This article was downloaded by: [Natalia Muntean]

On: 12 September 2011, At: 06:52

Publisher: Psychology Press
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Metaphor and Symbol

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription
information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hmet20

Image and Mind. Film, Philosophy, and

Cognitive Science (Book)
Ian Jarvie
Available online: 17 Nov 2009

To cite this article: Ian Jarvie (1997): Image and Mind. Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Book),
Metaphor and Symbol, 12:4, 287-290

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms1204_5

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial
or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply
or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation
that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any
instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources.
The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs
or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with
or arising out of the use of this material.
 METAPHOR AND SYMBOL, 12(4),287-290
Copyright O 1997, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

BOOK REVIEW

Image and Mind. Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Gregory Currie,
Cambridge,England: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1995,xxiv + 301 pages, £37.50.

Reviewed by Ian Jarvie

York University
Downloaded by [Natalia Muntean] at 06:52 12 September 2011

Currie, author of An Ontology of Art (1989), of The Nature of Fiction (1990), and
of an incisive article on film and language (Currie, 1993), here offers a comprehen-
sive monograph on topics classified variously as film theory and the philosophy of
film. Principal among those he considers are the following: What is the essence of
cinema? Do films operate by creating illusion? Or do moving pictures represent
things? What is the nature of the likeness between things and moving pictures? Is
there a language of film? What is the role of imagination in film viewing? How
well can films represent time? How do the perceptual imaginings that cinema
promotes coalesce into stories?
Currie's approach differs strikingly from such diverse predecessors in the
philosophy of film as Hugo Munsterberg, Donald Crawford, Stanley Cavell, Paul
Weiss, George Linden, this reviewer, George Wilson, and Allan Casebier, both in
philosophical style and in philosophy of mind. His philosophical style is strictly
analytic; his theory of mind derives from cognitive science. Currie does not
polemically engage predecessors, merely alluding to one or two of the philosophers
mentioned. He is slightly more forthcoming about film theorists. After noting in
his introductory pages the distance his presuppositionsput between him and much
psychoanalytically oriented film theory and comparing the latter to the shambles
of Ptolemaic astronomy epicyclically defending itself against Copernicanism, he
heads right into a presentation of his own ideas with only the occasional aside,
mostly in footnotes, to draw attention to what he sees as the errors and follies of
film theory. His reluctance to engage in dialogue with other writers on film is in
strong contrast to his willingness to engage other analytical philosophers over
technical matters.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Ian Jarvie, Department of Philosophy, York University, North
York, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada.
 288 BOOK REVIEW

It is Currie's contention that fiction film utilizes the capacities of our visual
system to make stories out of pictures. He denies that these pictures create the
illusion that what is represented is real; their appeal is to our imagination, which is
to say our belief system run "off-line," that is, disconnected from standard,
error-correcting inputs and outputs. Pictures bear a natural resemblance to the things
they represent, and this enables us to grasp what they are depicting. These pictures
cannot function like a language, because they lack the minimum features that are
widely agreed to characterize a language.
As viewers, we do not imagine ourselves to be witnesses to the action, placed
where the camera is. We see iconic signs that tell us what it is appropriateto imagine,
much as we get beliefs from things we see. Furthermore, film is a temporal art in
ways that are usually misunderstood.A rational account both of narrative interpre-
tation and of the workings of narrative can be given that makes sense both of
literature and of film. Interpretation is explanation by reference to intentional
Downloaded by [Natalia Muntean] at 06:52 12 September 2011

