Extract

How can we see fictional characters and events? One answer to this question has become known as the Imagined Seeing Thesis (IST), which is, broadly speaking, the idea that film spectators do not see fictional characters and events but imagine, or in Kendall Walton's terms make-believe,1 that they see them. In George Wilson's highly illuminating and important Seeing Fictions in Films this question is at the core of a return to his longstanding concern with film narration. How are the IST debate and narration related? According to Wilson, the function of the images (and the soundtrack) of a fiction film is to ‘prescribe’ what we are to imagine seeing (and imagine hearing) as part of the fictional world. In this way, together they constitute an ‘audiovisual narration’, and a form of narration that is distinctive to film – a kind of fictional showing. The success of a theory of film narration as imagining being shown crucially depends on the prior question of whether we imagine seeing – and this is why the IST debate is explored at such length. The range and complexity of Wilson's arguments require a much fuller and more detailed response than is possible here. I shall therefore confine my remarks chiefly to Part II of Seeing Fictions in Films, which contains the main discussion of the Imagined Seeing Thesis.

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