Vítor Moura

How does an actor’s persona condition our attention to the fictional filmic world? Is there a significant aesthetic difference between watching a film like Michael Hanneke’s earlier version of »Funny Games« (1997) and its 2008 American version staring Hollywood actors like Tim Roth and Naomi Watts? Several authors have recently introduced some conceptual tools that may prove useful in order to address these questions within the overall problem of »imaginative resistance«, i.e., why do spectators sometimes resist imagining things that fictions present. Gregory Currie has recently proposed that film and photography share a distinction between »representation-by-origin« and »representation-by-use«. A film like »Casablanca« may represent-by-origin Humphrey Bogart but also represents-by-use the fictional character of Rick Blaine. Sometimes what the film represents-by-origin is so intrusive that holds an excessive degree of what psychologists call »pop-out«, i.e., it grabs the spectator’s attention in such a way that prevents her from attending the fictional representation-by-use thus producing a strong sense of »representational dissonance«. The spectator is then unable to activate what Fauconier and Turner call the »conceptual blending« between author and character. In other words, she cannot reach the valuable experience of what Robert Hopkins calls »collapsed seeing-in«. This paper compares several versions of the same film and analyses the way character-building is diversely achieved in cases where actors are relatively unknown and in versions where a famous cast is hired in order to categorize the different ways the actor’s persona – or its absence – alters the spectator’s fictional involvement.

Vítor Moura (PhD, Wisconsin-Madison) is professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Film at the University of Minho (Portugal). Most recently he has published »A doença wagneriana (1813 – 2013)«, in »As Humanidades e as Ciências, Disjunções e confluências – Actas do XV Colóquio de Outono«, Braga: Húmus / CEHUM, 2014, 691-704; »Seeing-from: Imagined viewing and the role of hideouts in theatre«, in »Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics«, vol.6, Fabian Dorsch e Dan Ratiu (eds.), European Society for Aesthetics, 2014; »Timing the Aesthetic Experience«, in »Cosmo – Comparative Studies in Modernism«, nº 6, Turim: Università degli Studi di Torino, 2015, 111-122.

He has also presented several papers and conferences including »Ulysses and the sirens – the value of immoral art«, VI Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics (Florence, June 24-28, 2014); response to Gerard Vilar’s »Was Danto a cognitivist? Art and Knowledge in Danto’s Philosophy of Art«, First Iberian Meetings on Aesthetics (Valladolid, October 24, 2014); »Kundry must die: stage direction and authenticity«, European Society for Aesthetics Annual Conference (Dublin, June 11-13, 2015).