The phantom referent: perceptual realism in cinema

Authors
Aloysius Boh Chee Kai

Supervisors
Stephen Teo Kian Teck

Year

Abstract

We live in an age where photorealistic objects in films do not necessarily have physical referents — look no further than the dinosaurs in Jurassic World (2015), and the wormhole in Interstellar (2014). Yet when people watch Jurassic World or Interstellar, their typical response is, “That looks so real!” This is an implicit attempt to locate real-world referents of the aforementioned cinematic objects. If we are to retain this persisting intuition that there is an indexical relationship between the photograph and the photographed object in the context of films, then a new type of referent has to be posited, called the “phantom referent”. This thesis offers an ontology of the phantom referent.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66858