causes-plausible hypotheses about the story-telling intentions productive of the

work. Unreliable narration is a more restricted option in film than in literature.
This bare bones summary does not do justice to the care with which Currie tries
to formulate and clarify the questions at issue in each chapter and the range of
argumentative materials he draws on, especially current ideas about the workings
of the mind. His central contentions are that there is no language of motion pictures,
rather that pictures are decipherablein some direct way because of their unmediated
likeness to the things depicted. In this latter he is more in the camp of Gombrich
than of Goodman, though neither is discussed extensively. On language, he takes
four central ideas about language-productivity, conventionality,molecularity and
acontextuality-and uses them to devastating effect on those of us who carelessly
gave credence to the idea that there is a "language of film." Productivity refers to
the unlimited number of sentences that can be produced in a language; convention-
ality is the "adventitious uniformities of practice adhered to because they aid
communication" (p. 121). Sentences are thus molecular, built out of meaningful
units (i.e., words); and the meanings of the sentences are functions of the meanings
of the units, not of other words, or of anything else, hence acontextual.
Moving pictures have, by contrast, natural meanings (p. 131), more like "sen-
tence-meanings" than "word-meanings" (p. 134). Film is thus not molecular in the
way that language is; in particular, there are problems with it having any equivalent
to the tensed sentence. It has to be content with tenseless depiction of priority and
co-occurrence.
Currie's arguments on film and language are clinching. Even as a first approxi-
mation to a discussion of the workings of film, comparison with language creates
inextricable confusions. The "natural," depictive meanings of pictures, the manner
in which they can be strung together to make cinematic narratives, bear little or no
resemblance to what happens with language. Film, such a versatile medium in so
many ways, is at a disadvantage when the story imagines matters for which there
 BOOK REVIEW 289

are no pictures. Consider the banality of the alien creatures depicted in so many
science fiction movies-they almost always have heads, bodies, legs, even eyes.
In science fiction literature, by contrast, much more varied alien life forms are
conjured up by words that suggest but do not correspond to actual sights. Pictures
have natural meanings; there are no limits to the meanings words can convey.
Logically possible worlds presumably include many that cannot be pictured.
One big problem, however, haunts Currie's book: the role of sound-more
specifically, the role of language. Films certainly are a visual medium. But are the
visuals the essence of film? Films also draw extensively on spoken utterances,
sound effects, music, and, from time to time, titles and other forms of writing. Currie
holds that sound is an incidental accretion and defends his view by claiming there
are works that eschew "all sensory engagement except the visual. Visual properties
are what cinematic works have to have" (p. 3). His equation of minimum conditions
with essence, popular with film theorists of the silent and early sound era, is costly.
Downloaded by [Natalia Muntean] at 06:52 12 September 2011

It drives him to extend his claims about the limitations of motion pictures (viz.,
unreliable narrators and problems with tense) to the medium of film as such. Were
he to allow that (sound) film is a mixed medium that can and does incorporate
linguistic means as well as aural signs and representations,his arguments about the
limitations of pictures would be tempered. Pictures and sounds can complement
and overcome each other's limitations.
Currie's strict adherence to the idea that pictures have natural meaning may
explain why his chapters on interpretation avoid interesting questions about sym-
bols, morals, extra-textual context, and the like. Currie sets these aside because "if
we cannot agree about what is going on in a story, we shall hardly agree about the
story's significance, message, or relation to other stories" (pp. 229-30).
There are many vulnerable assumptions here, principally that story and inter-
pretation can be analytically separated, and that agreement is an uncontentious
value. Considerations of significance, message, and relation to other stories may
have considerable bearing on the seemingly straightforward question of what we
think is going on in a story. What we think is going on in a story is not a simple
matter like whether or not a particular word is used in the text. Agreement,
moreover, need not be the purpose of the interpretative exercise. Discussion of
works of art is not always guided by some such goal as "getting it right,"
"hammering out disagreement." Such discussion may equally seek to stimulate
thought and imagination, present alternative ways of seeing and feeling, or illumi-
nate overlooked aspects of the work. Discussion of works of art seems to be without
end, not because agreement eludes us, or the discussion is spurious, but because
the discussion serves purposes that are constantly renewed.
These are serious limitations in Currie's work. His use of films as examples is
sparing, to say the least, so it is impossible to assess his ideas by the quality of the
textual readings they produce. Nevertheless, the book is an outstandingcontribution
to the field, especially in its clear demonstration that there are alternatives to
 290 BOOK REVIEW

psychoanalysis when it comes to questions of how the mind works in making sense
of movies. It is a demystifying book, even if some of its sentences are too qualified
to be decoded. It is part of a general bid being made by rational and analytic
philosophers to seize back some territory in the philosophy of the ms, so long
occupied by romantics.

REFERENCES

Currie, G . (1989). An ontology of art. London: Macmillan.

Currie, G . (1 990). The nature of@ction.Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Currie, G. (1993). The long goodbye: The imaginary language of film. British Journal of Aesthetics,
33,207-219.
Downloaded by [Natalia Muntean] at 06:52 12 September 2011