ABSTRACT
The chapter argues that film is not a virtual world that we look into as we might look through a window. Rather, it is a world that draws us in—changing our perceptual perspectives by releasing them from confinement to the single lived body. But such freedom is by no means absolute—it plays off creatively against the realist aspect of the filmic medium. What we see in the film has, indeed, some kinship with our normal embodied perception, but it is enhanced and transformed through correlation with privileged viewing and hearing positions that are not available in our ‘normal’ perceptual mode. In Parts I and II, this general theory of filmic meaning is developed further. It takes the aesthetic space of film to be one of hyperbodiment—a belonging to the world that is based on embodiment but that exceeds its restricted viewpoint. In Part III the theory is used in detail in relation to Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and, in the Conclusion, it is used in relation to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.
