The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Film Culture in Transition (Paperback))

Book info: The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Film Culture in Transition (Paperback)) (Paperback, 258 pages) – Amsterdam University Press, 2003. Language: English.

This is the first collection of essays in English to give prominence to the work of European film scholars whose aim is "to understand how film is understood." The Film Spectator raises fundamental issues that have confronted film theory for the past thirty years, but which have never been adequately answered. It gathers together a representative sample of this work, covering the period from the mid-seventies to the present. Editorial Reviews From the Back Cover The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind brings together for the first time in English the work of European film scholars whose aim is, in Christian Metz's famous phrase, 'to understand how film is understood'. The authors represented in this collection approach this aim through a unique combination of cognitive science, pragmatics, and semiotics. The Film Spectator raises once again the most fundamental issues that have confronted film theory over the last thirty years, but which were never adequately answered - including: the role of narrative logic in the comprehension of film, the mental representation of filmic space, the communicative and cognitive bases for the spectator's construction of filmic meaning, the difference between fiction and documentary, the role of enunciation and self-reference in film and television texts, and the linguistic status of the point-of-view shot.