Showing Seeing in Film

Abstract

In this paper, we describe two film conventions for representing what a character sees: point of view (POV) and sight link. On a POV interpretation, the viewpoint of a shot represents the viewpoint of a particular character; while in sight link, a shot of a character looking off-screen is associated with a shot of what they are looking at. Our account of both treats them as spatial in nature, and relates them to similar spatial interpretative principles that generalize beyond character eyelines. We additionally observe that whether the object shot in a sight link takes a POV interpretation depends on whether the glance shot precedes or follows it. We offer a processing account of this effect of order on interpretation, which relies on the assumption that spatial coherence in film is established by incremental viewpoint grounding.

Virtual terrors

“…Even within traditional film, for instance, which can only represent a character's weak first-person perspective, the sight-link shot seems to be less accurate than the point-of-view shot (cf. Cumming, Greenberg et al 2021). Further along the line, 3D is phenomenologically directed towards the viewer in a way traditional cinema is not, although here, too, authors distinguish between 'non-immersive' and 'immersive' 3D (Kozhevnikov and Dhond 2012).…”

Super Pragmatics of (linguistic-)pictorial discourse

“…28 Indeed, the idea that discrete packets of information are related to complex structures, going beyond the sum of the packets, is not intrinsically tied to linguistic discourse. For example, Cumming et al (2017) explore the role that coherence relations play in the interpretation of More recently, Newton-Haynes and Altshuler (2019) have explored the coherence structure of ballet mime, while Grosz et al (2021) have motivated a semantics of emoji by first considering the sort of coherence relations that they allow when mixed with language. Building on this research programme, we suggest to use the same vocabulary of coherence relations in linguistic and pictorial discourse.…”

“…Plausibly, there are stronger constraints related to the orientation of the contents of the two pictures. Cumming et al (2017) suggest that two frames (in film) are consistent with one another only if between them, the camera has only moved on a 180 degree arc (see Fig. 2).…”

The structure of analog representation

“… See Casati and Varzi (1999),Cohn (2014),Cumming, Greenberg, and Kelly (2017), andGreenberg (2018) for some examples.32 We suspect that the restriction to counterpart systems is unnecessary for systems without complex representations involving multiple parts.33 In small systems with very few vehicles and contents, it may sometimes be easier to stipulate contents one-by-one rather than lay down rules capable of handling hundreds of contents. Arrows from §8.2 illustrates this situation.…”