10.54103/ai/15158



This paper casts film experience as a sort of disembodied perception. I will show how this experience can be manipulated and altered in order to approximate to mental states of fictional characters, in particular embodied perception, memory and imagination. I will acknowledge that film experience can approximate to non-perceptual attitudes such as memory and imagination much better than the experience elicited by theater. Yet, I will contend, film experience cannot emulate the phenomenology of non-perceptual attitudes since it remains a sort of disembodied perception even when it is manipulated by filmmakers in order to approximate memory states or imaginative states of fictional characters. Finally, I will argue that virtual reality, in virtue of both its proximity to embodied perception and its potential for manipulation, is, in principle, in a better position than film when it comes to trying to emulate non-perceptual attitudes such as memory and imagination. 



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Enrico Terrone
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Imagination
Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality
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Enrico Terrone
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Imagination
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Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes from film to virtual reality
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1
                 Images that we
                 should not see.
The issue of non-perceptual
attitudes from film
to virtual Filmreality
by Enrico Terrone
                    Virtual Reality
                    Perception
                    Memory
                    Imagination




                                      Issue №1 Year 2022
                                      → Altered states
                                      Edited by Giancarlo Grossi
                                      and Andrea Pinotti
Images that we should
not see. The issue of
non-perceptual attitudes
from film to virtual reality
by Enrico Terrone

Abstract                       This paper casts film experience as a sort of
                 disembodied perception. I will show how this experience
                 can be manipulated and altered in order to approximate to
                 mental states of fictional characters, in particular embodied
                 perception, memory and imagination. I will acknowledge
                 that film experience can approximate to non-perceptual at-
                 titudes such as memory and imagination much better than
                 the experience elicited by theater. Yet, I will contend, film
                 experience cannot emulate the phenomenology of non-per-
                 ceptual attitudes since it remains a sort of disembodied
                 perception even when it is manipulated by filmmakers in
                 order to approximate memory states or imaginative states
                 of fictional characters. Finally, I will argue that virtual real-
                 ity, in virtue of both its proximity to embodied perception
                 and its potential for manipulation, is, in principle, in a bet-
                 ter position than film when it comes to trying to emulate
                 non-perceptual attitudes such as memory and imagination.




Film         Virtual Reality             Perception              Memory              Imagination

To quote this essay: E. Terrone, “Images that we should not see. The issue of non-perceptual attitudes
from film to virtual reality”, AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images, no. 1 (2022): 69-90

ENRICO TERRONE                                    69                                          AN-ICON
                           Cloe sees a black cat, Jack remembers a black
              cat, Lisa imagines a black cat. According to representa-
              tionalist conceptions of the mind,1 Cloe’s, Jack’s and Li-
              sa’s mental states have the same representational content,
              namely a black cat, and yet they differ as regards their
              attitude, that is, the way that content is represented. Per-
              ceiving a black cat, remembering a black cat and imagin-
              ing a black cat are three different experiences in virtue of
              three different attitudes. Specifically, according to Uriah
              Kriegel’s “Sartrean account”,2 the perceptual attitude rep-
              resents-as-present its content, the memory attitude rep-
              resents-as-past its content, and the imaginative attitude
              represents-as-possible its content.
                           All this raises an interesting issue about film
              experience. On the one hand, according to experiential
              theories of depiction,3 films provide us with experiences
              whose “pictorial attitude” somehow emulates the perceptual
              attitude. On the other hand, scholars such as Hugo Mün-
              sterberg or Erwin Panofsky have stated that films allow us
              to share not only the perceptual point of view of fictional
              characters but also their inner life, which involves states
              such as memory or imagination.4 These two statements are
              in tension: if the pictorial attitude which characterizes film
              experience is a sort of perceptual attitude, how can film
              spectators enjoy experiences based on memory attitudes
              or imaginative attitudes?
                            I will argue that the spectator cannot enjoy the
              latter experiences. The spectator can only ascribe such
              experiences to characters by relying on the perceptual
              experience she is enjoying. Finally, I will argue that, quite

      1 T. Crane, “The intentional structure of consciousness”, in A. Jokic, Q. Smith, eds.,
      Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 33-
      56; D. Chalmers. “The representational character of experience”, in B. Leiter, ed., The Future
      for Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004): 153-180.
      2 U. Kriegel, “Perception and imagination. A Sartrean account”, in S. Miguens, G. Preyer,
      C. Bravo Morando, eds., Prereflective Consciousness: Early Sartre in the Context of
      Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge, 2015): 257-288.
      3 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”, in P. Livingston, C. Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to
      Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009): 64-74.
      4 H. Münsterberg, The Photoplay: a Psychological Study (New York: Appleton, 1916);
      E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures” (1934), in D. Talbot, ed., Film: An
      Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959): 15-32.

