EIGHT

TOWARD AN EXISTENTIAL HERMENEUTICS OF FILM WORLDS

OUR INQUIRY INTO THE CREATED AND EXPERIENCED WORLDS OF cinema has shown that in seeking to grasp the distinctively artistic dimensions of narrative films, as taking the form(s) of such worlds, it is insufficient to approach them in the same manner as objects of our ordinary, unmediated acts of sense perception and attention. Regardless of how much medium-enabled (or amplified) continuity with the sights and sounds of the “real world” films may involve (and what Gregory Currie refers to as the “likeness thesis” with respect to conceiving this continuity),¹ they also transcend and diverge from what is known and most familiar in our firsthand, extracinematic, and nonartistically mediated experience. In so doing, they do not so much simulate or mime our perceptual and emotional capacities as open up new avenues of and for their exercise. At the same time, in still adopting a broadly referential approach to cinema, rooted in symbols and signs, I have appealed to a tradition of reflection that regards all art as a fundamental and partly autonomous mode of symbolic representation and expression. Building on certain frameworks of ideas in the general philosophy of art, and relevant film theory, we have seen that a more promising theoretical approach may be founded in the conception of cinematic works as purposefully created symbolic and affective “worlds of their own.”

As is only to be expected, however, many questions remain (and not only those that arise in the necessary task of filling in a wealth of details). If film worlds are literally and figuratively bounded realities, to be defined largely by their alterity with respect to everything that falls outside of their singular symbolic and affective confines, it may be difficult to see what prevents their being forever closed off to one another and to common experience like Leibniz’s “windowless” monads, as those wholly self-enclosed, self-perceiving entities that the seventeenth-century philosopher famously argues are the fundamental constituents of the universe. How can we best characterize the nature of the close relation between a given film world and all the other worlds (collectively constituting much of our cultural experience) that, as we have seen, provide the materials for its construction? And, following from this, how can we preserve in theory the logical, symbolic, and aesthetic distance between a film’s artistic elements and features, on the one hand, and all the various realities from which (as transformed) they derive and remain connected (i.e., are still recognizable for what they are), on the other? In still broader terms, apart from its being consistent and coherent with and for itself, as a “heterocosmic” reality, can we also maintain that the singular world of a cinematic work possesses some more generally applicable and apprehended truth beyond its own sensory and imaginary confines? Finally, what is the ground on which we stand in negotiating between the “polarity of familiarity and strangeness” with respect to a film (as Hans-Georg Gadamer has described the preeminent character of the work of art),2 with the result that its created world can be meaningfully integrated into, and become a part of, our worlds, as viewers and persons, in lasting ways?

Well beyond cinema, but by no means lacking relevance to it, these are the very sorts of questions that philosophical hermeneutics is devoted to exploring with respect to the meanings and truth-values of texts and representational artworks, and the possibilities for their intersubjective interpretation through historical time and across cultural divides. Including the writings of such prominent thinkers as Gadamer, Ricœur, and, more recently, Charles Taylor and Gianni Vattimo, this tradition of thought offers many relevant insights into the being and understanding of cinematic works and worlds in certain ways that have remained largely unexplored in the theory and philosophy of film.³

In its extension to art, philosophical hermeneutics is not concerned with the modeled human subject as a universal and ahistorical consciousness, as traditionally posited in frameworks of empirico-scientific naturalism and phenomenology, alike. Hermeneutics is, instead, occupied with the subject (the interpreting viewer or reader) as “radically” historically and culturally situated and as being shaped by, as much as shaping, the common, symbolic frameworks of thought and action.4 This subject encounters art not only in the self-enclosed, phenomenological space and time of a work’s own creation, under the causal conditions of its medium, but as within the larger totality of a specific cultural and historical formation of experiences, ideas, beliefs, and so-called prejudices. Whereas phenomenological aesthetics seeks to capture the reciprocal, unified, and unifying interaction between subject and work on the (more) concrete plane of perception and affect (and its continual flux), the hermeneutic method, in its existentially attuned aspects, and as brought to bear on artworks, attempts to chart and better understand the equally dynamic self- and work-constitutive process of understanding. This pursuit includes, ultimately, the kind of truth that art reveals in its own ways since, as Gadamer holds, quite rightly, a work of art is not only an “expression of life” but is, or must be, “taken seriously in its claim to truth.”⁵

The insights afforded by this hermeneutic perspective are every bit as applicable to narrative films, with reference to their artistic aspirations and accomplishments, as to literature, drama, or painting. Mitry writes that “the cinema is not just an art, a culture, but a means to knowledge, i.e., not just a technique for disseminating facts but one capable of opening thought onto new horizons.”⁶ For all the reasons already given and more to be enumerated, however, this truth-telling function is precisely that which great cinematic art already discharges, not as an occasional means but as its perennial end. Clearly, to better recognize how this occurs, we must steadfastly reject the age-old, rationalist legacy Mitry here upholds, and its association of what is or can constitute knowledge, “thought,” and truth with something fundamentally beyond the capacity of art.

From the hermeneutic (and to a degree Heideggerian) perspective to which we now turn, a film world may be conceived of as a transsubjective event of artistic and cinematic truth. On multiple levels it is this very event character that serves to reconcile the positions of the viewing subject (as a genuine self) and the object (as the completed and physically instantiated cinematic work). It also brings together, in the same field of awareness, a film world’s transformative creation (including its interpretations of aspects of all that is referred to as the profilmic) and the typically highly immersive character of viewer experience. This hermeneutic approach thus complements and helps to further reconcile on a higher dialectical level, as it were, the cognitive-symbolic and phenomenological interpretations that we have traced and made use of in our views of cinematic art as profoundly symbolic (in its representations) and as affectively and intentionally expressive in multiple experiential ways. It does so by means of what the Heidegger scholar and translator Albert Hofstadter has termed, with respect to a similarly motivated theory of art, the “joint revelation of self and world.”7 In such a synthesis we are able to see these dimensions of the narrative film in a more holistic, integrated way, as mirroring the equally complex, internal constitutions of their creators and audiences.

PARTICIPATION, TRADITION, AND THE ARTWORK WORLD AS TRANSFORMATIVE EVENT

The hermeneutic conception of the encounter with a text or artwork regards it as an ongoing process of seeking understanding on the model of an open-ended conversation and dialogue. However, and relatively less discussed, Gadamer also draws a comparison between the participatory engagement with a work and the social-cultural phenomenon of play and game. He does so, however, in something more than the imaginary, “make-believe” sense that Kendall Walton, E. H. Gombrich, and others appeal to in discussing the experience of representational artworks as a form of imaginative play. Central to Gadamer’s argument is that the process of what happens “in between” the experiencing (or playing) self and the artwork (or game) is at the heart of both art and play (TM, 109).

Despite a lack of “real-life” consequences, play is often taken quite seriously. Although creative and allowing improvisation to various degrees, it is also a rule-governed activity, with an ethos and a proverbial “life of its own.” One gives oneself up (so to speak) to the game, to its norms, permitted movements or actions, spatial and temporal boundaries, and so forth, in a similar way to which one submits to the artwork. Yet unlike most play, which Gadamer, following pioneering Dutch anthropologist John Huizinga, regards as an ultimately in- and for-itself human social behavior lying at the foundation of many cultural pursuits, participation with a work has an overriding goal: to understand it for what, and all, that it is. Moreover, whereas no audience is required for ordinary play, such as children’s make-believe, or for more elaborate, structured games (e.g., chess, bridge, soccer)—with the result that the game may often be a reality for the players alone—the artwork is fundamentally an “event of being that occurs in presentation,” that is, for an audience.8 While this much seems obvious for theatrical performances throughout history, Gadamer extends the performative and presentational aspects of spectatorship to all artworks. He traces their implications for artistic experience as taking the form of occasional historical occurrences, as well as for the interpretation and understanding of works.

Central to Gadamer’s thought is the combination of, first, the artwork’s occasional (self-)presentation (as in theatrical or musical performance) and, second, its ontological stability and repeatability, that is, its existing to be seen or heard by an audience on multiple occasions (in the form of unique historical events of performance) while at the same time remaining self-identical. Gadamer regards these conjoined characteristics of a work as its Gebilde, or basic “structure” as a form of experience, as well as expression and truth. Given their peculiar mode of being, much like games, with their bounded boards and playing fields, but even more emphatically, artworks, as creating and presenting virtual realities, carve out their own experiential, cognitive, and cultural “space” as removed from the quotidian environment of practical use objects and transparent behaviors. What they lack, however, is all or most of the physical interactions with objects and people in real space and time that characterize many forms of play and games, as well as causal and purposeful activity in the worlds of objects and social intercourse. For these reasons, and similar to what Dufrenne suggests with respect to a work as an “aesthetic object” of attention “in” but not “of” the world, the physical work of art when and as experienced is “raised to its ideality” in the form of an appearance (TM 109). The work functions, that is, on a different plane from physical-practical life and intentions.

The nature of the encounter with an artwork as a temporal and historical “event” rooted in “play,” and idealized self-presentation (or “structure”), as together forming the dual “being of the aesthetic,” is also, in this view, the source of its creating and disclosing nothing less than a meaningful, nonmaterial world of its own (TM 112). The work exists as “another, closed world,” wherein “what unfolds before us is so much lifted out of the ongoing course of the ordinary world and . . . enclosed in its own autonomous circle of meaning” (TM 112, 128). Accordingly, Gadamer maintains that in comparison with an artwork’s world—as an enclosing context and interpretative encounter amid the quotidian—extrawork reality, as always thrown into relief by it, is defined as that which is “untransformed,” whereas art (in the form of the individual work) is a “raising up (Aufhebung) of this reality into its truth” (TM 113). We have seen that with respect to cinematic art as world-making, and as the source of immersive experience, such autonomy of “world” presence and meaning that films possess is indeed one equally the consequence of their transformational character, which is here identified with distinctly artistic truth.

