As Maier’s aim is to extend the notion of unreliable narration onto film, this reply focuses on the consequences of the difference between textual and filmic narration. Textual fiction imitates, or at least uses the resources typical of, a true textual description of events, which is itself highly conventional in that it uses arbitrary linguistic signs and chooses to describe those properties of objects and events that matter to the author, leaving the remainder unspecified. On the contrary, filmic narration imitates the perception of real events of which the watcher is supposed to be witness. Even if the arrangement of frames is conventional (as Maier insists), the content of a particular frame is presented to the observer as if the latter happened to be at the scene, thus in the totality of its detail; and the connection between the object filmed and its depiction in film is causal rather than conventional. Moreover, it is natural even for non-fictional texts to describe the scene in some rhetorically plausible order, whereas a real-life scene presented to our sight by pure chance need not follow any coherent plot.

Contemporary Philosophy | Philosophy of Science