ENRICO TERRONE                                 70                                          AN-ICON
              surprisingly, virtual reality is in a better position than film
              as regards the emulation of non-perceptual attitudes.

                               Film experience as disembodied
                               perception

                           Film experience is a perceptual experience.
              The audience perceives objects and events taking place in
              the world that the film portrays. The Lumière Brothers Sortie
              des Usines Lumière (1895) is paradigmatic in this respect:
              the audience sees workers leaving the factory in a way
              that is analogous to the way one would see those workers
              if one were in front the factory. Analogous, however,
              does not mean identical. While in ordinary perception we
              experience things as organized in an “egocentric space”,
              that is, a space that has our body as its own center,5 in
              cinematic perception we experience things as organized
              in a space that has only our sight, not our body, as its own
              center. The space depicted is experienced as “detached”
              from our body.6
                           The spectator of Sortie des Usines Lumière
              sees workers exiting the factory from a standpoint in front
              of the factory, but she does not occupy that standpoint and
              she does not have the impression of occupying it. Even
              spectators of the Lumière Brothers L’arrivée d’un train en
              gare de La Ciotat (1895) normally do not have the impres-
              sion of occupying the standpoint in front of the train, in
              spite of the popular fable that suggests otherwise.7
                           Film experience, so understood, is a disembod-
              ied perception. We can perceive things from a viewpoint that
              our body is not forced to occupy. It is worth noting that by
             “disembodied perception” here is just meant the percep-
              tion of a space in which our body does not have any place.
              Hence, film experience is disembodied only with respect to
              the experienced relationship between the spectator and

      5 G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
      6 N. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
      7 M. Loiperdinger, “Lumière’s arrival of the train. Cinema’s founding myth”, The Moving
      Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89-118.

ENRICO TERRONE                               71                                        AN-ICON
              the space portrayed. The spectator’s body, however, keeps
              playing a crucial role in the whole film experience which,
              as a twofold experience, also includes the spectator’s re-
              lationship to the space in which the film is screened.8
                           Even a paradigmatic essay on the embodied
              character of film experience, namely Vivian Sobchack’s The
              Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience
              (1992), acknowledges that the perspective of the spectator
              as an embodied subject is different from the perspective on
              the world depicted that the film provides us with. Yet, Sob-
              chack states that film experience is embodied all the way
              through because there is a further body at work, namely,
              the film’s body:

We recognize the moving picture as the work of an anonymous and
sign-producing body subject intentionally marking visible choices
with the very behavior of its bodily being. However, these choices
are not initiated by the movement of our bodies or our intending
consciousness. They are seen and visible as the visual and phys-
ical choices of some body other than ourselves [...]. That some
body is the film’s body.9
                           What does it exactly mean that the film has a
              body? This seems to be a suggestive metaphor that should
              be unpacked for rigorous theorizing. Sobchack offers the
              following characterization of the film’s body: “The cam-
              era its perceptive organ, the projector its expressive organ,
              the screen its discrete and material occupation of worldly
              space”.10 If the film’s body is just that, it comes down to
              a suggestive characterization of the film’s screening. Still
              Sobchack also insists on the “choices” that the alleged
              film’s body makes thereby determining our point of view on
              the space portrayed. Precisely because that point of view
              does not depend on the position and the movement of our

      8 R. Hopkins, “Depiction”. See also E. Terrone, “Imagination and perception in film
      experience”, Ergo, no. 5 (2020): 161-190.
      9 V. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton:
      Princeton University Press, 1992): 278. Thanks to a referee for pushing me to discuss
      Sobchack’s view.
      10 Ibid.: 299.

ENRICO TERRONE                              72                                       AN-ICON
              body, I find it worthwhile to cast the experience it provides
              as disembodied. While ordinary perception, as an embodied
              experience, depends on the position and movement of our
              body, film experience is disembodied since it depends on
              choices that are not up to us. Whom are those choices up
              to? To the filmmaker for sure, and yet scholars like George
              Wilson argue that, in our engagement with fiction films, we
              rather experience those choices as the outcome of the “min-
              imal narrating agency” of a fictional narrator.11 Perhaps what
              Sobchack calls the film’s body may be an interesting char-
              acterization of how we experience the actual agency of the
              filmmaker or, if Wilson is right, the fictional agency of the
              narrator. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the film’s body
              is not the spectator’s body and I reckon that this is enough
              to warrant the characterization of film experience as disem-
              bodied perception.
                            Such a disembodied nature of film experience
              has an interesting consequence. Since film experience, as
              disembodied perception, involves a point of view that does
              not depend on our body, that point of view can change
              without the need of moving our body. Neither Sortie des
              Usines Lumière nor L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ci-
              otat exploit this option, but later films do so by means of
              camera movements and editing.

