Shortlisted for the BAFTSS 'Best Monograph' Award 2021When watching the latest instalment of Batman, it is perfectly normal to say that we see Batman fighting Bane or that we see Bruce Wayne making love to Miranda Tate. 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. Nor do we say that we see Christian Bale pretending to be Bruce Wayne making love with Marion Cotillard, who is playacting the role Miranda Tate. 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, Mario Slugan 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, Slugan argues that cinema provides a better model for understanding fiction than literature.

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Introduction 1: The Status of Fiction in Early Cinema: Train and Trick Films ARE THERE TEXTUAL CRITERIA FOR FICTIONALITY? EXTRA-TEXTUAL CRITERIA OF FICTIONALITY RECEPTION AND EXHIBITION CONTEXT TRAIN FILMS AND THE ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN THE IMPORTANCE OF EXHIBITION CONTEXT AND MAGIC THEATREA TRIP TO THE MOON AND TRICK FILMS PRODUCTION AND PROMOTION CONTEXT2: Hale's Tours and Adjacent Cultural Series: Illusion, Immersion, Imagination PANORAMAS AND TERMINOLOGICAL CONFLATION: ILLUSION, IMMERSION, IMAGINATION TRAVELOGUES AS ERSATZ-TOURISM: ANY PLACE FOR IMAGINATION? PHANTOM RIDES: FROM FICTION OF TRAVEL TO NON-FICTION OF PLACE HALE'S TOURS THE MYTH OF A 'DEMENTED FELLOW' HISTORICIZING THE IMAGINED SEEING THESIS 3: Re-enactments in Early Cinema: Fake, Fiction, Fact WHAT IS A FAKE?FAKES, INDEXICALITY AND FICTIONALITYFAKES AND IMAGINARY PARTICIPATION 4: The Lecturer and Make-Believe: The Borders of the Text and Explicit MandatesTHE RELATION OF THE FILM LECTURER TO THE TEXT IDEAL, PRINTED, AND DELIVERED LECTURESTHE LECTURER AND THE PERFORMANCE OF THE FILM NARRATOR THROUGH DEIXIS 5: Implicit Mandates and Fictional Narrators NARRATIVE AND NARRATOR IN EARLY CINEMA NARRATIVE NARRATOR CONTEMPORARY NARRATOLOGICAL DISCOURSE GENETTE'S THEORY OF VOICE THE NEAR-UBIQUITY THESIS FOR LITERARY FICTION THE NEAR-ABSENCE THESIS FOR FICTION FILM THE ENUNCIATOR AS THE FILMIC NARRATOR THE RETURN OF THE GREAT-IMAGE MAKER EXCEPTIONS TO NEAR-ABSENCE THESIS FOR FICTION FILMConclusion Bibliography