ABSTRACT
Meunier’s reflections upon the differences between the “home-movie attitude,” the “documentary attitude,” and the “fiction attitude” can help to develop a theory of reference in cinematic discourse. Such a theory needs to take into account three fundamental ideas. First, reference is not constituted by the film alone but results from an interaction between film and viewer. Second, there are different kinds of objects (or entities with different “modes of being”) that are referred to. These two ideas can be drawn more or less directly from Meunier’s argument. The third idea is less obvious but logically implied: it is based on a differentiation between three dimensions of meaning: intensional (with an ‘s’), extensional, and referential meaning, all of which co-exist phenomenologically.