                               The specificity of film experience

                          In ordinary perception we experience things as
              taking place in a determinate place and time, namely, here,
              the place where our body is, and now, the time when our
              experience occurs. In cinematic perception, on the other
              hand, place and time remain indeterminate. Our perception,
              as such, does not tell us where and when the things per-
              ceived take place. Cinematic perception needs a cognitive
              supplementation in order to fix the spatial and temporal
              coordinates of what one is perceiving. Films can provide

      11 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford
      University Press, 2011): 129.

ENRICO TERRONE                               73                                        AN-ICON
              such supplementation either explicitly, by means of devices
              such as voice over and inscriptions, or implicitly, by relying
              on clues embedded in the scenes portrayed.
                           Furthermore, film perception is not up to us in
              the way ordinary perception is. In the latter, I can decide,
              at least to a certain extent, what I am going to perceive. In
              film experience, instead, I am completely deprived of au-
              tonomy. In other words, film experience is predetermined
              in a way ordinary experience is not. One might say that
              ordinary perception is a natural experience whereas cine-
              matic perception is rather an artificial experience whereby
              we perceive what filmmakers (or narrators) have established
              for us. In the specific case of fiction films, filmmakers (or
              narrators) guide us in the perceptual exploration of fictional
              worlds. That is arguably the most insightful way of unpack-
              ing Sobchack’s metaphor of the film’s body.
                           Let me consider, as an example, David W. Grif-
              fith’s An Unseen Enemy (1912), which tells the story of two
              orphan sisters whose heritage is threatened by a treach-
              erous housekeeper and her accomplice. We discover this
              story through a series of disembodied perceptual expe-
              riences of the same kind as those elicited by Sortie des
              Usines Lumière and L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat.
              We see the two orphans, then the housekeeper, then the
              elder brother of the two girls who places the heritage in the
              safe, then the housekeeper who spies him, and so on and
              so forth. The filmmaker has designed this series of percep-
              tions in a way that provides us with a sort of “unrestricted
              epistemic access” to the relevant facts of the story.12 Unlike
              the two orphans, we are aware from the beginning of the
              threat coming from the housekeeper. Moreover, unlike the
              housekeeper, we are aware of the brother’s attempt to help
              his sisters and prevent theft. In sum, the spectator of An
              Unseen Enemy perceives more, and therefore knows more,
              than the characters in the story; the “enemy” is “unseen”
              only for the characters, not for the audience.

      12 G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns
      Hopkins University Press, 1986).

ENRICO TERRONE                                 74                                        AN-ICON
                            This is the basic functioning of fiction films, which
              corresponds to the omniscient narrator in literature. However,
              other configurations are possible in which the audience’s
              knowledge of relevant facts is “restricted” to that available to
              characters or is even narrower than the latter.13 For example,
              in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1948) the audience’s
              knowledge is as restricted as that of the character L.B. Jef-
              feries (with one important exception, however: we see the
              murderer leaving his apartment with his lover while Jefferies
              is sleeping). In Pablo Larrain’s Ema (2019), the audience’s
              knowledge is even narrower than that of the eponymous
              heroine; the latter has access from the beginning to the
              truth about the new adoptive parents of her son whereas the
              audience will discover this truth only at the end of the film.
                            A further restriction that affects film experience
              concerns the mode of this experience, which is just dis-
              embodied perception. In ordinary experience, on the other
              hand, one can enjoy a variety of experiential attitudes: em-
              bodied perception, first of all, but also memory and imag-
              ination, and possibly perceptual illusion, hallucination and
              dream. Here is another sense in which the audience can
              find it hard to know what characters know. What is at stake
              here is phenomenal knowledge, that is, knowing what it is
              like for a subject to undergo a certain experience.
                            For sure, empathy may enable the audience to
              acquire phenomenal knowledge concerning the affective
              and emotional dimension of a fictional character’s expe-
              rience.14 For instance, the audience can share the char-
              acter’s fear or the character’s surprise. Yet, affects and
              emotions are evaluative mental states that are grafted onto
              more basic cognitive states such as perceptions, memo-
              ries, and imaginings,15 whose distinctive attitude is sure-
              ly harder to access through empathy. The audience may
              deploy empathy to know what it is like to for a character
              to feel fear or joy but something more is required to grasp
      13 Ibid.
      14 J. Stadler, “Empathy and film”, in H.L. Maibom, ed., The Routledge Handbook of
      Philosophy of Empathy (London: Routledge, 2016): 317-326. Thanks to a referee for leading
      me to consider the role of empathy.
      15 K. Mulligan, “From appropriate emotions to values”, The Monist 81, no. 1 (1998): 161-188.

