Recursive Reflections

This chapter casts a critical eye on various classifications of reflexivity that have been proposed by film and media scholars over a number of decades. These center on the reflexive content of films, their self-referential communicative structures and functions, and intended effects of reflexiveness on spectators. In this context it differentiates between (self-)reflexivity and related terms/concepts—metafiction; metacinema, mise en abîme, allusion and intertextuality, self-conscious style and narration—from a twenty-first century standpoint; and outlines an alternative classification of reflexive forms in celluloid and digital cinema. The latter are distinct from specific reflexive devices (e.g., the film within the film, direct address, display of the cinematographic “apparatus”) and general modes (e.g., political, formal, ludic). As illustrated through concrete examples, the five transmedial forms posited—environmental; trans-art and intermedial; generic; creator-centered; performance-based—typically occur in complex combinations. Their identification, and the new conception of cinematic reflexivity this typology represents, aids in the analysis and interpretation of reflexive and metacinematic films and styles.

Some Alternative Accounts of Interperspectival Content

This chapter looks at a number of attempts to exorcise perspectival content from the semantics (and thus, presumably, from our metaphysics). First, perhaps, we can make do with token indexical (token reflexive) content, give the account of human action and emotion that we needed, and avoid the use of perspectival contents. The chapter also considers other approaches to perspectival contents including David Lewis’s account of the de se, Kaplan’s theory of indexicals, and use-based accounts. It is argued that all such accounts sweep the perspectival content under the rug and fail to eliminate it.

Talbotowski paradygmat wizualności fotografii

The concept of visuality proposed by Norman Bryson, which refers to conscious perception determined by a system of concepts and knowledge of the visible, is related in the paper to the relationship between two kinds and ideas of photography, introduced respectively by Louis J. Daguerre and William H. Fox Talbot. The discourse about daguerrotypy stresses the quasi-telescopic properties of the picture whose visually ungraspable surface triggers an effect of reaching with the eye far beyond it toward even the farthest details, invisible without a looking glass but still clearly visible in the picture. In response to this feature, Talbot connected the photographic picture primarily with the effects of transferring the relations of shadow and light to contrast on the surface of photosensitive paper. He referred the “photogenic drawing” to a tradition older than the Albertian paradigm of the illusion of perspective adopted by Daguerre in his famous views of the streets of Paris from the window. His technique, called “skiagraphy,” Talbot associated with an ancient legend about the origin of drawing as the art of fixing shadows on a flat surface. His photographs of Lacock Abbey windows were a paradigmatic example that determined the understanding of each photo on the level of its basic self-reflexive content: in the first place, the photographic picture shows how reality before the camera lens projects its “skiagraphic” drawing – a “stamp,” as it were – on the paper surface, and how the forms of objects are reduced to that surface and grasped on it. In his Pencil of Nature, Talbot connected photographic pictures with text, determining the visual status of print photography as replica – both repetition of the highly appreciated daguerrotypy, and a rival response to it, showing the advantages of Calotypy based on the visible proximity of the picture and the surface. Thanks to the properties of Calotypy, precise “fixing of shadows” allows one to arrest despite the flow of time and fix in a visual structure what is the most volatile and changeable.

SOME REMARKS ON PERRY’S REFLEXIVE CONTENT AND COGNITIVE SIGNIFICANCE

Neste artigo, apresento e discuto a solução oferecida por John Perry para o Problema de Frege em termos do conteúdo reflexivo de elocuções. Em primeiro lugar, discuto sua solução para a versão indexical do Problema de Frege, e argumento que o conteúdo reflexivo não pode explicar a trivialidade de certas e locuções. Se isso está correto, então o conteúdo reflexivo não é o tipo de coisa que explica adequadamente o valor cognitivo. Depois, discuto a solução de Perry para o Problema de Frege envolvendo nomes próprios. Argumento que, mesmo que esse conteúdo explique o valor cognitivo, ele não o faz em termos do significado das expressões, como Perry pretendia originalmente.