Representation, Depiction and Portrayal in Film

Abstract

An account of the experience of film as art that allows a central role to the notion of phantasy, as this book suggests, cannot fail to benefit from an account of representation. The reason for this will become clearer when we discuss the idea of phantasy itself being understood as a kind of representation, and as such a link can be established between pictorial representation and psychological states themselves. But in the first place such an argument requires a detour through heavily disputed philosophical questions of pictorial representation which, for historical reasons, have focused largely on the art of painting.¹ Since Plato, painting, as a two-dimensional means of representing persons, objects and events in three-dimensional space, has been the art form which traditionally has posed the question of the nature of understanding pictorial representation. What does pictorial representation involve? Is it a matter of an illusion, of a resemblance, of a symbolic system, or what? Put at its most schematic: what is it for one thing to represent another, where the representation could be a painting, a drawing, a diagram, a map?