ENRICO TERRONE                                75                                        AN-ICON
               the phenomenal difference between an embodied percep-
               tual experience and a memory episode or an imagining.
               Filmmakers are thus challenged to design disembodied
               perceptual experiences that can approximate to the ba-
               sic cognitive experiences enjoyed by characters, thereby
               leading the audience to grasp what is going on in the char-
               acters’ minds. This is arguably one of the most fascinating
               challenges that cinema has addressed along its history.

                                 Approximating to embodied perception

                              Although film experience and ordinary percep-
               tion are both perceptual experiences, they differ inasmuch
               the latter is embodied in a way the former is not. That is why,
               in ordinary experience, we can move towards the things we
               perceive and possibly touch them, but we cannot do so in
               film experience.
                             The usual way in which filmmakers lead the
               audience to share the embodied perceptual experience
               of a character consists in providing the audience with a
               standpoint that corresponds to that of the character. This
               mode of representation, which is usually called “subjective
               shot”, enables us to share the visual perspective of the
               character in spite of the fact that our body does not occupy
               the corresponding standpoint, which is instead occupied
               by the character’s body. As Kendall Walton puts it,

Following a shot of a character looking out a window, there is a
shot of a scene outside. Watching the second shot, we imagine
observing the scene, and we judge that the character looking out
the window has an experience “like this”, like the one we imagine
enjoying. We do not attribute to the character an experience (much)
like our actual visual experience, a visual experience of a film shot,
of a depiction of the scene outside the window. The experience
we attribute to the character is like our actual one only insofar as
imagining seeing is like actually seeing.16

       16 K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination – mind the gap”, in In Other Shoes: Music,
       Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 17-35, 13.

ENRICO TERRONE                                  76                                         AN-ICON
                            Let me assume that what Walton calls “imag-
              ining seeing”, here, matches what I call “disembodied per-
              ception”. Under this assumption, we can interpret Walton’s
              last sentence as stating that the experience elicited by the
              point-of-view remains a disembodied perception, which is
              not identical with, but only approximates to, the embodied
              perception of the character. Overlooking this limitation can
              lead to disastrous effects. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in
              the Lake (1947), for example, aims to turn the audience’s
              disembodied perception into the perceptual experience of
              the main character along the whole duration of the film, but
              the result is just that the audience has “the impression that
              there is a camera by the name of ‘Philip Marlowe’ stumbling
              around Los Angeles and passing itself off as the well-known
              human being of the same name”.17
                            In fact, more cautious and parsimonious uses
              of the subjective shot can have outstanding aesthetic ef-
              fects. Griffith’s An Unseen Enemy is exemplary in this re-
              spect. I pointed out earlier that the film is based on “ob-
              jective” shots from neutral standpoints that are aimed to
              elicit pure disembodied experiences from the audience. Yet,
              quite exceptionally, one subjective shot emphasizes the
              most dramatic passage of the story. This shot is a close-
              up of the gun that the housekeeper passes through a hole
              in the door of the room where the two sisters took refuge
              (Fig. 1). We see the gun from the standpoint of the young-
              er sister (Fig. 2), and this subjective shot emphasizes the
              centrality of that character in the narrative.




                                                                    Fig. 1. David W. Griffith,
                                                       An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film.

      17   G.M. Wilson, Narration in Light: 86.

ENRICO TERRONE                                    77                                AN-ICON
                                                           Fig. 2. David W. Griffith,
                                              An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film.
                          She is the one who has a psychological and
            relational arc of transformation along the story: at the be-
            ginning she refuses reluctantly to kiss her boyfriend but in
            the last image of the film she finally accepts the kiss. It is
            tempting to see the film as a sort of bildungsroman of this
            girl; specifically, her initiation to sexuality. This hermeneutic
            temptation is encouraged by the subjective shot in which
            the gun passing through the hole evokes a sort of phallic
            figure. The next shot shows that the girl is horrified by the
            gun. Later in the story, however, she finds the courage to
            try to grasp the gun, and then slumps back (Fig. 3 and 4).




                                                           Fig. 3. David W. Griffith,
                                              An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film.




                                                           Fig. 4. David W. Griffith,
                                              An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film.


ENRICO TERRONE                      78                                     AN-ICON
                           Interestingly, the editing connects this image of
            the girl to the image of her boyfriend walking in the fields (Fig. 5).