Related to its further recognition of the transformation of the experiencing self in the presence of the artwork and world seeking to be figuratively entered and understood, central to Gadamer’s hermeneutics of art is a distinction between two forms of experience. The dichotomy in question is reflected in the differences between the corresponding senses of the German words Erlebnis and Erfahrung. Whereas the former term tends to connote a brief, transient, and superficial encounter, allowing for a passing experience soon forgotten, the latter is often used to refer to a deeper, more meaningful, “life experience.” In other words, Erfahrung pertains to an event in the world with lasting consequences for the self that has witnessed or undergone it. We do not generally credit the particular “worlds” of most games and their experiences with being able to fundamentally change how we look at experience or understand ourselves. Art, however, is fully capable of providing such a more meaningful, self-contained, and unified experience—Erfahrung—as leading to self-knowledge and knowledge of the world, in the form of an “encounter with something that asserts itself as truth” (TM 489). To appeal to a relevant interpersonal analogy, the art object is met within the context of a temporally extended and cumulative event of understanding, no less than in any serious, extended conversation, as opposed to engaging in a more superficial or perfunctory verbal exchange.

For Gadamer the experienced and interpreted world of the artwork is “closed within itself” in the sense of evidencing many pronounced differences from what remains outside it and existed before it. Yet (and as the hermeneutic enterprise depends upon) it is at the same time “open” to the beholder, if not always transparently so (TM 109). It is, after all, a communication intended wholly for an audience and its individual members (even if generalized), who become, in effect, part of the work-world as an artistic and historical event that may, in principle, be understood—even if never completely or definitively or on a single occasion of a work’s encounter. Like any genuine communication, this is an encounter that not only informs but transforms the experiencing and interpreting subject to various degrees. As such, it may be seen as a kind of corollary and reflection of the transformational (as opposed to the merely reflective or reproductive) character of a work, including a narrative film, vis-à-vis whatever it represents.

In a cinematic context this conception of the substantial transformative and aletheic potential of artworks (which I will explain further below), indebted to the influence of Heidegger’s later philosophy, can be understood as applicable not only to a film’s formal transformation of preexisting materials into individual symbolic and aesthetic elements but also to a number of related, higher-order transformations. These include an “ontological” one, whereby filmed objects, places, and people together take on an interrelated fictional existence, and a story-world comes into being, as well as, in some cases, the transformation Cavell describes, wherein an actor becomes an idealized and abstracted cinematic persona (a “star”).9 There is also an “authorial” transformation at work, whereby a filmmaker is regarded as the creator of a meaningful and expressive world that will subsequently stand for him or her as a cinematic artist (as discussed in the previous chapter). From an experiential perspective such transformations, as joined by a host of other perceptual and formal ones, are also accompanied by, and all encompassed within, a multifold “existential” alteration of the viewing self as a result of participation in the artistic and cultural-historical experience of a film-created world. Nor, in relation to cinema, does this lack pronounced social and cultural, in addition to individual, relevance. This is because the work-occasioned time-space of audience immersion and transport is not wholly private or subjective, existing only on the psychological plane. Rather, it also has a manner of existence within the larger, intersubjectively shared space and time of an artistic, and here cinematic, tradition of creation and reception. This tradition changes and develops, as do viewers as concrete individuals, with the result that, although the world-in and world-of a film remain self-identical, throughout both historical and individual life time, our relations to these alter and mutate, more or less dramatically or subtly. (Here lies much of the historicity of representational and expressive symbolism.) Tradition, or Überlieferung, in this relevant sense is “not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves in as much as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine ourselves.”10

I have already argued for the importance of tradition in cinematic world-making, especially given that however seemingly novel, independent, and original its creative activity may appear, and indeed be, it always also involves “remaking” in the more abstract sense of bringing together, (re-)organizing, and reformulating many pieces of other, culturally constructed worlds, including preexistent film and art worlds (as already surrounded by their interpretations). Over time, and through cinematic practice and institutional support, the resulting symbolic and artistic structures have, in turn, become the stuff of particular film styles, movements, and genres. Whether or not a given instance of actual filmmaking is accompanied by a more critical awareness of the underlying, dialectical process (to any pronounced degree), every filmmaker who picks up a camera also takes up a stance in relation to relevant aspects of cinematic tradition, adhering to some, discarding others, attempting to reinvent still more.

As Gadamer’s broad-based reflections bring to our attention, however, cinematic tradition is not just the storehouse of materials of cinematic world-making and the toolbox of effective ways to put them together. It is also the dynamic arena of the evolving nature of cinema and of interaction between viewers and films, which is in itself a more extensive, if more loosely bounded, cultural and institutional “world.” At its core, cinematic tradition is the overarching and enabling nonphysical repository of all relevant practical and theoretical knowledge that is always in principle accessible, even if it cannot be fully grasped or retained in its entirety by any one director, viewer, critic, or theorist. As such it is the open field of the possibility of cinematic art, both the matrix from which every film world emerges and that which gives its experience genuine meaning and value.

Tradition enables and shapes the reception and understanding of a film. But just as a cinematic work creates a new “version” and way of thinking and feeling about whatever familiar phenomena it addresses and represents—in the form of a novel world (or world-version)—it may also throw a new and singular light on all previous cinema, altering our views of what it has been and what it may yet become. Here we are speaking not only of the theorization of cinema in general, and of the formation and maintenance of canons, for instance, but of understanding and appreciating the individual works and worlds of which they consist (in light of implicit comparisons with many others). For these reasons, what Joseph Margolis writes of the painted worlds of Paul Klee is equally true of the cinematic worlds of Welles, Fellini, or Almodovar (for instance): “We are obliged to construct (within our sense of the tradition of receiving art) what we judge to be a fair way of entering the (Intentional) ‘world’ of any particular Klee. . . . But the deeper point is that how we enter Klee’s ‘world’ is a function of how we ourselves have been formed and altered by the on-going history of painting we suppose we are able to master, well after the original Klee was produced.”11

In other words, and as contemporary hermeneutic philosopher Charles Taylor, for example, also stresses, the experiencing and understanding self is no less than the work also situated within, and partly a product of, a continuously evolving tradition, in the form of shared historical, cultural, and linguistic experience generally, in which we come not only to describe but quite literally to define and know ourselves and our worlds.¹² Involving relevant claims of the past on the present and their evaluation, it is such accumulated, enveloping context that makes an artwork’s (or virtually any cultural artifact’s) genuine understanding possible. As explicated in Truth and Method, one of the landmarks of late twentieth-century European thought, the general process involved is Gadamer’s famous “fusion of horizons” (TM 305–7, 374–75), cultural and historical, in which, as David E. Linge has explained, the “limited horizons of text and interpreter” (as conditioned by the specific historical and cultural position of each) are synthesized into a new and “comprehensive” one.¹³ Taking this form, the full comprehension of the intentions deposited in a given cultural artifact always involves “both the alien that we strive to understand and the familiar world that we already understand”¹⁴ and their successful reconciliation or accommodation. In other words, adequate interpretation of any artwork or text is informed by knowledge of the historical world from which the work comes and the artistic tradition of which it is a part as both are negotiated, reconciled, or fused with the interpreter’s understanding of his or her self and world, on the one hand, and the actual temporal experience of the work and its presented world as an in-itself reality prompting self-reflection, on the other. This dynamic relation between such contextual knowledge or preunderstanding and self-awareness (responsive to the demands of the work in its sensory and representational concreteness) marks all genuine artistic appreciation and understanding.

For all these reasons, in the view shared by Gadamer, Ricœur, and other thinkers partial to the hermeneutic outlook, at its most genuine and complete, the interpretation of a text or work, as resulting in its genuine, if never complete, understanding, is not a detached, impersonal activity in which the interpreting subject has no actual stake in the meaning and expression that is conveyed and discerned. Instead, interpretation is a more complete interaction that has the power to alter the subject in the process. Some such alterations may be small and go relatively unnoticed, but others may be quite profound, even life-changing. In all cases there is an acquisition by the work-encountering self, through the mutual reshaping and redefining of “subject” and “object” in the artistic experience—even if, it should be added, and as also differentiating the hermeneutic conception from other theoretical models of interpretation (e.g., Derridean deconstruction), in this meaningful exchange and negotiation the work, as the product of artistic intentions and supraindividual artistic tradition, always has the upper hand and the final word, as it were.

CINEMA AND THE HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE

These important yet obviously highly general ideas and suggestions gain greater concreteness and (more) explicit relevance to cinema with reference to the related concept of the “hermeneutic circle,” which both the real-time and postexperience interpretation of any film may be seen to involve. Given the fact that “nothing that needs interpretation can be understood at once” (TM 191–92), the circle in question refers to the alternating movement of attention from each temporal or spatial part to the whole, and back to the part, in an iterative process of grasping a work’s meaning (whatever specific form the parts may take and however the whole in question is classified). The process entails a negotiation between meanings that are anticipated, and projected onto the whole on the basis of what we believe (at any given point in the work’s experience) to be our grasp of its parts, and those that are found or not found, corroborated or dismissed. Here the primary task of the reader or viewer is thus, in Gadamer’s words, to “expand the unity of the understood meaning centrifugally,” wherein the “harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion for correct understanding.”15

In the case of films, and unlike still photographs or paintings, this iterative movement of greater comprehension is a matter of part-whole relations perceived and interpreted in not one but two temporal modes, namely, in the intersection of the actual progression of a film and the naturally conditioned “subjective” time of the specific pattern of our successive acts of attention. Whenever we watch a film attentively and, thereby, actualize and complete it in and through our conscious assimilation of its percepts and symbols, we are in the midst of a productive, dialectical tension between the “now” (and the spatial-temporal part of the cinematic whole it represents), on the one hand, and a unity of past and present (the viewer’s and the work’s) that is always in process, coming-to-be, on the other.

