ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the ubiquity of implicit, mediated fictional narrators in fictional cinema by challenging both the claim that imagining seeing is ubiquitous and the ontological gap argument. There is a very influential view in the philosophy of motion pictures that conjectures that all fictional movies have implicit fictional narrators. George Wilson has proposed the most sophisticated version of this position, based on the notion of mediated fictional narration. Wilson maintains that this follows from the idea that viewers imagine seeing mediated images of fictional characters. Other proponents of the ubiquity of implicit fictional narrators have invoked what Andrew Kania has called the ontological gap argument. One of the major debates in the philosophy of cinema concerns the nature of motion picture narration with respect to fictions. The straightforward, unforced answer would appear to be the motion picture maker. Charlie Chaplin is the narrator of The Gold Rush.