                                                              Fig. 5. David W. Griffith,
                                                 An Unseen Enemy, 1912. Still from film.

            This link does not seem to be motivated by the course of
            the narrative but rather by a sort of symbolic pattern.

                          Approximating to memory

                         The experience of the spectator who watches a
            film such as An Unseen Enemy consists in a series of per-
            ceptual perspectives on the fictional world. Many of them
            are from a neutral, unoccupied point of view but some of
            them can match the perceptual point of view of a charac-
            ter. Most films function in this way. Some films even try to
            make us share the perceptual point of view of non-human
            characters. For example, John McTiernan’s Predator (1987)
            makes us share the perceptual point of view of an alien
            creature, and Pietro Marcello’s Bella e perduta (2015) that
            of a buffalo. On the other hand, there are films that do not
            limit themselves to making us share the perceptions of
            certain fictional characters but also aim to make us share
            other basic cognitive states of them.
                          Let me begin with the case of memory. At the
            turning point of Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), Rick
            remembers his love affair with Ilsa in Paris. The combination
            of the movement of the camera towards Rick’s face with the
            crescendo of the music and the white dissolve indicates that
            the following scenes are to be taken as memories of Rick
            (Figg. 6,7 and 8). Yet, the kind of experience whereby the
            spectator experiences this scene is perception, not memory.
ENRICO TERRONE                        79                                      AN-ICON
            The flashback makes us perceive the events that Rick is
            remembering rather than his memory experience. We have
            not the impression of remembering those events, that is, we
            are not enjoying the peculiar phenomenology of memory.
            Rather, we keep perceiving those past events set in Paris
            in the same disembodied way in which we were perceiv-
            ing the present events set in Casablanca which have been
            portrayed before the flashback.




                                                         Fig. 6. Michael Curtiz,
                                                Casablanca, 1942. Still from film.




                                                         Fig. 7. Michael Curtiz,
                                                Casablanca, 1942. Still from film.




                                                         Fig. 8. Michael Curtiz,
                                                Casablanca, 1942. Still from film.



ENRICO TERRONE                    80                                    AN-ICON
                          Memory experiences usually are fragmentary, in-
            complete and unstable whereas the Paris events portrayed
            in the film exhibit the typical accuracy, fluidity and stability
            of perception. Moreover, memory experiences typically in-
            volve a first-person perspective whereas most shots in the
            Casablanca flashback are taken from a neutral objective
            perspective, not from Rick’s perspective. Most importantly,
            memory experiences, as such, involve a feeling of pastness
            whatever their content, whereas our experience of these
            scenes of Casablanca lack that phenomenological hall-
            mark. Although Rick is represented as remembering, the
            flashback only makes us perceive what is remembered, the
            content of his memory. This is the standard way in which
            flashbacks encode memory in film. We do not think that
            Rick’s memory experience is like this. We just think that we
            are seeing (in a perceptual attitude) the events that Rick
            is remembering (in the memory attitude). At most, certain
            films can use stylistic device such as blurred images or
            shift from color to black and white in order to stress that
            the spectator’s perceptual experience is meant to encode
            another kind of mental state. Yet, the spectator experience
            remains perceptual in nature. Seeing blurry or seeing in
            black and white are still ways of seeing.
                          Perhaps a better way of getting the spectator
            closer to the memory state of a character might consist in
            casting as a flashback a shot that was previously conjugat-
            ed in the present tense. For example, in François Truffaut’s
            L’amour en fuite (1979) flashbacks are made of shots of
            previous films of the Antoine Doinel series, so that the spec-
            tator shares Antoine’s experience of remembering those
            events. Yet, these cases are quite exceptional. In most
            films that use flashbacks, only the character is undergoing
            a memory experience while the spectator is rather enjoying
            a disembodied perception.