While watching a film, we may at any one moment be inevitably drawn to sensory spectacle, dramatic situations, arresting compositions, virtuoso performances, and the personalities and appearances of star actors and actresses, as well as moved to and fro by the power of local affective expression—be it any of the sensory-affective, cognitive-diegetic, or formal-artistic varieties that we have identified. However, as inveterate, human seekers after meaning and order of many and various kinds, we are also and equally compelled to consider how these psychologically mediated parts of many kinds “all fit together,” certain in our tacit conviction that they contribute to a greater cinematic and artistic whole, with its own cognitive-expressive significance and coherence. Unlike what may or may not be true of empirical experience generally or the universe-at-large, in this case, at least, our belief and faith are clearly justified by the fact (or reasonable belief) that the parts have been meant by some purposive intelligence to be so meaningfully arranged and related.

More specifically, the constant mediation between cinematic part and whole takes many forms, some more basic than others in film experience (and as anticipated by filmmakers). These include, for instance, the relations of opposition and resolution (on some level) between the shot and the sequence, the form and contents of onscreen and off screen space, the synthetic combination of the perceptually present image or sound and the memorial one, and the narrative event and the larger (simultaneously apprehended and constructed) fictional reality or story-world in which it occurs. The part-whole reconciliation necessary to grasp the cinematic work and its meaning as a synthetic unity may be deferred or detoured for valid aesthetic or artistic reasons, such as those determined by the form and style of the work, for instance. But it may also be sidetracked for more prosaic reasons, such as when our attention and concentration wanes, and we mentally “wander away” from a film and its demands. Yet the work, insofar as it is made to be understood (in a nonreductive sense) and experienced as an intention-bearing unity, always draws us back to the task at hand—to interpret it “personally” and in a dialogical sense. Since whether by way of a scratched, celluloid print with less than ideal sound or via the present-day marvels of Bluray presentation and the latest iteration of Dolby surround sound, a given cinematic work offers and presents so much more than only a replication of, or substitute for, sensory and affective experience in and “for its own sake,” as an occasion of Erlebnis (as distinct from Erfahrung).

As the above implies, the circle of understanding is not confined to the work, to what it has to say, show, or otherwise disclose to us in an impersonal and unidirectional fashion. Hermeneutic inquiry into the meaning of an artwork is always also marked, in Gadamer’s words, by the attempt to achieve a “continuity of self-understanding . . . despite the demands of the absorbing presence of the momentary aesthetic impression” (TM 96). As he, together with Ricœur and Vattimo, argues, the continuity referred to here is one that is insufficiently recognized and accounted for within subjectivist and “sensationalist” accounts of art in the romantic tradition (as rooted in the momentary flux of Erlebnis). Instead, they must be philosophically recovered in a transsubjective hermeneutics of art (as rooted in Erfahrung) as distinct from “aesthetics,” as associated with these romantic and idealist-subjectivist views.

Gadamer is right to stress that understanding a work as a whole also embraces and includes an integration of it with the individual viewer’s culturally mediated life experience, knowledge, and identity—all of which an artistically serious film’s experience may serve to focus like a prism while simultaneously modifying. Potentially, all cinematic worlds, and certainly great ones, provide a reflective platform for a self-encounter wherein the viewer is met not only with many forms of association and exemplifying moving images and sounds but also, however indirectly in some cases, with his or her own world(s) and the parts he or she plays within them.16 It must be stressed that although we have arrived at the subject of these dynamics and their implications in relation to film works and worlds visà-vis hermeneutics, they are a concern for any general understanding of art—cinematic or otherwise—given that, as one philosopher has written, such understanding must always include inquiry into “descriptions of what happens to the self in aesthetic experience” and, more precisely, the familiar (if relatively underanalyzed) process by which the self is seemingly “lost” and “regained” in the encounter with an artwork.17

In a cinematic context, then, the hermeneutic circle is usefully regarded as representing a negotiation and attempted synthesis involving three distinct dualities: (a) the temporal whole of the work versus its constituent parts, with respect to both film form and content; (b) the viewing self who encounters the cinematic work, and is changed by it, versus the self that one was, prior to this encounter and what it discloses; and (c) the film as a singular, self-enclosed, perceptual, and affective reality versus the larger cinematic, artistic, and cultural-historical traditions and contexts in which it is inextricably embedded and that contribute equally to its world-like nature (including being made, experienced, and interpreted as a particular, externally objectified version of the way things are or might be). In the film event these dialectical oppositions are fundamentally present to one another, each presupposing the dynamic operations of the others.

FILM INTERPRETATION AS HERMENEUTIC UNDERSTANDING

In the framework of ideas we have been considering, interpretation is always constrained and channeled by the precedents of tradition and the standards and principles these put into play for constant reevaluation and debate, again on the model of dialogue, as genuine and successful, intersubjective communication. It is the inviolable presence of the cinematic work, as fixed in its medium and “incarnate” (to which nothing more can be added or anything taken away), that anchors this process in an “objective,” publicly accessible, and empirical reality, transcending the perceptions and imaginative contributions of individual viewers. While such permanency does not guarantee or fix a corresponding objectivity in artistic interpretation, as some critics, theorists, and philosophers might wish, it controls it within rationally manageable bounds.

Following from these considerations, there are not different Citizen Kane worlds for every viewer who experiences and interprets Welles’s 1941 classic, nor for any one viewer’s experiences of it at different points in biographical time and place. Rather, separate experiences and different interpretations of a film’s work-world constitute so many events that, like many natural ones, have a common source that causes or allows them to form patterns and overlap with one another, concentrating within a certain range. From the hermeneutic view, film interpretation inevitably involves negotiation based on the finding and articulation of such “common ground,” which is an expanding, historically variable but bounded field of significance. Such a concept of interpretation, which may just as well, and perhaps better, be termed genuine understanding, with reference to virtually any cultural object, is rather obviously different from and grander in scope than what may customarily fall under the heading of “interpreting” Les enfants du paradis or Taxi Driver within the discourse of film studies. Its full explication requires consideration of the notion of the revealed and interpreted truth of a film work and world—as the main goal and object of such understanding and a topic we will consider next. Prior to this, however, at least a few related, clarifying points may be made.

First, the interpretation (or understanding) in question, as forming an iterative succession of related interpretative acts, with each new act informing all previous ones, is, in one aspect, at least, nothing more—and nothing less—than a fully engaged encounter with a film work as a whole. This includes its viewing, of course, but also extends reflectively beyond it. In paraphrasing Ricœur’s analogous concept of textual “comprehension” (as encompassing more than narrative comprehension), Andrew writes that this is “synthetic in that it listens to the wholeness of the text,” as well as responsive to the ways in which the work “lives in the web of its interpretations, in their history, and in the projected meanings to which they point.”18 Such an orientation toward a film is fundamentally open to what it “says” to the viewer at the time of encounter. As such, and second, interpretation in this primary sense should not be confused or conflated with the activity of analysis, even though these two may be coincident and, at times, mutually supportive. Considerably more narrow, pragmatic, and encapsulated, analysis (whatever conceptual and systematic rigor it may possess—or lack) is bound to a particular method and typically focused on one a priori selected general aspect of a film—for example, its narrative structure or its thematic significance or its place in the historical evolution of cinematic form—to the often necessary exclusion of many others. Bordwell’s well-known claim that the interpretation or “reading” of a film is necessarily a post experience activity, entirely distinct from the “synoptic” real-time process of narrative film “viewing” (and story comprehension),19 certainly holds for analysis but not for interpretation in our present sense. As leading to the sort of unpredictable understanding Gadamer attributes to engagements with artworks (and their worlds), and with which I am most concerned in relation to film worlds, interpretation always and necessarily begins during a film’s experience but need not cease with the final credits. It may be endlessly renewed, repeated in every subsequent encounter, and incorporated in all intervening reflections.

Whether one has seen it once or ten times, the interpretation of a (seemingly) meritorious cinematic work and its world is never final but is continuously revised and supplemented by new events, new experiences, new ways of knowing. (This open-ended process, which as such is distinct from an analysis, mirrors the activities of film-world creation, involving an extended process of symbolic and aesthetic remaking and rethinking.) To be sure, such a process as conceived in these terms in relation to narrative cinema is a model that some may, for any number of reasons, consider idealistic given its many actual conditions, both psychological and institutional. But it is no more or less suspect, on that account, than the prospects for “open” critical discussion in literature and the arts generally.

