Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FIEC (Fiction, Imagination, and Early Cinema)

Teaser

PROBLEMWhen watching Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 Uncle Tom’s Cabin we nowadays say that we are watching a fiction film. We say, for example, that we see Eliza escaping over a frozen river, Uncle Tom saving Eva, and Legree beating Uncle Tom to death. When contemporaries of...

Summary

PROBLEM
When watching Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 Uncle Tom’s Cabin we nowadays say that we are watching a fiction film. We say, for example, that we see Eliza escaping over a frozen river, Uncle Tom saving Eva, and Legree beating Uncle Tom to death. When contemporaries of Porter discussed the film, however, they were apt to describe it as a filmic “documentation” whose subject is the theatrical performance of various episodes from Harriet Stowe’s 1852 novel of the same name. For instance, one contemporary review spoke of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a documentational recording of William H. Brady’s theatre production of the novel: “Edison, the inventor of the moving picture machines, suggested to Mr. Brady the advisability of having films made of this mammoth production” (Grand Forks Daily Herald 20.12.1903: 5). Why did contemporaries treat such films as recordings of real events, while we approach them as creations of fictional worlds? This project tackles the above rarely acknowledged historical slippage by investigating three closely interrelated questions: a) what does it mean for a representational work to be fictional, b) what is the role of imagination in this, and c) how did the audiences c.1900 understand categories of fiction and non-fiction prior to existence of labels such as “documentary” or disclaimers such as “all persons fictitious”?
IMPORTANCE
Determining whether something is fiction or not is crucial for our engagement with it. To know a work’s fictional status is to know whether to epistemically evaluate its claims to truth or to regard it as a source of potential enjoyment. Consider, for example, how different it would be to treat Fire at Sea – the 2016 Berlinale winner about the migrant plight on Lampedusa – as fiction rather than as documentary.
OBJECTIVES
1) Make a case for temporal instability of fiction, i.e. that the fictional status (whether something is fiction or not) of a cultural text such as film may change over time.
2) Combine the methods of analytic philosophy and new film history.
3) Outline criteria according to which we distinguish fiction from non-fiction.
4) Highlight the early cinema period (c.1880-1915) as a unique case study for understanding how a new representational medium becomes employed in the production of fictions and the crucial role the discourse on imaginary engagement plays in this process.

Work performed

Dr Mario Slugan has done the research under the supervision of Professor Daniel Biltereyst within the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Communication Sciences, Ghent University from 2017 to 2019.
During the duration of the fellowship, Dr Slugan has completed all of the 5 segments of the project outlined in the original proposal: 1) the status of fiction in early cinema, 2) illusion, immersion, imagination in early cinema, 3) re-enactments in early cinema, 4) lecturing and make-believe in early cinema, and 5) the preparation of a monograph manuscript.
Next to this work Dr Slugan has also done additional research on fictional narrators in early cinema and on German and Russian theory of film fiction.
In terms of publications, Dr Slugan has published 3 peer-reviewed articles and 1 non-peer-reviewed book chapter and has co-edited 1 peer-reviewed journal special issue with a co-written introduction. (A monograph will be published by the end of November 2019).
Concerning dissemination, Dr Slugan has:
• co-organized 2 international conferences for which websites were developed (Analytic Aesthetics and Film Studies, Oct 26-27, 2018 University of Warwick; Rethinking the Attractions-Narrative Dialectics: New Approaches to Early Cinema, Nov 9-10, 2018, Ghent University),
• organized 1 conference panel (Aesthetics, Religion, and Film’s Fictional Status, British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, Kent, Apr 12-13, 2018),
• gave 4 invited research talks (University of Kent, Mar 12, 2019; University of Zagreb, January 17, 2019; University of Edinburgh, Nov 21, 2017; University of Osijek, October 27, 2017) and held 1 invited workshop (University of Kent, Mar 12, 2019),
• presented at 18 international conferences (International Association for Media and History Conference, Newcastle, Jul 16-18, 2019; Film-Philosophy Conference, Bristol, Jul 9-11, 2019; Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image, Hamburg, Jun 12-15, 2019; Dubrovnik Conference on the Philosophy of Art, Dubrovnik, Apr 8-12, 2019; The Asian Conference on Arts and Humanities, Tokyo, Mar 29-31, 2019; Philosophy without Theory Conference, York, Jan 10–11, 2019; Rethinking the Attraction-Narrative Dialectics: New Approaches to Early Cinema, Ghent, Nov 9-10, 2018; Image Conference, Hong Kong, Nov 3–4, 2018; MediAsia, Tokyo, Oct 9-11, 2018; Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities, Canterbury, Jul 1-4, 2018; Screen Studies Conference, Glasgow, Jun 29 – Jul 1, 2018; HoMER@NECS Conference, Amsterdam, Jun 27-29, 2018; Docusophia, Tel Aviv, May 22-24, 2018; Dubrovnik Conference on the Philosophy of Art, Dubrovnik, Apr 23-27, 2018; British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, Canterbury, Apr 12-13, 2018; The Aesthetic Potential of the Virtual Conference, Paris, Mar 28-30, 2018; Researching Past Cinema Audiences: Archives, Memories and Methods Conference, Aberystwyth, Mar 26-28, 2018; and Historical Fictions Conference, Stoke-on-Trent, Feb 24-25, 2018)
• co-organized 2 doctoral training schools (18 and 15 contact hours for 10 doctoral students, respectively),
• held 2 presentations at public science fairs (Sound of Science, Edegem, May 27, 2018; WOOOW Wetenschapsfestival, Ghent, Nov 25, 2018),
• gave 1 lecture performance (New Approaches to Silent Film Historiography, Leeds, Sep 18-19, 2018),
• and uploaded 4 videos (1 video describing the overall project, 2 keynotes from the New Approaches to Early Cinema conference, and a presentation of Dr Slugan at the same conference).

Final results

This work has successfully combined analytic aesthetics and new film history to give an account of how the categories of fiction and non-fiction were understood in the early cinema period. Crucially, the project has demonstrated that there are films which audiences c.1900 construed as fictions that present-day audiences engage as non-fictions and vice versa. In other words, the project has argued that to answer the question of what fiction is and how a given film can migrate across fiction/non-fiction boundaries over time, film studies and philosophy need to work together; whereas philosophy offers a robust theory of fiction in terms of mandated imaginings, film studies are best-equipped for tracing the historical emergence and changes in these mandates.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.ugent.be/ps/communicatiewetenschappen/cims/en/team/mario-slugan.htm.