                        Approximating to imagination

                      Memory differs from imagination in that one
            remembers events that one previously perceived whereas
ENRICO TERRONE                      81                              AN-ICON
              the events imagined could not have been perceived. Imag-
              ination indeed, unlike memory, can represent events that
              did not take place. So, when in John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar
              (1963) Billy images himself to be the ruler of an imaginary
              country called Ambrosia, we cannot perceive the corre-
              sponding events in the story world of Billy Liar because
              there are no such events in that world.
                            However, the way in which Billy Liar’s spectators are
              invited to consider Billy’s imaginings is analogous to that in which
              Casablanca’s spectators are invited to consider Rick’s memories.
              That is, the combination of a camera movement towards the
              character’s face with music and visual dissolve (Figg. 9, 10
              and 11). In Billy Liar, the shift to imagination is also stressed by
              the inner voice of Billy himself who says: “It was a big day for
              us. We had won the war in Ambrosia. Democracy was back
              once more in our beloved country...”. Yet, the experience that
              this segment of Billy Liar elicits from its spectators remains a
              perceptual experience. We see Billy on a tank in the middle
              of the crowd which celebrates his triumph in the war. Just
              as Casablanca makes us perceive the events that Rick is re-
              membering, Billy Liar makes us perceive the events that Billy
              is imagining. The difference is just that the events remem-
              bered belongs to the story world of Casablanca, whereas
              the events imagined do not belong to the story world of Billy
              Liar. Rather, those events belong to a nested fictional world,
              which the filmmaker has built up within the main fiction in
              order to represent Billy’s imagining.18




                                                                             Fig. 9. John Schlesinger,
                                                                       Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film.




      18   On the notion of nested world, see K.L. Walton, “Fictionality and imagination”.

ENRICO TERRONE                                  82                                            AN-ICON
                                                        Fig. 10. John Schlesinger,
                                                   Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film.




                                                        Fig. 11. John Schlesinger,
                                                   Billy Liar, 1963. Still from film.
                          Billy Liar does not make us share the imagina-
            tive experience of Billy, just as Casablanca did not make us
            share the memory experience of Rick. Imaginings, indeed,
            usually lack the kind of accuracy, fluidity, objectivity and
            stability that characterizes our perceptual experience of the
            events imagined by Billy. Moreover, imaginative experienc-
            es, as such, should involve a feeling of unreality whatever
            their content whereas our experience of these scenes of
            Billy Liar lacks such phenomenological hallmark. The con-
            tent of our perception, namely, Billy’s triumph, may look
            weird and non-realistic but we experience it in the same
            way in which we experience other scenes of the film that
            look much more realistic. Thus, films such as Billy Liar do
            not make us share the imaginative states of fictional char-
            acters but only approximate to such states by providing
            us with perceptual experiences of nested fictional worlds.

                        Altering the epistemic status of film
                        experience

                         From a phenomenological perspective, there
            is just one basic experiential attitude that film spectators

ENRICO TERRONE                     83                                     AN-ICON
              can take towards the fictional events portrayed. Wilson,19
              following Walton,20 calls it “imagining seeing” while I prefer
              to dub it “disembodied perception”. That said, there are
              different ways in which spectators can relate this experi-
              ence to the fictional world they are exploring; this is what
              Wilson calls the “the epistemic status of the contents of
              their imagined seeing”.21
                            The default assumption about the epistemic
              status of film experience is that we are perceiving the fic-
              tional world as it is, from a neutral perspective that does
              not match the point of view of anybody. In other words, the
              basic epistemic status of film experience is pure perceptual
              knowledge. Yet, this basic epistemic status can be altered
              by cues coming from the content or the context of our per-
              ceptual experience. The main way of altering the epistemic
              status consists in a shift from the neutral viewpoint of the
              spectator as a detached observer to the subjective view-
              point of a character. In such cases, the spectator is invited
              to relate what she is perceiving in a disembodied way to
              the embodied perception or memory or imagination of a
              certain character. Yet, the spectator’s experience does not
              turn into an embodied perception or memory or imagina-
              tion. It remains a disembodied perception; only its epistemic
              status undergoes alteration. In the default case, we cast our
              disembodied experience merely as a source of perceptual
              knowledge about the objective facts of the fictional world.
              In the altered states, on the other hand, we cast our disem-
              bodied experience as a source of knowledge concerning also
              (in the case of embodied perception and memory) or only
              (in the case of imagination) the subjectivity of a character.
                            Some films leave the epistemic status of cer-
              tain shots indeterminate. In Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Straw-
              berries (1957), for instance, it is not evident whether the
              protagonist Isak Borg is remembering or rather imagining
              certain episodes of his teenage. Spectators just perceive

      19 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164.
      20 K.L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts
      (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
      21 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164.

ENRICO TERRONE                               84                                       AN-ICON
            such episodes in the usual disembodied way and acknowl-
            edge that something is going on in Isak’s mind rather than
            in the outer world. One might say that the spectator per-
            ceives a nested fictional world which is made of elements
            coming from both Isak’s memory and Isak’s imagination,
            but she cannot precisely tell the imaginative elements
            from the memory elements. The epistemic status of these
            shots thus remains indeterminate: suspended, as it were,
            between memory and imagination. Likewise, the scenes
            of Federico Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) that portray the
            protagonist Guido Anselmi in his childhood (being bathed
            in wine lees and then put in bed; playing football in the
            schoolyard and then visiting Saraghina; being punished by
            the priests and then returning to Saraghina) have an inde-
            terminate epistemic status which lies between memory and
            imagination. The spectator has a perceptual disembodied
            experience of a nested fictional world which is made of
            elements arguably coming from both Guido’s imagination
            and Guido’s memory, but she finds it hard to precisely dis-
            tinguish what is coming from where.

