Taking Fiction Film Seriously

A Philosophical Approach to Cinema Studies

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by Mario Slugan

Type

Essays

Subject

Theory

Keywords

theory

Publishing date

2025 (October 02, 2025)

Publisher

Bloomsbury Academic

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 272 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-350-50571-1

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Book Presentation:
Fiction film has been and remains the privileged site of film studies, with film history regularly being viewed as the rise of the narrative fiction film. Taking Fiction Film Seriously argues that despite this privileged position, the notion of fiction as it relates to cinema, has yet to be properly interrogated.

Mario Slugan explores the significant misunderstandings concerning the categorisation of film, audience experience, and the real-life effects of fiction. He contends with the contradictory assumption that fiction films have tangible effects on audiences' beliefs and behaviours, while also intuitively being 'not true' or not to be believed in.

Slugan analyses the notion of 'fiction' from a theoretical and historical perspective, considering how it manifests in a broad range of films from the past 110 years, including The Arrival of a Train (Lumière brothers, 1895-1897), The Blair Witch Project (Myrick and Sánchez, 1999), and Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008). He supports his close readings with findings from philosophy, psychology, and literary studies, and in doing so seeks to challenge the current state of film studies.

About the Author:
Mario Slugan is Lecturer at the Department of Film of Studies, Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Montage as Perceptual Experience: Berlin Alexanderplatz from Döblin to Fassbinder (2017) and Noël Carroll and Film: A Philosophy of Art and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). He is also Fellow of the Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, editor of the open-access peer-reviewed academic journal Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe and book reviews editor of Early Popular Visual Culture.

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic