>Karen Bardsley wrote: When we ask, say, "Did you see the latest Austin
>Powers?" are we merely >asking "Did you hold your eyes open for most of
>the screening of a certain collection of images
>known as the Spy Who Shagged Me?", or do we have in mind ... a certain
>experience, perhaps
>one that involved a particular sort, or sorts, of mental experiences or
>activities?
I think that this typical opening question refers less to an
experience than to the evaluations that the other person has undoubtedly
made about the film (experience), and I would argue that, at least among
experienced viewing populations, evaluation is a universal aspect of film
viewing (one always assumes an opinion, and that is what one is asking for
in that question). The conversation that ensues generally involves shared
appreciations and criticisms (Didn't you love/hate X? Thumbs up or down?)
and/or interpretations (What did you make of Y?). These criticisms and
interpretations are not about our experience of the film so much as about
the film as a product, aren't they?
I'm curious about just what compels such evaluative work, and
whether this question might help with the imagination question. First
there is the idea that since representations refer somehow, the ambiguous
relations between the representations and their multiple referents compels
evaluation. That is, since the relations are ambiguous (eg, the image of a
protagonist on screen refers both to an imaginary referent, say the
president character as played by John Travolta, and to several levels of
real referents, in this case Clinton, the US presidency, powerful white
American males in the 20th century, humans with intentionality, etc), the
viewer reconstructs them by figuring out which ones work and which don't.
This happens on several levels: both in terms of the viewer's opinions
("That's exactly Clinton/a president/ a power-hungry white politician") and
in terms of the viewer's reconstruction of the author's intentions ("They
wanted the president to be unsympathetic but I liked him"). So it's
crucial to this process to hypothesize what the film or the filmmaker
intends to refer to, and therefore evaluation depends upon belief in an
intending author. If evaluation is universal, and it necessitates the
positing of an author, then the strong imagined seeing
I also wonder about the status of the film in a consumer market,
where it has always existed. It's an interesting aspect of film, and
narrative works in general, that you cannot preview or test the product
before buying. You have to rely on ads and reviews (and the line betwen
these is blurry) and word of mouth. So first you buy the product, and then
you evaluate it, and this lack of foreknowledge might mean that its very
openness to evaluation is part of the package (a different kind of
imaginative reconstruction than filling in plot gaps to complete the
story). You might buy other things with the idea "Is this thing good or
not? I'll buy it and find out" but I guess the difference is that the
quality of narrative works is always unknown and the game of figuring out
what's good and what isn't, determining where one's taste falls relative to
others, and similar imaginative games that are outside of yet intertwined
with the "primary" (?) imagination of the film experience are always a part
of the total experience ("I'll buy it _in order to_ find out if it's good").
Chris Perrius
Chicago
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