                        The phenomenological virtues of film
                        compared to theater

                        If film experience is just a kind of perceptual
            experience which can at most approximate to other mental
            states such as memory or imagination, why scholars like
            Münsterberg and Panofsky have stated that films can lead
            spectators to enjoy the latter mental states?
                        I propose a historical explanation according
            to which statements such as Münsterberg’s or Panofsky’s
            are to be read as comparisons between film and theater.
            Both these forms of art invite the spectator to enjoy a per-
            ceptual experience of a fictional world. Yet, the experience
            that theater elicits from the spectator is ordinary embod-
            ied perception whereas film experience is a peculiar kind
            of disembodied perception. At the theater, the spectator
            sees the play from a standpoint that corresponds to the
            standpoint of her body, and that standpoint can change
ENRICO TERRONE                    85                            AN-ICON
               if the body moves. Slightly moving one’s head can be
               sufficient to change one’s perspective on the events por-
               trayed by a play; if one moved closer to the stage, one
               would even perceive those events from a closer standpoint.
               In this sense, theater experience works just as ordinary
               perception; it is as if fictional events had been magical-
               ly transported in our own environment, in our egocentric
               space. In film experience, on the other hand, it is the spec-
               tator’s viewpoint that seems to be magically transported in
               the middle of fictional events even though her body firmly
               remains in her seat. Film experience is thus independent
               from the spectator’s bodily movement in a way theater ex-
               perience is not. This is what motivates the characterization
               of film experience as a sort of disembodied perception.
                            Thus, film experience is much more flexible
               than theater experience when it comes to approximating to
               other mental states such as memory or imagination, whose
               content also is quite independent from the position and the
               possible movements of one’s body. Panofsky nicely makes
               this point when he writes:

In a theater, space is static, that is, the space represented on the
stage, as well as the spatial relation of the beholder to the spectacle,
is unalterably fixed. [.. ] With the movies the situation is reversed. Here,
too, the spectator occupies a fixed seat, but only physically, not as the
subject of an aesthetic experience. Aesthetically, he is in permanent
motion as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera, which
permanently shifts in distance and direction. [.. ] This opens up a world
of possibilities of which the stage can never dream.22
                            Among the possibilities of film in comparison
               with theater, there is surely the capacity to lead the spec-
               tator in the proximity of the mental states of the characters.
               Yet, this does not mean that, in those cases, film experience
               turns into a memory experience or into an imaginative ex-
               perience; it remains a perceptual experience, though one
               aimed at approximating to other mental states.

       22   E. Panofsky, “Style and medium in the motion pictures”: 18-19.

ENRICO TERRONE                                 86                              AN-ICON
                            Film experience, as a disembodied perceptual
              experience, reveals itself to be especially apt to emulate
              mental states such as perceptual illusion, hallucination and
              dream, whose attitude is not as distinct from that of per-
              ception as it is the attitude of memory or that of imagina-
              tion. One can cast perceptual illusions, hallucinations and
              dreams as perceptual experiences that, unlike standard
              perception, fail to represent things as they are. Specifical-
              ly, perceptual illusions lead the perceiver to cast things as
              having properties they do not actually have, while “partial
              hallucinations” lead her to perceive things that actually have
              not their place in her environment, and “total hallucinations”,
              just like dreams, leads the subject to experience a totally
              made up environment.23
                            Ordinary perception is somehow authoritative
              as for the reality of its content, and theater experience
              tends to inherit this epistemic authority, which it applies to
              the story world. Film experience, on the other hand, has a
              weaker epistemic authority despite its perceptual character.
              I contend that this depends on its peculiarly disembodied
              attitude. While watching a film, we have the impression of
              seeing characters who inhabit the story world, and events
              that occur in it, and we usually tend to endorse such im-
              pression thereby acquiring pieces of information about the
              story world. Yet, we do not perceive these events as occur-
              ring in the environment we inhabit with our body, and this
              somehow affect the degree of reliability of those pieces of
              information. Even though we tend to cast film experienc-
              es as a perception of events in the fictional world, we are
              disposed to acknowledge that this experience might mis-
              lead us as regards the way things are in that world. In this
              sense, film experience is a perceptual experience that can
              get closer than standard perception and theater experience
              to illusion, hallucination and dream.