The interpretation and understanding at issue must also be distinguished from many critical-theoretical “readings” of films (including but not limited to so-called symptomatic readings, focused on the ideological dimensions of works) that academic skeptics (including Bordwell) have now for a number of decades submitted to a good deal of critical scrutiny.²⁰ Such readings often look for, and find, in particular films confirmation of an already well-established theoretical supposition existing for, and adopted by, the theorist or critic before the cinematic work or its encounter. They risk being closed to both the singularity and multivalence of a film as an artwork, in the pursuit of features that fit the established protocols of the view in question. No doubt, such an approach may unduly reduce a film work and world to an antecedent doctrine’s own shape and size, so to speak, as distinct from enabling “the expansion of the reader to the size of the text and to its specific shape,” as Andrew maintains (again with reference to Ricœur’s conception of a text’s full comprehension).²¹

Yet unlike what may be true of some exercises in film analysis, and the goal (at least) of such programmatic readings, in this existential-hermeneutic frame of reference interpretation is not a matter of attaining certainty as opposed to ambiguity, or indeterminacy, as if films transmitted certain message-bearing signals that, in the jargon of contemporary communications theory, have only to be discriminated from a background of disorderly “noise” in order to be “received.” Rather, it is founded on the acceptance of the “productive” ambiguity of a work as admitting a plurality of plausible or reasonable but not necessarily equally valid interpretations. This is certainly not an “irrational” process, partly just because it is only a process, without any certain or necessary terminal point. And, again, if truly work-centered and governed, in terms of its dialectical reference points, there is little real danger that it will, on the one hand, lapse into subjective impressionism, incapable of gaining substantial ratification and agreement, or, on the other hand, become little more than a platform for unrelated opinions or the advancement of some general, theoretical program that the medium may be enlisted to support in reductive fashion.

Although interpretative understanding begins when a film viewing begins (and continues with each and every viewing) and is, as I have suggested, manifested in the ongoing interior, so-called intrasubjective dialogue that the viewer shares with it, in its post–film experience phase, as now also public and addressed to others (e.g., intersubjectively discussing or writing about films), this understanding evolves into a far more comprehensive (and comprehending) process. Yet it is still one that is, in terms of its results, highly revisable. As is the case during a film, but now from a more privileged position (the entirety of the work having been experienced and known), the hermeneutic task of the would-be understanding viewer (or critic or theorist) is to attempt to reconcile a film work’s nature, as a created and intended symbolic-artistic object (in all the ways that have been described), with those realities that it represents and refers to, as often supplemented by relevant, extrawork knowledge. Both of these poles of the referential process—that is, the cinematic-artistic “symbol” and the symbolized—are in turn reflected upon through the lens of a film’s actual (including affective) experience.

Goodman and Elgin make the relevant observation, in a similar context, that all the “presystematic judgments” that are a constant feature of our direct experiences of artworks serve as “touchstones” for all subsequent, more reflective and synoptic, understandings.22 Since a film, as a temporal work, reveals itself at its own pace (to which the viewer has no choice but to submit) and relies on the workings of our individually limited memory capacities, it even more especially necessitates that our initial interpretations and judgments, at whatever level of sophistication they may occur, are always in part a reflection on what we have thought and felt most distinctly or strongly during the film event. In other words, despite the subjective conditions that some theorists of interpretation have been reluctant to acknowledge (and that have been anathema to others), our own personal dialogue of comprehension with a film—and, through its mediation, with our constantly self-aware thought and feeling during the viewing experience—feeds and evolves into all subsequent, more carefully composed, critical discourse surrounding it, whether spoken or written, informal or formally institutionalized.

In sum, involving (a) interpretative understanding, in this sense, together with (b) the governing presence of cinematic tradition (here including that of film criticism and theory, as well as practice), and (c) a work’s character as “idealized” self-presentation, a film world is an event not only in the obvious sense that its full manner of existence depends on occasional realizations in physical space and time—that is, whenever it is projected or otherwise screened or played in a way accessible to our sight and hearing. Instead, in its nature as a historical, transformational, and “comprehending” process, it is also, and especially, an event in the hermeneutic conception here offered. On the viewing side of the relation, this event and process is also one of self-knowledge (and, perhaps, self-growth). Moreover, since the activity here considered contains and unifies potentially multiple, individual viewings often separated in historical and biographical time and cultural space, its results as expressed and preserved in discourse continually modify, deepen, and expand a film work’s associated world (as, ultimately, the event in question).

Much of the above is predicated on the fact that the artistic event of a film is always (also) a conveyance, in some manner and degree, of intersubjective truth about human and cultural realities existing apart from and outside of its own singular perceptual and affective confines. Such truth-revealing potential transcends a film’s affective expression, the pre- and profilmic reality of its perceptual and represented contents, and its narrative-fictional construction, together with its individual symbolic and artistic exemplifications, even while all of these familiar dimensions typically work together to actualize it. Beyond what may (only) be determined through the detailed consideration of specific films, however, what more may actually be said in general terms about a film world’s “truth,” both as an object of interpretative attention and understanding and, simultaneously, as an occasion of artistic-cinematic revelation, or disclosure?

TRUTH AND FILM WORLDS

In a nostalgic article entitled “What Do Critics Dream About?” Truffaut writes that as a working film critic he always believed that “a successful film had simultaneously to express an idea of the world and an idea of cinema; La règle du jeu and Citizen Kane correspond to this definition perfectly.”23 Expanding on Truffaut’s critical maxim, more profound than its brevity may indicate at first blush, film worlds may be seen to convey two basic forms of truth. The first, roughly corresponding to Truffaut’s “idea” of, or about, “the world,” might be called existential or experiential truth. This is a revealed truth of life as much as to life. However, as we have seen in our brief references to a number of films, including Truffaut’s own Day for Night, film worlds may also convey a more narrowly focused sort of truth. Akin to Truffaut’s “idea about cinema,” this truth concerns the ongoing, self-sustaining practice of cinematic art as one cultural form of expression among others, of which every cinematic work is a (potential) instructive and illuminating sample. As grounded in an enabling tradition now approximately 125 years old, we may, for short, refer to this latter as cinematic truth. Manifested in a film world in its own ways, and with varying degrees of interest and insight, such truth is (as Goodman and Elgin might say) characteristically exemplificational. It is a truth about cinema, specifically, that operates through reference to what a cinematic work is, as a work, as opposed to (only) what it represents; and rather than more narrowly targeted and localized self-reference or self-reflexivity, such truth is “global” in significance, with reference to the work as a whole.²⁴

Existential Truth

The existential truth conveyed in and through a given film world is a strongly culturally and historically emergent one. In addition to addressing itself to specific areas of human concern and experience (potentially any area), it is in itself experiential. Moreover, as we have already seen, it is dialogical and reciprocal, both found and made, not least in the respect that it is capable of making a contribution to the complex, personal reality that we call self-knowledge. Such capture by cinematic works of art of that which is phenomenally most real or authentic is clearly not a matter of veridical or mimetic representation alone. That is, it is not an informational “what” knowable apart from the sensory and aesthetic “how,” as in a series of semantic (or quasi-semantic) messages that could just as well be communicated in some other didactic medium and form. Nor is the existential truth of film worlds equivalent to a factual, or objective, presentation of some range or aspect of lifeworld or historical events, wherein truthful representation is equated with realism of style or treatment. Indeed, as Sartre argued in defending Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood as true to the lived experience of war (against some socialist critics at the time of the film’s release), in narrative cinema (as in all art) factual accuracy, and a will toward the objectivity of neutral reportage, may impede the conveyance of more valuable and enriching truth, as much as subserve or guarantee it.25 Nor, again, despite some of the best known remarks of authors in the theoretical tradition of film realism, does such film-world truth in our present sense emanate directly from inherent properties of the medium—that is, when these are sufficiently “respected” and put to work. This includes the cinematographic truth often seen to result from the (suggested) objectivity (or “honesty”) of the film camera, which simply records all before it in a mechanical fashion free from direct human mediation and, as a result, provides an “automatic” and factual view of the “real world” otherwise inaccessible.²⁶

Although it is of course enabled and profoundly channeled through an audiovisual, photographic medium—and to varying degrees is shaped by its “ontological” features—following from all that we have established concerning cinematic art thus far, the truth in question is, instead, to be approached in terms of what films may reveal about their particular subjects (of representation) as these are mediated and concretized through narrative fiction, and other cognitive strategies and figurations, together with (and through) a distinct artistic and cinematic style founded on relevant and highly mediated (symbolic) exemplifications and attendant expression. In the case of Ivan’s Childhood, and via Sartre’s perceptive interpretation, it is precisely in deviating from any sort of factual reporting and literal or mimetic depiction of events occurring on the Russian front during one of the darkest periods of World War II—as might be found in any competent historian’s account or presented in an educational documentary—that the film is able to so powerfully convey the fundamentally surreal or oneiric nature of war as also (always) a subjective, impressionistic, and senseless reality for those at the center of it (and certainly for children, such as the film’s central character). And, moreover, it is able to do so in a profoundly affective, as much as perceptual and imaginary, way whereby work-generated feeling serves a “referential” function. As Sartre implies, this much is achieved through a creatively forged, rather than a simply found or ready-made, affiliation between a film’s subject and a particular cinematic style and form, together with a particular view of empirical reality following from and expressed by it. In this specific instance it involves the sympathetic, mutually supportive relation between the subject matter and the film’s presentation of its young protagonist’s “mindscreen,” constantly shifting between registers of reality, fantasy, and dream without, that is, the film presenting or signaling these modes of experience, and the transitions from one to the other, in any clear or conventional cinematic way. In looking at his post–Ivan’s Childhood films, we can (now) see that the presentation in question is not only a defining stylistic world-marker of the film but a hallmark of Tarkovsky’s cinema (one also found with notable variations in Andrei Rublev, Mirror, and The Sacrifice).

There is no certain route of access to a film world’s existential truth content, which may have various direct and indirect relations with fictional narrative (and the jointly represented and imagined world-in), together with a film’s artistic transformations, structures, and intentions, as these are experienced and interpreted. The truth in question may be communicated in and through the very detail, grain, nuance, and tone of any or all of these. What must be stressed is that like a film work’s various symbolically exemplified features, rather than transparently “seen-in” or semantically “read-off” it, as in our more ordinary acts of comprehension, the truth latently present in a film world does not reside exclusively in what it (more) literally or explicitly shows or says. Rather, it most typically comes to light through repeated viewings and efforts of interpretation necessarily directed at a cinematic work and world in the entirety of its sometimes more opaque artistic function and meaning.

