Preface

Summary

Hard is his lot, that here by fortune placed,

Must watch the wild vicissitudes of taste,

With every meteor of caprice must play,

And chase the new-blown bubbles of the day.

Dr Johnson

This book aims to place film in relation to other things: to other arts of the same and of different kinds; to modes of representation like pictures and language; to time and the representation of time; to narrative and the comprehension of narrative; to imagination and belief; to the real world. To all these things, film stands in interesting and controversial relation. Getting that relation right will mean we are on the way to understanding the medium of film.

This is a philosophical book about film, a claim that I had better expand on, lest it be written off as a vague gesture in the direction of depth and subtlety. I mean, quite specifically, that the method of this book is generalizing, systematizing, argumentative and conceptual. It aims at conclusions of maximum generality rather than a concentration on particular works, schools or genres; it aims to integrate what can be said about film with (what I take to be) our best theory of the rest of the world; it proceeds in steps, laying out premises and conclusions, indicating how we get from one to the other; it tries to provide analyses of opaque, complex and contested notions like language, image, representation and belief.