ABSTRACT
It is notoriously difficult to say what the world we experience is like without saying something about how we experience it. That has encouraged many to think that a representation of the world, especially one which presents the world as it appears in sensory experience, must be the representation of experience, and hence of something subjective. We see this in the discussion of cinema, with formulations such as this: “Watching a film, we can see the seeing, as well as the seen.” 2 But while we may not be able to say what the world as disclosed by experience is like without referring to our experience of it, we can certainly distinguish between a representation of that world and a representation of an experience of it; film images are good for doing the former and no good at all for doing the latter. What is depicted in a film image, if it depicts anything, is always some aspect of the world and never any aspect of experience of the world. We may see what the character sees, and we may see things as they see them, having experiences ourselves which are relevantly like their own. But we do not see their seeing of it. This does not mean that cinema fails as a medium for representing subjectivity; film images, when combined with certain mental constructions on the part of the viewer herself, enable her to represent the experiences of characters, as we shall see. But those experiences are not represented on screen.
