Summary Points

• Fictional film deals in imaginative reality; by temporarily suspending disbelief, viewers voluntarily enter a world of someone else’s imagination that is invested with meaning.
• The movie screen can be understood as functioning like the theatrical convention of a “fourth wall,” a conceptual threshold between one space and another.
• A film elicits thoughts and references, blending them into a “meaningful emotional experience” known as aesthetic emotion.
• A film scholar describes three types of emotions that characterize movie watching: direct emotions, sympathetic or antipathetic emotions, and meta-emotions.
• There are two “takes” in film viewing and interpretation that eventually become one piece: a process of discovery, analysis, interpretation, and re-interpretation that necessarily activates a viewer’s perspective in one way or another.
• We don’t experience film in a vacuum. Our interpretations of movies, and the particular effects that movies might have for us, are mediated by many factors in differing combinations.
• That we tend to compare a film’s vision with our own means that viewers naturally negotiate the relationships between the fictional world, their own perspective, and real-life experience.

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Movie Clips

Hugo (2011) Opening Sequence

Hugo (2011) Georges Méliès Tribute Scene

Hugo—Behind the Scenes

Hugo—Miniatures & VFX, New Deal Studios

Pixar’s Get a Horse! (2013)

Mickey Mouse - Get A Horse (Frozen Short) from Justin Callahan on Vimeo.

Blade Runner (1982)

The Ending of Blade Runner Explained

Blade Runner End Scene

The Imitation Game (2014)

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Sidebar: Crossing the Cinematic Threshold

Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902)

In an early silent short, Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), Uncle Josh himself watches three films. In the first, A Parisian Dancer, he dances along with a woman on screen. He is then terrified by an onrushing train in The Black Diamond Express. And in the third film, The Country Couple, a man and a woman are engaged in what appears like slapstick; but the chivalrous Uncle Josh finds it hard to distinguish the filmic world from the real one. Becoming infuriated by what he seems to think is an improper advance, he rolls up his sleeves and tries to jump into the filmic world. Instead, he tears down the screen and gets into a fight with a rear projectionist (whom he seems to mistake for the man in the film).

Buster Keaton: Sherlock Jr. (1924)

Buster Keaton plays a movie theater projectionist and wannabe detective in Sherlock Jr. (1924) (begin with the intertitle at 15:40). He falls asleep during a private eye film, Hearts and Pearls. The story looks a lot like his own troubling situation having to do with a stolen item and winning the heart of the woman he loves. As he sits dreaming in the projection booth, a superposition shows him leaving his body, walking down the center aisle in the theater, and through the screen into the filmic world. There the characters have been transformed into his real-life acquaintances. He becomes the world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Jr., who is called on to solve the crime.

Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

In Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Cecilia (Mia Farrow), a sweet, small-town waitress, sits through a movie countless times hoping to escape her dreary life and abusive marriage (which makes her “a good candidate for the magic of the movies,” according to Roger Ebert).¹ Breaking the fourth wall, Tom Baxter, a character in the film, finds her attractive and starts talking to her. “You’ve been here all day and I’ve seen you here twice before,” he says; and he walks through the black-and-white screen into the colorful real world, where he and Cecilia fall in love. As they cross between the filmic and real worlds, a love triangle develops with Cecilia having to choose between the fictional Tom and the actor who plays him, Gil Shepherd (both played by Jeff Daniels). The convention of traversing the two worlds works to highlight the difference between fantasy and reality: the conventional happy ending in fiction is not always guaranteed in real life.

Last Action Hero (1993)

Something similar happens in Last Action Hero (1993) when a theater owner gives Danny, a troubled adolescent movie buff, a golden movie ticket once owned by the famed illusionist Harry Houdini. While Danny munches on popcorn watching his favorite hero, Los Angeles cop Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the ticket starts glowing with energy. Villains throw a stick of dynamite that magically comes through the screen and rolls down the aisle toward Danny. Shocked and scared, he runs toward the screen. Cut to a burst of white, silence, and a subjective shot from Danny’s point of view on the floor in the backseat of Slater’s convertible looking up at a blue sky with palm trees going by as the car drives down a boulevard. The magic ticket turns the movie screen into a gateway that allows our heroes and, because of a misadventure, villains to cross over between the filmic and real worlds. And like in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the real-life consequences are alarming and the happy ending conventional in fiction is not always certain.

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1. Roger Ebert, “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” RogerEbert.com, March 1, 1985.

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