      23 For the distinction between partial and total hallucinations, see A.D. Smith, The Problem
      of Perception (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002): 193. Note that I am putting
      total hallucination and dreams on a par not because I think they are, but just because I reckon
      that discussing their difference goes beyond the scope of this paper.

ENRICO TERRONE                                  87                                          AN-ICON
                             If the perceptual experience is a genus among
              whose species one can find not only standard perception
              but also illusion, hallucination, and dream, then film ex-
              perience can be cast as a peculiar further species of the
              genus, which can emulate all the other mental states of
              that genus. This fact is exploited by those films that lead
              the spectator to share the deceptive perceptual experi-
              ences of a character. In films such as David Fincher’s Fight
              Club (1999) and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (2001) we
              share the partial hallucination of the heroes by being in
              turn deceived by our perceptual experience of the events
              portrayed. Likewise, in films such as Robert Wiene’s The
              Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) or Fritz Lang’s The Woman
              in the Window (1944), we share the total hallucinations or
              dreams of the characters by wrongly casting certain film
              experiences as perceptions of events that actually occur
              in the story world. In Wilson’s terms,24 spectators of such
              films enjoy the proper perceptual experiences but fail to
              endow them with the proper epistemic status, which is not
              the reliability of standard perception but rather the unreli-
              ability of illusion, hallucination or dream.
                             In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), at
              least according to a popular interpretation of the film,25
              dream, memory and perception are combined in a way that
              can be grasped only after the fact. The first part of the film is
              presented from an allegedly neutral perceptual perspective
              but later reveals itself to be a dream of the protagonist Di-
              ane Selwyn. The material of that dream comes from Diane’s
              memories constituting the flashbacks that we find in the
              second part of the film, which also provides us with a neu-
              tral perceptual perspective on the last moments of Diane’s
              life, from her waking up from her dream to her suicide.




      24 G.M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: 164.
      25 See for instance B. Wyman, M. Garrone, A. Klein, “Everything you were afraid to ask
      about Mulholland Drive”, Salon (October 24, 2001), https://www.salon.com/2001/10/24/
      mulholland_drive_analysis/; P. Bertetto, “L’analisi interpretativa. Mulholland Drive”, in P.
      Bertetto, ed., Metodologie di analisi del film (Rome-Bari: Laterza: 2007): 223-255.

ENRICO TERRONE                                  88                                           AN-ICON
                        The phenomenological virtues of virtual
                        reality compared to film

                          While film provides us with a disembodied per-
            ceptual experience, virtual reality makes us perceive an
            egocentric space, that is, a space which is centered in our
            body in the way the space of ordinary perception is. Both or-
            dinary perception and virtual-reality experience are such as
            that our bodily movements correspond to change in our
            viewpoint whereas the viewpoint of film experience is in-
            dependent from the viewer’s body.
                          Virtual reality thus shares with theater a sig-
            nificant proximity to ordinary perception that film, instead,
            lacks. Should we conclude that virtual reality, just like the-
            ater, is less apt than film to approximate to non-perceptual
            mental states such as memory or imagination? Not so.
                          Film experience, as disembodied perception,
            is already an altered state in comparison to ordinary per-
            ception. Nothing else remains to be altered at the phenom-
            enological level. The only possible alterations, as I have
            argued earlier, are alterations in the epistemic status of
            our perceptual experience: clues in the context or in the
            content of film experience may lead us to cast it as the
            memory or the imagining of a character, or even as a de-
            ceptive experience such as an illusion, an hallucination or
            a dream. Virtual-reality experience and theater experience,
            on the other hand, are not intrinsically altered; they work
            just as ordinary perception works. Yet, virtual-reality expe-
            rience can be altered in a way in which theater experience
            surely cannot be altered. Even though the default mode
            of virtual-reality experience is the emulation of ordinary
            perception, a virtual reality system might be designed so
            to provide users with experiences of completely different
            kinds. Whether and how such experience can effectively
            emulate memory episodes and imaginings remains an open
            question. Arguably the emulation of perception has been
            the main aim of virtual reality technology so far. Still, this
            technology has also a potential for altering its basic per-
            ceptual mode thereby getting the user’s experience closer
ENRICO TERRONE                     89                             AN-ICON
            to other kinds of mental states. Emulating memory and
            imagination through perception, the great challenge for
            filmmakers in the twentieth century, might become the great
            challenge for virtual-reality makers in the twenty-first. Para-
            phrasing Panofsky’s statement, virtual reality might open
            up a world of possibilities of which film can never dream.




ENRICO TERRONE                     90                              AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



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