In all these ways such truth is most aptly characterized as an event of “disclosure” or “revelation” occasioned by a cinematic work, which, according to Heidegger and Gadamer, as two of the leading exponents of this concept of art, is, as we have seen, always an occurrence within time and history through which a new aspect of the authentic “being” of things (or “the being of beings”) is disclosed. Art, according to these philosophers, “is the becoming and happening” of a truth that is profoundly different from that which permits certain discursive assertions to be counted as items of fact or knowledge.27 It is in this sense that Heidegger, in famously rejecting an age-old Western rationalist and propositional conception of truth (inherited from classical Greece), speaks instead (in poetic-theoretical fashion) of a “showing forth,” an “unconcealedness,” and a “bringing into the open” of a new reality on the part of artworks. It is as if in encountering them, one enters a clearing (Lichtung) in the otherwise trackless forest, which enables one to see the surroundings for the first time and to gain a necessary orientation and perspective.²⁸ This fundamental notion as to the meaning of what “is true,” as gleaned from the pre-Platonic, original meaning of aletheia, concerns a specific and existent reality that only the work may succeed in making fully apparent.

In his profound, if also frequently obscure and difficult, essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger argues that “the setting-into-work of truth thrusts up the unfamiliar and extraordinary and at the same time thrusts down the ordinary and what we believe to be such. The truth that discloses itself in the work can never be proved or derived from what went before. What went before is refuted in its exclusive reality by the work. What art founds can therefore never be compensated and made up for by what is already present and available” (75). What a cinematic work is truthful to does not entirely preexist its experience—because only through its creation, appearance, and individual engagement may one become fully aware of that which it reveals and expresses, as well as of the unique constellation of external realities with respect to which it draws away the veil of ignorance, so to speak.²⁹ The work’s appearance in the world of objects is simultaneous with the appearance of its world as a novel one, something over and above antecedently familiar realities, including all those it incorporates to its own ends.

Thus if cinematic art may convey what is true, it does so through an intervention in, and transformation of, what we ordinarily perceive, think, and believe. This activity does not involve a loss or diminution of primary reality, as Plato has notoriously held in his opinion of art as mimesis, or mere imitation, which, as Cassirer has written, inevitably condemns art to cognitive failure.30 To the contrary, a primary virtue of the hermeneutic approach sketched here is that it enables us to finally move beyond this conception, with respect to films and their experiences, and many of our intuitions concerning their greatest values. In its skilled and insightful presentation—which is also a re-presentation—of appearances to disclose that which is otherwise “hidden,” obscured, or overlooked, a cinematic work is not like a mirror of an already illuminated reality—as if a set lit for a camera—but, more appositely, a searchlight in the dark, revealing much that we did not even suspect was present before its beam contacted it.

Since, as we now have traced in some detail, cinema effects a pronounced transformation of quotidian, lifeworld objects and actions as previously experienced and known as central to its artistic functions and value, the cinematic-artistic “event of truth” may continue to be regarded as a “defamiliarization.” Yet the oft-noted process must be seen to occur in a more “global” and holistic sense than in Viktor Shklovsky’s (original) invocation of the term (in his essay “Art as Technique”) as pertaining primarily to an artwork’s deliberate disruption and frustration of “automatic” perceptual processes (leading to knowledge and action), occuring in our ordinary (lifeworld) activities, through the interposition of particular “formal” or structural devices as the methods of such disruption. In Bordwell’s and Thompson’s more or less direct extension of Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarisation to narrative cinema, they take it to apply to a film’s disruption or rendering moot of the common perceptual-cognitive schemata (or strategies) that viewers employ to construct a coherent narrative and story-world from the perceptual information a film provides. They associate such an interest and activity on the part of a narrative film—drawing attention to what might otherwise go unnoticed in its experience, as concerning its form and structure—with (what is in their view) the distinctly “aesthetic” aspect of narrative cinema in its more creative and original manifestations.³¹

However, just as there is more to art-making and reception in general than either perceptually accessible form (even as this is broadly construed to include many aspects of style) and story comprehension and construction (in the case of narrative art), films also connect with other, and perhaps deeper, sources of Erfahrung. In bringing the now-familiar concept into line with the existential-hermeneutic perspective (and its critical modification of mimesis in art), defamiliarization must also embrace and encompass not just formal and structural processes and elements but the full range of a cinematic work’s representational and symbolic “contents,” with all that these carry in its train, and which we have found necessary to characterize in terms of the more expansive notion of an artistic world-version of objects and experiences. In other words, and also in keeping with the broad arc of Heidegger’s well-known discussions of the truth in and of painting and architecture, the “aesthetic” in cinema as a feature and goal of individual works is not only a matter of the work prompting (greater) reflection on its own—and the viewer’s—perceptual and representational processes in constructing the film’s version of X subject for attention (e.g., a city, an individual’s life, the French Revolution). It also and equally prompts reflection on the resulting product—that is, the presented version of X in question—in all the sensory presence of which the medium is capable. That is, the object of representation is now given, as it were, in and through the cinematic work both as an in-itself (“ideal”) reality and in conjunction and comparison with that which is known and felt about it in “real life” (i.e., outside of the work), before, during, and after the encounter (and also together, it should be added, with how it may be known as presented in other works as other and different artistic versions). Related to the dynamic Mitry and Dufrenne stress with respect to the relation between cinematic representation and artistic expression in film, this can also be put in perhaps more familiar semiotic terms: aesthetic perception and experience are a matter of (greater than normal) attention being paid not only to the artistic “signifier” but also to the “signified” in the (potentially) full range of its artistically communicated presence and its work-specific, semantic attributions. With these points in mind we may now continue to flesh out and perhaps make more plausible these major aspects of Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s central theme concerning art and truth in their application to cinema, as well as indicate the relation of such an existential hermeneutics of art to the other theoretical and philosophical perspectives and concepts (including that of symbolic exemplification) that I earlier attempted to bring to bear on film works and worlds.

DISCLOSURE, PROJECTION, AND PRESERVATION

One effect of the journey through cultural and historical space and time a film world provides is that aspects of our lifeworlds appear new and strange, as if our taken-for-granted acquaintance with them has all along been incomplete or mistaken. For instance, neurosis is not the same after the creation and experience of Through a Glass Darkly, color after Black Narcissus, or modern travel after a number of Wenders’s films. Nor is Rome the same after La dolce vita, or Los Angeles and its environs (including Hollywood) after Mulholland Drive. Fellini’s and Lynch’s film worlds are not capable of altering the physical environment of these cities, of course. But they reveal new perceptual, aesthetic, cultural, mythical, and historical facets or dimensions of these places that would in a significant sense not have been revealed had these specially created worlds not existed. Although one cannot literally walk the streets of Woody Allen’s or Martin Scorsese’s Manhattan, as these are the thoroughfares of virtual as distinct from physically embodied and causally supported worlds (for all that this distinction entails), in visiting and exploring Manhattan one can, nonetheless, recognize these filmmakers’ Manhattan-set worlds as palpably present (fig. 8.1). In and through their works Allen and Scorsese (and their collaborators) do not so much present a certain city and its inhabitants as they existed before being mediated and transformed within a cinematic world structure but in the very process of being so transformed, street by street, as it were. We may think of film worlds as superimpositions. Like new templates placed over (older) experiential realities, they shape, organize, and render coherent and navigable our more immediate sense experiences—preceding and conditioning the discovery of a truth they both embody and convey.

FIGURE 8.1   Allen’s Manhattan as one of many cinematic and artistic world-versions of New York City.

Our critical, evaluative judgments of the truth-to-experience of films, however rudimentary or sophisticated, always pertain to their transformations of preexisting realities, as so many constituent, film-world materials—given, that is to say, what we take to be our firsthand knowledge and familiarity with them. (This is no less true, it should be added, with respect to films in the mode of cinema verité or its spirit, for instance, where all such transformations are ostensibly at their minimum.) I have argued that a cinematic work’s affective dimension may be divided between, first, what belongs to the extrawork psychological and affective nature of its selected (profilmic) materials—for example, objects, faces, events (the selection of which itself is a creative, intentional, world-shaping act)—and, second, feeling conveyed by virtue of the unique symbolic and aesthetic articulations created with and through these materials, in the manner of formally shaped and presented referential elements and structures, including narrative-fictional ones. With respect to meaning, as well as feeling, these two factors and their proportions are often at the forefront of interpretative attention and understanding—as when we say, for example, that the cinematography or editing of a film is not suited to its location or subject matter or the human behavior represented. For not only is this characteristically cinematic dialectic of the “naturally” or “mechanically” reproduced and the creatively and formally shaped or altered (and hence interpreted) a powerful magnet for viewer engagement, but also, and equally, it is a criterion for artistic and aesthetic interest and value. As Mitry, among others, suggests, and as previously discussed (also with reference to Goodman’s cognitive philosophy of art), assuming it is aesthetically attentive, both viewer experience (in the cognitively robust sense here argued) and postviewing critical discussion always demand assessing and negotiating the relation between some known and recognized extrafilmic reality and a film’s (and filmmaker’s) interpretation and transformation of it in the form of a singular cinematic and artistic version. During a film’s experience this “higher-level,” culturally informed aesthetic comprehension (and its back-and-forth mental movement between what is inside and outside of the work), occurs, it must be added, in addition to, simultaneous with, and often closely intersecting basic narrative comprehension and its processes.

