FIEC · Fiction, Imagination, and Early Cinema

Fiction, Imagination, and Early Cinema

PROBLEM When watching Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 Uncle Tom’s Cabin we nowadays say that we are watching a fiction film. We say, for example, that we see Eliza escaping over a frozen river, Uncle Tom saving Eva, and Legree beating Uncle Tom to death. When contemporaries of Porter discussed the film, however, they were apt to describe it as a filmic “documentation” whose subject is the theatrical performance of various episodes from Harriet Stowe’s 1852 novel of the same name. For instance, one contemporary review spoke of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a documentational recording of William H. Brady’s theatre production of the novel: “Edison, the inventor of the moving picture machines, suggested to Mr. Brady the advisability of having films made of this mammoth production” (Grand Forks Daily Herald 20.12.1903: 5). Why did contemporaries treat such films as recordings of real events, while we approach them as creations of fictional worlds? This project tackles the above rarely acknowledged historical slippage by investigating three closely interrelated questions: a) what does it mean for a representational work to be fictional, b) what is the role of imagination in this, and c) how did the audiences c.1900 understand categories of fiction and non-fiction prior to existence of labels such as “documentary” or disclaimers such as “all persons fictitious”? IMPORTANCE Determining whether something is fiction or not is crucial for our engagement with it. To know a work’s fictional status is to know whether to epistemically evaluate its claims to truth or to regard it as a source of potential enjoyment. Consider, for example, how different it would be to treat Fire at Sea – the 2016 Berlinale winner about the migrant plight on Lampedusa – as fiction rather than as documentary. OBJECTIVES 1) Make a case for temporal instability of fiction, i.e. that the fictional status (whether something is fiction or not) of a cultural text such as film may change over time. 2) Combine the methods of analytic philosophy and new film history. 3) Outline criteria according to which we distinguish fiction from non-fiction. 4) Highlight the early cinema period (c.1880-1915) as a unique case study for understanding how a new representational medium becomes employed in the production of fictions and the crucial role the discourse on imaginary engagement plays in this process.

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