Not all Films are Fiction Films

What is actually going on in the cinema is that you are sitting in a comfortable chair, in a darkened room? Let’s say you are watching a film of a young woman playing a piano. You might say, ‘I am watching a representation of a woman playing a piano’. However, in some kind of way that it a bit difficult to put one’s finger on, the following also seems to describe your experience: you are watching, in real time, a young woman play a piano. You might say, ‘I am watching a woman play a piano’. Bingo, we have a lovely philosophical problem: what is the relation between these two experiences that represent the world very differently but that we seem to be having at the same place at the same time?

Many philosophers of film have spent much time trying to describe the second experience in a way that doesn’t clash with the first. One might start by saying that we are under an illusion we are seeing the pianist. However, it is difficult to cash out ‘illusion’ in a way that both solves the problem and makes sense. We could suggest that we imagine that we are seeing the pianist. That runs into trouble because if we can imagine that we are in a position to see the pianist, why, in that imagined world, can the pianist not see us? We then propose our imagined perception of the pianist is not direct: we imagine that we see the pianist via some mechanism the nature of which we need not specify (think perhaps of an array of connected mirrors). Or maybe we imagine the perception of the pianist from some point of view, where that point of view is never or only sometimes occupied. Or maybe something else.

My concern is not to comment on these various proposals, interesting though they are. It is, rather, to point out a puzzling aspect of this debate. The problem, such as it is, arises in virtue of the medium – that is, in virtue of us watching a representation. It matters not a jot whether what we are watching (to continue our example) is a scene from a fiction in which Marianne Dashwood is playing the piano or a scene from a concert from Salzburg in which Mitsuko Uchida is playing the piano. What is puzzling is that pretty much everyone who writes on the topic (Enrico Terrone is an exception as – for complicated reasons – might be Kendall Walton) report the results of their labours as the solution to the problem of watching fiction films.

While it is unclear why they do so, it is possible to speculate. Let us try, however, speculate. The first might be a confusion between the mode of access to a medium and the nature of that medium. Let me explain. To solve our problem (let’s call it ‘the participation problem’) we have to propose an activity such as ‘imagining seeing a woman’. Imagining has become inextricably linked in the philosophical consciousness with fiction, so we can write this shorthand as ‘fictionally seeing a woman’. Pushing this a bit further, it is true that Mitsuko Uchida is not actually there – let us grant that it is fictional that she is there (or she is ‘fictionally there’). Hence, we are fictionally seeing a woman who is fictionally there.

That is all well and good, but it does not address the issue. When one is watching Sense and Sensibility, one is watching a fiction, and when one is watching Misuko Uchida in concert one is watching a non-fiction. That is, the difference between a fiction and a non-fiction is a difference in the representation. If you wanted a definition, it would be, roughly, that a representation is a fiction if its content is not guided by what its makers took to be true in the actual world and a representation is a non-fiction if it is so guided. Even more roughly, a non-fiction is like it is because that is the way the world is or was, while that is not true of fiction. The film of Uchida’s concert is as it is because the concert was as it was; the same is not true for Sense and Sensibility – there is no ‘as it was’. However, as I have said, the participation problem arises when watching both; it is entirely independent of the fiction/non-fiction distinction.

Why, then, are the two issues systematically confused? As I have said, I simply don’t know. However, philosophers of film who have fallen into this confusion can console themselves that they are not alone. The same confusion can be found in philosophers write about the written word – most of what is written about literary fiction is in fact about literary representation (whether fiction or non-fiction). In as much as future historians of philosophy will pay us any attention, I suspect they will be as puzzled about this as I am.

Derek Matravers

Derek Matravers is Professor of Philosophy at The Open University and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He writes in aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of mind and edits, with Paloma Atencia-Linares, The British Journal of Aesthetics.