We may come to the worlds of Manhattan or After Hours or Eyes Wide Shut knowing New York City very well, as perhaps present or former residents or frequent visitors. In such cases a more complete appreciation of these cinematic “New Yorks” may well require (at certain points in their experience) temporarily relinquishing some of our conceptions, past experiences, and expectations of the great metropolis in order to more openly and productively engage with a very different place onscreen: that is, one of a more closely bounded, intentionally and symbolically concentrated sort. Whatever our own, personally experienced, and practical knowledge–determined and–dependent “New York” is (or was) prior to encountering a cinematic version of it, if the work is interesting and successful, our various conceptions, attitudes, feelings, and so forth will be (permanently) altered in some degree as a result of its experience. And yet, not only can prior awareness of the physically actual city also add to our appreciation of each of a great many different moving-image and sound-enabled “New Yorks,” but grasping the filmmaker’s particular artistic vision and version of this complex reality might require and presume such firsthand experience and quite self-consciously build on it.

The reader will be able to supply numerous examples of his or her own here, but the key point is that whatever we know or believe about New York prior to viewing a film set there, or otherwise representing it, is always and fundamentally put into play in the event of the work and our participatory dialogue with it. In the perceptual-cognitive and affective crucible of a film’s experience, the relevance (and value) of such knowledge and belief is always tested, as it were. Obviously, what applies in this example applies in some measure to any specific, familiar, profilmic (or extrafilmic) reality that a film world simultaneously represents, presents, and transforms—be it such a vast, complex, and physically instantiated one, like a major city, or perhaps a single, biographical individual treated fictionally, or even an abstract idea or system of accepted beliefs.

In these ways perhaps the most relevant feature of film worlds as conduits of artistically conveyed truth to experience is a dialectical one: it consists in the opposite tendencies of filmmaking and viewing wherein one process is the reverse of the other. Although creative filmmaking involves the construction of an indecomposable and artistic-symbolic unity (in physical, perceptual, and meaning-bearing terms), a finished work subsequently, and as experienced, not only also permits but requires and compels, on a mental plane, a kind of individually self-centered “deconstruction” of this unity in order to attain a new and higher synthesis. To explicate this fully: the filmmaker borrows his or her materials from our worlds of experience in order to fashion a new world apart. Yet (a) in order to recognize this as (also) a creative version, and artistic interpretation, of experience and its objects, and (b) for the purpose of grasping the extent and nature of the transformations in question, and the possible purposes and meanings of them (in relation to the cinematic and artistic whole), the viewer must—at least initially—parse out and mentally return these realities-cum-world-making materials to the “places” from which they came. Such knowledge-based recognition, comparison, and comprehension is a major aspect of judging a film’s artistic success and interest. Moreover, rather than a challenge to it, it is the ultimate foundation of a cinematic work-world’s most significant alterity and singularity, in artistic terms. In addition to a reemphasis of relevant insights found in Mitry’s film theory in these respects (as well as in Goodman’s aesthetics), here we may also find the film-theoretical application of Gadamer’s thesis that “only the support of familiar and common understanding makes possible the venture into the alien, the lifting up of something out of the alien, and thus the broadening and enrichment of our own experience of the world.”32 As a more concrete version of the basic, active relation of representation itself, every cinematic work-world involves a three-way “conversation” between certain extrawork realities, their artistic presentation as mediated by the intentions and creativity of filmmakers, and the viewer, not only as perceiving and imagining subject but also as a cultural and historically situated “self.”

Goodman adopts a differently oriented but recognizably similar position in his cognitive philosophy of art, centered on the concepts of artistic “projectibility” (an obviously apposite term in a cinematic context) and what he calls “rightness” or fidelity to experience, as a suggested more relativist alternative to truth. He writes that “what a Manet or Monet or Cézanne does to our subsequent seeing of the world is as pertinent to their appraisal as is any direct confrontation. How our looking at pictures and our listening to music inform what we encounter later and elsewhere is integral to them as cognitive.”³³ In line with Goodman’s further explication of this key notion of retrospective “projection” in largely perceptual and formal terms, in a cinematic context it would seem to mainly apply to what film worlds look and sound like. Certainly we may perceive light and shadow in new ways as a result of seeing the most accomplished film noir lighting, experience three-dimensional space differently by virtue of its two-dimensional presentation in a German expressionist or Soviet montage film, or see aspects of color differently as a result of the creative use of Technicolor or lens filters. And the power of film art, in the form of specific works, to alter the visible and audible world around us by changing how we more literally see and hear it, should, of course, not be understated (or left unanalyzed).

Yet, as I noted earlier with respect to “defamiliarization,” since a film may in one way or another exemplify any kind of property by way of reference that passes through itself (i.e., its own nature as a work), the realities it helps to reveal or clarify through the viewer’s “projection” of it onto, and over, extrawork (and noncinematic) experience are not confined to purely perceptual ones. They are, rather, as potentially unlimited in kind and scope as intellect and imagination themselves and are constrained only by the medium. Thus, Blow-Up leads us to awareness of certain truths about perception, images, and art; Blade Runner plumbs the mysteries of personal identity; and Adaptation prompts reflection on the vicissitudes of Hollywood screenwriting and the nature of film narrative. As I have argued, in each such instance the formal, presentational vehicle of such insight and enhanced understanding everywhere interpenetrates and shapes such semantic and ideational content as may be abstracted from a cinematic work. In this aspect the truth-telling process is, moreover, again a circular or recursive one: the more a cinematic work-world can be interestingly and revealingly projected onto external domains of experience, the more we learn, and continue to learn, about it and its reservoirs of meaning.34

In the highly figurative terms of his later philosophy, Heidegger refers to a similar process of an artwork’s “preservation.” Those who grasp what the work reveals and “stay within” the event of truth it embodies (that is, remain attentive to and “respectful” of it) are its “preservers.” Such preservation is always relative and variable, dictated to some extent by the terms of individual works and what they “demand” of us (as audience). Moreover, the full and “proper way” to preserve a work is, as Heidegger suggests, “co-created and prescribed only and exclusively by the work.” In much the same way, we might add, common, prior standards of what is “realistic” or “natural” or “credible” or “right” as applied to films are to some notable extent challenged and tested by recognition of the specific nature and intended artistic aims of a given cinematic work and world. As Heidegger further maintains, and as is relevant to the worlds of films as much as any other artistically created and experienced worlds, such “preservation” occurs at different levels of knowledge with always differing degrees of scope, constancy, and lucidity.35 Of course, film critics and theorists have a large role to play in both of these “projecting” and “preserving” processes, one aspect of each being the labeling, bringing to attention, and interpretation of what I have termed (and discussed as) a film world’s exemplified symbolic-aesthetic elements and world-markers, as the most significant among these.

Finally, under the present heading of film-disclosed truth “about the world,” beyond the dimensions of perceptual form and symbolic and referential content (with reference to a single film or the entire body of work of a filmmaker), such frequently retrospective, epistemic world “projection” and “preservation” also pertains to the affective-expressive dimension (as is implicit in both Goodman’s and Heidegger’s accounts). As we have seen in the application of Dufrenne’s general aesthetics of feeling, the global affective expression, or world-feeling, of a film may serve to draw it closer to the powerfully felt reality of many other worlds, and experiences constituting them, ones that may come to greater awareness and appreciation by way of it. Likewise, and more generally, the affect and emotions that a film world generates (and that, as we have seen, are of structurally and psychologically distinct types) may allow for perceptual and representational, artistically mediated truth to come into sharper focus and heightened attention, and to acquire personal relevance. Indeed, this feeling-led recognition and access to what may be otherwise closed off and invisible to our faculties of cognition alone is already assumed in the conception of the inherent expressivity of the symbols of art, and there is no sound, convincing reason to summarily withhold it from cinema.

Cinematic Truth (as Exemplified)

To return to Truffaut’s observation that I have taken as the starting point for a consideration of film-world truth as distinctly artistic truth: if what has been said thus far pertains to a film’s “idea of the world,” how may we best understand the French critic-director’s further claim that every successful film must present an “idea of cinema”? The leading edge of his remark is to remind us that every cinematic work of art is already a concrete example of what cinematic art is, and can aspire to be, as an instantiation and further development of the traditions to which it belongs. For this reason the truth that each film world exemplifies is also therefore a truth about the importance and constitutive role of cinematic tradition, one that often precedes all other forms of self-acknowledgment and explicit, representational self-reference. The meaningful self-display in question is, in other words, a more basic, primary “exemplification” (or serving as a sample-of) than that which we have discussed in relation to a film’s individual self-reflexive features, which are most often more episodic and narrowly focused or specific in terms of subject—for example, showing or referring to some particular aspect of filmmaking or film viewing and thus commenting upon it.

Work-exemplified truth of this second kind is by no means confined to modern and contemporary cinema or to films that are mainly or directly “about film” in fictional and narrative fashion. Yet, and to draw an analogy with the practice and theory of painting, neither is such truth always and only manifest in the conspicuous, form-centered way that Clement Greenberg famously tied to a definition of distinctly modern painting (from Cézanne to abstract expressionism) as always first and foremost “about” painting (a tendency that philosopher and art theorist Arthur C. Danto—with reference to Truffaut’s films, in fact—directly compares with the pronounced “self-consciousness” of modern art cinema).36 Nor, however, is the revealed, cinema-related truth in question exhausted by a more representation-centered, sometimes (self-)critical or probing, concern on the part of a film with cinema’s nature, history, or institutional settings more along the lines of the self-referential character of “postmodern” pop and postpop art. To the contrary, this potential truth about cinema that Truffaut intimates, and I am expanding on, is something wider than the pronounced tendency toward the (self-)reflexive in both modern (or modernist) and contemporary (e.g., postmodern) cinematic guises that Danto, Deleuze, Robert Stam, and many other writers have usefully identified and compared with its manifestation in other arts, although it may, nonetheless, be seen to encompass and, in effect, license specific forms of reflexivity.

