Publisher's Synopsis
Film--viewing is a unique aesthetic experience. In a movie scene, media that are associated with other art forms individually-sound, language, images, narrative- act together, with their distinctive varieties of meanings informing one another. This richness poses a challenge to philosophers of film: given this complex union, how do we start uncovering what a movie as a whole means? How can we do justice to such an integrated experience? Too often, theorists attend only to one aspect of film-its perceptual presentation or its ability to communicate or its narrative construction-thereby overlooking the extent to which these features (or layers) interact with one another. In this way, theorists typically do not work towards a theory of film meaning that
does justice to film's aesthetic complexity
