Styles of Memory: Film and the Mnemonic Imagination

"Philosophical approaches to film often emphasize narrative film's power to conscript the imaginative investment that viewers have in fictions generally. In virtue of their conceptions of the shot and cut, some films greatly accentuate this identificatory agency on the part of the viewer, harnessing it to drive narrative and theme. Cut can work in various ways to refashion the time of the fiction in ways that challenge and even preempt the time of the viewing. The power of the framing, angle, proximity, and point of view of the shot to focus attention has been a staple of film construction since the advent of commercial fictional film; that said, there are more subtle formal aspects of shot that increase imaginative identificatory response without precisely defaulting to point of view representation as it has been practiced traditionally. These techniques render visual episodes within the filmworld in ways that permit them to bleed over into objective shot, thereby imbuing the filmworld more generally in a kind of sentience. This, in turn, heightens imaginative investment in their fictions. This book investigates at close quarters three films that are structured around the power of the film image to manifest rather than merely represent visualizations, with stress laid on mnemonic envisioning"-- Provided by publisher.