For beyond (self-)reflexivity as an artistic strategy and technique, the truth in question may also be seen as related to Kant’s concept of the exemplariness of an artwork, as inextricably bound to a judgment concerning its merits. This idea refers, specifically, to the work’s being judged as able and worthy of serving as a “model” or standard for future artistic creation and the founding of (new) stylistic traditions. The quality and capacity in question is regarded as a necessary “check” on originality, as Kant’s other criterion for a work’s manifestation of artistic “genius.”37 Such exemplariness assumes a work’s being recognized (by artists, as well as critics) as a creative and valuable artistic address of, and reflection on, the practices and past works of the art form in question, whatever specific form such address and reflection may take in individual works (e.g., whether relatively more form- or representation-centered).

We have already met with particular instances of such truth (and “exemplariness”) in several places throughout this study. I refer here to some of the cited film works and worlds that exemplify through aspects of their form, narrative, and themes something true and significant about cinematic art (in light of recognition of their created and experienced worlds as symbolic and aesthetic realities). Works of film theory are typically full of such paradigmatic examples, and to that extent they implicitly admit such “cinematic” truth. Thus, not only may films serve as examples, models, and precedents for subsequent innovative and artistically significant filmmaking practices (as Kant’s idea of artistic exemplariness entails), but, and more in line with a Hegelian and post-Hegelian conception of the (historically increasing) closeness of art and philosophical and critical reflection on art, they can stimulate and assist our critical thinking and theorizing concerning cinema’s possibilities and limits as art. Pending further exploration and analysis, it seems reasonable (and not entirely circular) to believe that the ability of some films to valuably contribute to the formulation of a general theory of film art (whether it be the present one or some other) is testament to each presenting and disclosing some quantum of cinema-related truth in a compelling way.

As it seems hardly necessary to point out, many films do not exploit their own nature in this direction to the same extent or with the same significance and insight. Additionally, in some specific filmmaking modes and styles, as in some individual works, such “cinematic truth” may well be more prominent or trumpeted in some ways than it is in others and, in consequence, may be relatively more on the sensory and perceptual surface. More typically, however, and no less so than each film world’s content of the existential truth we have described, this more specific, cinema-directed form of the true as that which is “brought out into the open,” in Heidegger’s sense, is often far from transparent, or always in plain view of casual observation or untutored experience, in any ordinary senses. As is the case with virtually all artistically exemplified and stylistic features (and world-markers), its appreciation may require efforts of active, engaged interpretation and critical reflection, coupled with the prior possession on the part of the individual viewer of filmic and cultural literacy. Moreover, the general claim and conception that artistically and cinematically conveyed truth, whether “existential” or “cinematic” as here described, is revealed (e.g., in contrast to being discursively formulated) in the first instance, does not mean, or entail, that it is revealed to all viewers, on every occasion of a work’s experience.

The complete picture (which can only be sketched here) is thus one of truth in a work of cinematic art (“existential”) that potentially concerns any aspect of human experience and primarily works through and with symbolized “content” and subject matter but also transcends them—since it is ultimately inseparable from a film’s global, presentational “form” and artistic world-version (i.e., of that which it represents). But there is also another sort of truth, concerning cinema itself, which is more akin to the exhibition of a paradigm case or example (to evoke a philosophical notion associated with the later reflections of Wittgenstein) and that, while often enlisting the aid of what a given film represents literally, fictionally, or figuratively, is also more “form” and self-centered (in other words, at a relatively lesser symbolic remove from its perceptual and formal presence). This aspect of aletheic “disclosure” pertains to what a cinematic work “says” about cinema (and cinematic art) as a practice and concept, while also providing an implicit version and interpretation of it. No less than in its outward facing representations, however, as I have maintained throughout the preceding chapters, the only vehicle for such self-reflection of a narrative film work is all the formal transformations of its chosen materials that it effects through both the film medium (or media) and the processes of narrative fiction. Taken together, these dual-facing, genuinely aletheic potentials of an encounter with a film world thus pose a significant challenge, at the highest levels of a work’s cognitive and expressive value, to any overly simplistic or reductive use by theorists and critics of a form-and-content dichotomy.

FILM-WORLD TRUTH AND CRITICISM: SOME OBSERVATIONS ON ARTISTIC VALUE

In offering a world-centered framework for the theorization of films as artworks, I have taken a largely descriptive rather than normative or film-critical stance. While I have cited many films that are indisputably significant in artistic terms, my inquiry has (with some exceptions) been concerned with the matter of what cinematic works and their worlds are as artistically intended objects and events, in contrast to what makes some films and worlds better (often far better) as art than others. However, in bringing to a satisfactory completion this discussion of the two forms of revealed and interpreted truth to which films as art may be conceived to aspire, and sometimes, at least, to attain—and also by way of necessary conclusion on this obviously large and ramified subject—a few consequent observations as to their specific relevance to the aesthetic valuation of narrative films are in order.

If, as I have claimed, every cinematic work-world is singular in its multi faceted totality (and even, perhaps, rationally incommensurable with others in some significant respects) and, further, that there is no one set of universal, fixed standards for critical judgment, or certain way to transition from film theory to “metacriticism,” none of this should be taken (or need be taken) to imply that all films are of equal artistic value. Critical standards pertaining to the twin forms of film truth exist, even if these are culturally and historically relative and, perhaps less obviously, also highly relative to each given world (or world-system) in some respects (i.e., in the sense that some films require us to revise or enlarge our criteria and will continue to do so). All films, as symbolic constructs, organize realities in particular ways through the kinds of general processes that I have traced. But, this does not mean that they do so well or that the end result is particularly interesting, novel, or illuminating.38 As Goodman astutely observes on the subject of the endlessly renewed process of more interesting and enlightening cultural and artistic world-making, “while readiness to recognize alternative worlds may be liberating, and suggestive of new avenues of exploration, a willingness to welcome all worlds builds none.”³⁹

To fully grasp the created worlds of films, as I have argued, it is first of all necessary to appreciate their artistic and cinematic transformations of that which is antecedently known, commonplace, and familiar. This is precisely where the two forms of filmic truth—existential and cinematic—meet each other and potentially effect a synthesis. Truffaut is right to suggest, in terms of what a good or great film must do, that such an “aletheic” conjunction is, and should continue to be, a principal criterion for a film’s inclusion in any canon of narrative cinematic art. The best cinematic works, narrative and nonnarrative alike, not only express truths about experience or “the world” and cinema together and simultaneously, but what is so expressed in each such case is (almost invariably found to be) interesting, profound, and revealing, as opposed to superficial, clichéd, and trivial. (To pick but one example: apart from any specific stylistic, narrative, and screenwriting considerations alone, this arguably marks the most fundamental difference in terms of artistic success and interest between Wenders’s Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, and Wings of Desire, which are generally and rightly considered masterpieces of post-war European cinema, and his later The End of Violence, The Million Dollar Hotel, and Land of Plenty, which are generally considered artistic failures.)

More generally, these forms of truth may be considered among the chief objectives of film art—in some plausible sense of this notion such as the realization of the best-informed intentions on the part of filmmakers—and among the broad teleological goals of cinematic world-making, dissemination, and valid interpretation. If this much is accepted, there are normatively “true” and “false” film worlds, based on their possession or lack of a range of representations, exemplifications, and expressions of whatever extrawork realities the film addresses in terms of a subject. It matters little whether we speak here of post–World War I Vienna or swinging-1960s London, of childhood or the psychology of love, of the French Revolution or the troubles of Northern Ireland, or, indeed, of cinema itself. The issue is whether a cinematic work of art helps us to recognize (and “recognize”) something new and significant—and feel something significant and perhaps emotionally atypical or unique and awareness-heightening—about it. Or, in contrast, does the work serve only as a mimetic conduit, confirming what is already common belief, attitude, or knowledge? Or, worse still, does it distort, obscure, or fail to do adequate justice to that which it incorporates or to which it refers? Since it is centered on the artistic creation and interpretation of a film, the “falsity” in question, however, like the potential for truth, is not an “extra-aesthetic” interpreted feature (e.g., connected to an inferred, didactic theme or “message”) but lies near the heart of what I have explicated as a film’s full aesthetic dimension.

If Truffaut’s own 400 Blows and Jules and Jim have claims to the status of important cinematic works of art, it is because, like Citizen Kane and La règle de jeu (as the two films that he singles out for attention in the respects I have been considering), they admirably fulfill these dual criteria. In these films both forms of truth—existential and cinematic—are present in a pronounced way, sometimes in mutually illuminating (if dialectical) relation, and the “content” of each is deemed particularly valuable and compelling. In this sense the apprehended presence of such illuminating and compelling “ideas” (to return to Truffaut’s suggestion, with which I began), or, at least, meaningful suggestions, concerning both “life” and “cinema,” must be seen to testify to artistic accomplishment and value. The accompanying caveat, however, is that “ideas” here does not in any sense exclude the display of skill in the use and handling of formal and sensory properties, which, after all, are among the vehicles of transmission.

