ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 summarizes the critical analysis of ontological claims. This ideological assertion about the ‘events’ is shown on-screen via their semblance to everyday experience. Narrative and semiosis become apparent as distinct, independent functions only when considering specifically non-narrative works such as title sequences where the link to fabula is attenuated or submerged within other structural relations (such as the crediting function). Realism demonstrates these ideological foundations in the indexical claim to/about reality (being-factual), that makes the an acknowledgment of being a product of ideology (articulation) impossible. Modernism historically assumed indexicality is an essential foundation for cinema, yet this connection to ‘the real’ and the naturalism that accompanies it is not a technological ‘given’ but an ideological attempt to define denotation in terms of an empirical reality apart from perception; however, denotation is not an ontological identification or recognition of an innate indexicality to ‘the real,’ but an interpreted conclusion, a product of specifically formal cues.
