspects of film art at the expense of leaving others largely in the dark. But this review of (what are for the most part) past and current semiotic, narratological, and some contemporary experience-based (phenomenological) approaches in film theory has been necessary, given the need to explain the principal differences between the “world” of a narrative film, as here conceived, and other uses and understandings of the term and its description, not only in the study of films but in literature and other arts. Moreover, the differently oriented film-world concepts and models we have discussed raise major theoretical and philosophical issues that must be dealt with in this context. Perhaps foremost among these is the kind and degree of autonomy, alterity, and singularity of films as artworks vis-à-vis noncinematic experience and human-occupied sectors of the “real world.” The latter bears most importantly on processes of transformation at work in all filmmaking, together with what is transformed, and the effects and experience of both. An account of the worlds-of as distinct from the worlds-in films must also address, however, the spatial, temporal, and affective absorption and immersion, so undeniably pronounced in the film-viewing experience, which certainly includes, but is far from limited to psychological and emotional engagements with fictional people, places, and events.
Yet before we can treat all of these subjects in greater detail, we must now start over, in some sense, and address more fully, and in more positive rather than negative (or critical) terms, the fundamental question of why it is at all advantageous and, as I contend, even necessary to think about cinematic works as creating and presenting symbolic-affective and artistic worlds (for experience) in the first place.