Awareness of Fictionality and Cinematic Perception: Rethinking Plato's Critique of Mimesis through Film Spectatorship

Abstract

Film spectatorship combines awareness of fictionality with responses to what is seen and heard. Spectators know that events on the screen are fictional, yet cinematic form can still organize attention and expectation through viewpoint, narrative, sound, and rhythm, eliciting emotional and bodily responses. This experience provides a new basis for reconsidering Plato's critique of mimesis. Plato's account of the psychological power of mimesis remains illuminating: images exert force through the organization of perception even when spectators retain awareness of fictionality. Immediate responses during viewing, however, must be distinguished from changes in the order of the soul and in character, which also depend on the formation of viewing habits and their longer-term effects on judgments about reality. Spectatorial agency emerges in the capacity to recognize cinematic form, one's assigned viewing position, and one's own responses, thereby making renewed judgment possible.