Content area
Abstract
My dissertation investigates two interrelated issues: what does it mean for a representational work to be fictional and what is the status of narrators in such representations? To answer these questions I turn to pre-cinema and cinema practices between 1880 and 1915, a period that has received comparatively little attention in discussions of fiction and narration in cinema studies. I propose that this period provides a unique opportunity for construing not only the earliest models of film narration in the form of lectures but also how a new representational medium became employed in the production of fictions. In other words, I investigate why we engage some films as fictions and other as actualities/documentaries despite the fact that they are both based on actuality material – photographs. For instance, why, when watching Méliès’ 1898 The Astronomer’s Dream or the Man in the Moon, do we nowadays regularly say that we are watching an astronomer whose observation of the moon turns into a series of fantastical mishaps? Why do we engage such a film as a fiction rather than as an actuality of actors performing in front of painted sets? A question even more pressing given the fact that during the early era, such films were regularly seen as instances of “canned theater”.
Methodologically, my approach is twofold. On the one hand, I draw on narratology and analytic philosophy to articulate the key concepts informing my inquiry – fiction and film narrator. Fiction, crucially, I construe as “any mandated imagining/make-believe” following Kendall Walton. Film narrator, similarly, is the agency which we are mandated to imagine as responsible for all audio-visual information on screen. On the other hand, I draw on new film history to determine what roles the notions of fiction and narration played in the production, distribution, exhibition, and reception of early cinema. To this end I examine late 19th and early 20th century sources such as trade press, catalogues, lectures, and more general discourse on cinema and adjacent cultural practices.
