When: Wednesday, April 1, 2020, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PMWhere: Postponed, due to COVID-19
Speaker: Mario Slugan
About Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema:When watching the latest installment of Batman, it is perfectly normal to say that we see Batman fighting Bane. We would not say that we see Christian Bale dressed up as Batman going through the motions of punching Tom Hardy dressed up us Bane. But if we look at the history of cinema and consider contemporary reviews from the early days of the medium, we see that people thought precisely in this way about early film. They spoke of film as no more than documentary recordings of actors performing on set. In an innovative combination of philosophical aesthetics and new cinema history, the monograph investigates how our default imaginative engagement with film changed over the first two decades of cinema. It addresses not only the importance of imagination for the understanding of early cinema but also contributes to our understanding of what it means for a representational medium to produce fictions. Specifically, the book argues that cinema provides a better model for understanding fiction than literature and that a text's fictional status may change over time.More about the book can be found here.
About the authorMario Slugan is a Lecturer in Film Studies and IHSS Strategic Lecturer at QMUL