Overview

From documentary to art-house cinema - and from an abundance of onscreen images to their complete absence - films that experiment variously with narration, voice-over and soundscapes do not only engage viewers' thoughts and senses. They also make an appeal to visualise more than is perceptible on screen. This book explores the extraordinary ways in which film can stimulate and direct the image-making capacity of the imagination. Bringing together an international range of films with debates in philosophy, film theory, literary scholarship and cognitive psychology, author Sarah Cooper charts the key processes that serve the imagining of images in the light of the mind. Through its navigation of a labile and vivid mental terrain, this innovative work makes a profound contribution to the study of spectatorship.

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9781474452786

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Reviews

"Cooper dives into an exploration of how cinematic narration can prompt spectators to form pictures in their minds beyond what is shown on screen. This monograph achieves remarkable clarity in its central idea that the activity of imagining is bound inextricably to perception and that the mental visual images formed by the audience both depend on and are independent from the images on screen.--Giulia Rho ""Film-Philosophy"" Film and the Imagined Image is an impressive and meticulous study of the ways in which film prompts the spectator to form mental images. An extremely innovative work that fleshes out an under-theorised line of inquiry into the spectatorship of film [...] an immensely astute and thorough exploration of the 'how' of mental imagery in the process of watching film. --Aldo Kempen ""Studies in European Cinema"" [...] Cooper permeates our imaginations and provides us with not only a voice of kinship in our filmic imaginings but also a set of concepts that help us to understand how we generate other images when we experience images on screen. [...] Cooper achieves something remarkably rare in an academic monograph: she helps us understand why we see other images in our minds when we look at the images on a screen. This book speaks directly to your imagination and your personal experience of viewing and imagining, in an intimate and reciprocal relationship, and actively propels the reader into a newly nuanced realm of understanding. --Lucy Bolton, Queen Mary University of London ""Projections 15.3"" In this elegantly argued book, Cooper interrogates the ways in which movies use the viewer's image bank of memories, dreams, and associations to co-create the film that appears on the screen. Beautifully written, with numerous examples from a wide range of films, this is an engaging but challenging book. --G. A. Foster ""CHOICE"""

Author Information

Sarah Cooper is Professor of Film Studies at King's College London. Her books include The Soul of Film Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Chris Marker (Manchester University Press, 2008), and Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (2006). Sarah Cooper is Professor of Film Studies at King's College London. Her books include Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (Legenda, 2006); Chris Marker (Manchester University Press, 2008); The Soul of Film Theory (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013); and Film and the Imagined Image (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Her current research is on flowers and film.

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