Response to Karen Bardsley.


I think you are really on the wrong track.  The problem is with the word
"imagining"  The debate you have outlined seems to assume that a primary
process in movie viewing is some sort of imagining process, perhaps, or
perhaps not, including the imagined apprehension of an observer-object
relationship.  

I think this unduly complicates the situation.  The term "to imagine" is
being conflated with the term "to perceive."  Watching a movie is an act of
perception, of a particular kind to be sure, but one which recognizes that
the movie view is of a simulation of "reality" via a particular technology
and is distinct from that "reality" one encounters when the lights come
back up and one leaves the theatre.

Watching a movie is somewhat similar to listening to music on a radio or
stereo system.  This morning I listened to Beethoven's Second Symphony on
my stereo system.  I have a pretty good set of components, but at no time
did I think that:  A.  I was imagining an orchestra playing Beethoven or B.
I was imagining I was imagining an orchestra playing Beethoven.......and so
on to the infinite mirrors.  

What I was doing was accomodating my hearing to the reality that I was
listening to a reproduction of David Zinman conducting an orchestra in a
piece by Beethoven.  I could, if I wished, follow this performance with a
score (it would have to be the "original" manuscript that Zinnman evidently
used) and I would find that the performance and the score matched very
closely, if not exactly.  I could play back the performance any number of
times on my stereo system, or another system.  I could play it back on a
state of the art system or on a boom box.  The quality of sound would alter
significantly depending on the quality of the reproduction system I choose
to use.  But no matter when or what system or how often, I would know that
I am not listening to a LIVE PERFORMANCE.  What I AM doing is undergoing
what I would term the "Proxy Process."  The proxy process is merely the
accomodation we make to the degree of discrepency that exists between the
presumed reality (dare I use the word "imaged"?) and the reproduced reality
which we hear or, in the case of movies, hear and see.  I never think that
I am listening to a live orchestra performing Beethoven, but I do think I
am listening to a reasonable reproduction of a once live performance (or
many performance that have been edited together to form this final
simulation).  Now this Proxy Process has some relationship to the literary
concept of "suspension of disbelief" and certainly to some of the notions
which have been proposed by Gestalt and cognitive psychologists.  

I purposely used the hi fi reproduction example because it is somewhat less
complex than that which occurs while watching a film.  First of all, I
recognize that a film doesn't merely reproduce a previous experience, but
through a whole series of conventions (filmic, literary/dramatic, etc.) and
technological innovations, it CALLS ATTENTION TO ITSELF as an alternate
"reality" related to but distinct from that supposed reality (here is what
is imagined) that it supposedly reproduces.  

Second of all, we, as an audience, accomodate ourselves to this reality,
accept its conventions, suspend our disbelief; in other works, we accept
this reality on its own terms, just as we do a play on its terms, or, more
simply, when the parameters of a reproduction of music creates its
particular form of an alternate aural reality which we accept on its terms.

I guess another problem I have with the observer imagining an Indiana Jones
running from a boulder (or is it Harrison Ford AS Indiana Jones?) is that I
sense a confusion of the filmic with the literary as written text.  We're
in different worlds when we talk about reading a novel and seeing/hearing
an adaptation of that novel on the screen.  Aside from the obvious
alteration of plot that often occurs in a film adaptation, there is the
more basic difference in that reading a novel DOES require imagination IF
the reader is inclined toward a visual representation of what the words of
the novel seem to refer.  I do not see any need for imagination to come
into play in a film, if one merely takes in the movie experience within its
conventions.  Of course, imagination can come into play if one wishes to
watch a film critically, comparing it to the novel, evaluating its
aesthetic worth, etc.  This is another issue beyond the scope of this brief
response.

One final tantalizing question.  What happens when technology reaches a
point whereby we can experience "created" reality in the Star Trek
sense----a holidome reality whereby a created world and a so-called "real"
world are indistinguishable?  If and when that occurs, we will be brought
back to square one, and by "square one" I mean that we will be asking
quasi-theological questions, as did our forebears when they first looked
around at the surrounding "reality" of the world.  Who made this, what is
the purpose of life, are the gods benign or malevalent (substitute
programmer for gods, or perhaps even the I as observer being the same as I
as creator--wow.)  Or we may still accomodate ourselves to this super
virtual reality and still be able to perceive a distinction between a
holidome world and the "real" one.  After all, when the Lumier brothers
first showed that train coming into the station, some folks ran out of the
cafe.  They don't run out any more, even in I-Max three D.

We adjust.  When we watch a movie, the real world is, for the time,
metaphysical, the filmic world ontological.  When we leave the threatre,
the real world is once again ontological, the filmic world a memory of the
ontological and thus a smear of the metaphysical, as is all memory, the
work of the imagination upon an imagined past "emotion (and more)
recollected in tranquillity," the daffodils dancing in the inward eye.  
 


       




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