The forms of truth that successful cinematic works convey are the direct result of discovering or making cinematic and artistic forms that are both interesting and enlightening in themselves and then locating them within a seemingly right (or at least highly appropriate) vehicle for their narrative, thematic, and conceptual content. In this context Mitry has rightly observed that “though the work of art may take it upon itself to express valid truths, the problem exists in creating a form both necessary and suitable for giving the chosen idea its completed meaning, enabling it to become fulfilled in an original signification.”40 The concept of a film world that I have elucidated is consistent with Burch’s contention that in cinema “a subject can engender form and that to choose a subject is to make an aesthetic choice.”⁴¹ That this may often seem not to be the case is more a reflection of the lack of aesthetic accomplishment or interest on the part of some films (and their makers) than any formalist proof that subject and form are, or should remain (somehow) functionally independent, even in a narrative film context. As Burch also argues, any subject a filmmaker chooses to address should ideally provide, in some way, an opportunity for a cinematic and wider artistic exploration of form, just as a film’s form should ideally be related, or relatable, on various levels, to content and subject matter.⁴² If narrative cinematic works of art are to be held to the general evaluative critical standards we customarily apply to novels, paintings, sculptures, and plays—and there appears no good reason not to—this is surely not too much to ask of them and of their creators.

My emphasis on this double and opposite-phased movement toward truth conveyed by and through an artistically successful film world is not to overlook the fact that even when present (in potential), it may not be fully manifest, or even discoverable by some audiences, in many cases. A given cultural and artistic context, as well as all manner of (other) contingent historical and practical constraints, may have not yet allowed a film world’s truth to be recognized and experienced. We could (if space permitted) discuss many cases in which extrawork factors concerning, for example, a film’s audience, commercial interests and expectations, the lives of its makers, or a controversial or taboo subject matter have caused its artistically conveyed and embodied existential and cinematic truths and related values to go underappreciated for years or decades, if not to the present moment and thus have also prevented its potential artistic influence on subsequent films. Such historical vagaries that preclude due appreciation at particular times in film history are evident, for instance, in the wayward life-stories of now canonical films like Vertigo, recently surpassing Citizen Kane in the respected Sight and Sound critics’ poll as the greatest film ever made, having opened to famously mixed and muted reviews in 1958 (before largely dropping off film and television screens for a number of years); Powell’s scandal-inducing, near career-ending Peeping Tom; Kalatozov’s extraordinary, “lost and found” Soy Cuba (sponsored by Soviet Russia and Castro’s Cuban government, which later shelved it for political reasons); and still underappreciated narrative-experimental works like Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Of course, to any such list to which the reader may wish to make his or her own additions, we should add the category of simply “undiscovered” film worlds of artistic merit and significance (with particular reference to the products of several lesser known and discussed national cinemas and traditions).

Classic films may stand the proverbial test of time, but none are timeless in the truths they disclose about experience and cinema. In this respect, as in others, they are subservient to the historicity of artistic perception, interpretation, and judgment. Although the history of cinema is still undeniably brief in comparison with the other arts—making its artistic accomplishments and milestones all that more impressive—what we may see and appreciate in and about a film world constructed today may not have been grasped thirty or sixty years ago and perhaps could not possibly have been. But also, and vice versa, there are likely some aspects, including aesthetically significant ones, of certain cinematic worlds that, owing to lack of requisite knowledge, experience, or interest, the contemporary viewer can no longer see, feel, and comprehend. If in itself not particularly original, the robust acknowledgment of the artistic truth of films being bound to vicissitudes of history, circumstances, and taste is one of the principal benefits of conceiving of a cinematic work’s created and presented world as a hermeneutic event—a dialogical process that begins but most certainly does not end with a film’s (first) viewing. And if the human creators of cinematic works and worlds have their artistic careers, so, too, as previously suggested, do their creations have their “interpreted careers,” in Margolis’s phrase.43 These, as well, are important parts of a film world’s experience, and any specific attempt at informed interpretation also involves the viewer’s active considerations of their past “lives,” in the form of their previous receptions and interpretations, from the standpoint of the present situation (just as, that is, and in a more systematic way, this sort of awareness, whether it is made explicit or not, also informs their scholarly discussion and appraisal).

The present argument is not meant to suggest that the more profound, and thought- and creative action-inspiring, truth(s) in question are the only monuments of lasting cultural significance and value that are or should be in play with respect to the productive and informed criticism of cinematic works in artistic or aesthetic terms, nor their experience. One may wonder, for instance, where the phenomena of the aesthetic or other pleasures of cinema, of our sometimes simple enthrallment with the art of the moving image as a “for-itself” good, as it were, fit into this general approach. Yet this prominent aspect of viewer experience, as one reason among many why people watch films (of all kinds), does not seem to me to be in any way incompatible with what I have maintained about film worlds in terms of their artistic (i.e., aesthetically symbolic and affective) truth and value. Experiencing, coming to know, the revealed and interpreted truths of films is frequently satisfying, pleasurable, and intensely exciting, including in those ways that we might attempt to define (and defend) as uniquely aesthetic or responsive to art. And although other types of pleasure and delight in the wonders of cinematic media and their use (which will no doubt continue on their track of technical innovation) is often ancillary to it, it is by no means necessarily antithetical to the genuine knowledge that films, as artistic worlds, may provide. By the same token, however, viewers can take all manner of clearly nonaesthetic pleasures—voyeuristic, erotic, ironic, “guilty”—in watching films that they and others would not wish to regard as artistically or culturally significant. Surely pleasure on its own, even in that contemplative, “disinterested” form Kant posits as at the root of the aesthetic and its connection to fine art, does not begin to exhaust our visits to film worlds in all their cognitive and affective richness, complexity, and heterogeneity.44

Although the truth and value of films as art is a “serious” matter in the ways that I have been arguing throughout, there is, of course, no correlation between this seriousness and a relative seriousness of tone, attitude, or genre. The comedy or musical film, as well as the drama, may reveal much that is previously hidden our unknown amid the appearances that surround us. Moreover, it may do so not only (and without contradiction) in thoroughly entertaining ways but in a formally and expressively innovative fashion that expands the artistic range and scope of narrative cinema. An artistically interesting and truth-conveying film world may, it would appear, address itself to any subject and aspect of life (including apparently common or even trivial ones) and adopt any perspective, attitude, or tone in so doing. Given some common expectations, and past and current critical prejudices, however, it is perhaps especially important to take note of Jacques Demy’s observation—aptly capturing not only the great artistic achievements of many of the best film comedies but also his own major and frequently overlooked contribution to cinematic art—that “lite films about serious subjects” may be more artistically profound and valuable than “serious films about lite subjects.”⁴⁵

In this chapter we have begun to explore a hermeneutics of cinematic art commensurate with the proposed concept of film worlds. A more adequate treatment would involve much more detailed consideration of particular films and their interpretations (over time). I hope enough has been said, however, to show that the “objective” reality of a cinematic work-world, as a symbolic-aesthetic object, and its most “subjective” one, as an unfolding affective-immersive experience in lived time, are united in both the reality and the concept of the cinematic event, as at once a life experience and reflection of the larger, contextual realities of culture and cinematic tradition. If anywhere, here is the meeting and reconciliation of subject and object, work and viewer, the times, places, and activities of a film’s creation and its experience and interpretation. In terms of its theorization and description, recognizing artistic truth in narrative cinema (which is, of course, never a whole or final truth) necessarily involves consideration of the ways in which a cinematic work is a representationally and narratively conveyed fictional reality and story, as well as a formally embodied, symbolically constituted object that provides a highly personal, subjective aesthetic experience within each viewer’s private consciousness. But it equally requires full recognition that in the most profound and ramified sense, it is also an intersubjective, historical, and cultural reality—an event of art.

In the foregoing chapters I have advanced the thesis that in its major aspect as a symbolic, affective, and aesthetic object and event, a narrative film creates and presents a world. The world-like character of a cinematic work is asserted not only in the (generally and theoretically accepted) sense of an imagination-posited place and time, where fictional characters exist and a certain story of their actions unfolds, but also the more holistic and (perhaps) philosophically deeper one that each film presents (or is, at least, capable of presenting) nothing less than its own artistic version of human experiential reality on integrated sensory, affective, and cognitive levels.

My goal has been to offer an alternative approach to the aesthetics of cinema. While I have proposed some original concepts, distinctions, and descriptions, this has also involved the introduction (or reintroduction) of a number of already existing and illuminating, if currently somewhat neglected, philosophical and theoretical perspectives on art and cinema into the contemporary discourse of film theory and philosophy. Indeed, and with respect, for example, to the expressive and emotional valences of films, their self-referential dimensions, and complex dynamics of cinematic experience as aesthetic experience, and the artistically conveyed truths of films, these represent perhaps more perspectives than can be adequately explained, or done justice to, in one volume. Informed by appropriate theoretical and philosophical sources, the exploration of these and other relevant subjects will, I hope, continue in other forms and contexts. Most of all, it will await further impetus from the extraordinary worlds brought into existence through the various media of the moving image.

Whatever its merits and defects may be, the model of an artistically intended and aesthetically experienced film as a specially constructed and experienced world is not a reductive one. It does not, in other words, whittle down narrative cinematic art to one or another partial aspect, magnified out of proportion, in the attempted application of a single, all-embracing, one-size-fits-all theoretical system or doctrine nor to an excessively narrow empirical research program. Of course theory is not the same as history or description, but it must do justice, if it is to be pursued at all, to the multiplicity and complexity of the phenomena it attempts to organize and understand, which, in this case, is also naturally, historically, and culturally shaped and mediated to a profound degree. Above all, film theory (as also intersecting with the philosophy of film) must (still) seek to capture, however necessarily in a series of relatively pale abstractions, something of the full and actual sources and effects of narrative cinema’s artistic spell. While much detail remains to be filled in, the proposed framework, like the fundamental approaches to art and art-making it draws on, at least leaves ample room to do so.