Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics

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Bloomsbury Academic, Sep 15, 2008 - Social Science - 288 pages

The most powerful films have an afterlife. Their sensory appeal and their capacity to elicit involvement in story, character and conflict reaches beyond the screen to subtly reframe the way spectators view ethical issues and agents within the narrative, and in the world outside the cinema. Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience and Narrative Film questions how cinematic narratives relate to and affect ethical life. Extending Martha Nussbaum and Wayne Booth's work on moral philosophy and literature to consider cinema, Dr. Stadler shows that film spectatorship can be understood as a model for ethical attention that engages the audience in an affective relationship with characters and their values. Building on Vivian Sobchack's Address of the Eye and Carnal Thoughts, she uses a phenomenological approach to analyse ethical dimensions of film extending beyond narrative content, arguing that the camera describes experience and views screen characters with an evaluative form of perception: an ethical gaze in which spectators participate. Films discussed include Dead Man Walking, Lost Highway, Batman Begins, Nil By Mouth, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

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Contents

Introduction
1
Ethics in Narrative Form and Content
13
Phenomenology Embodiment
38
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

Dr Stadler is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia, and is on the editorial advisory board of the online journal IM- Interactive Media. She was Convenor of the Film Studies Major at t

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