Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies

In works of literary fiction, it is a part of the fiction that the words of the text are being recounted by some work-internal "voice": the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether the story in movies is told in sights and sounds by a work-internal subjectivity that orchestrates them: a cinematic narrator. George M. Wilson argues that movies do involve a fictional recounting (an audio-visual narration) in terms of the movie's sound and image track. Viewers are usually prompted to imagine seeing the items and events in the movie's fictional world and to imagine hearing the associated fictional sounds. However, it is much less clear that the cinematic narration must be imagined as the product of some kind of "narrator" – of a work-internal agent of the narration. Wilson goes on to examine the further question whether viewers imagine seeing the fictional world

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