La ficción realizada: implicaciones y transferencias entre ficción y realidad en la pragmática del cine narrativo

This research Ph.D. thesis centres its study on fictional and narrative cinema and the implications and transferences between fiction and reality that promotes within its pragmatics and its spectators’ reception. In that sense, it aims to analyse how narrative and fictional films integrate data from human reality and human existence in universes and stories of great impact and valuation by its receptors, who develop filmic experiences that allow themselves to involve their most hidden and subjective characteristics in films and, therefore, to strengthen narrative and filmic fictions’ use for a series of contributions (cognitive, affective and empirical ones) that extend themselves from the filmic experience to the conditions of their existence and action within their reality. The investigation of the pragmatic phenomenon associated with narrative and fictional cinema represents, on this case, an effort to penetrate in the spectators’ subjectivity and to acknowledge how filmic receptors understand, experiment and make use of filmic and fictional narratives as a means to comprehend, interpret and assimilate elements connected closely to reality and human existence. The reconfiguration and representation of the latter in filmic universes and stories represent, to spectators, the possibility to experiment reality’s and human existence’s diversity and complexity, allowing at the same time to project and absorb information that find in its receptors different valuations such as entertainment, therapeutic catharsis, learning or sociocultural integration. In order to develop a consistent, complete and significant path in the study of the selected theme, this research divides itself in several parts that, in their order and progression, allow to understand coherently the different stages inherent to the filmic pragmatics’ process and, more specifically, to the narrative and fictional films’ experience as a source of varied and transversal learnings, resonances and contributions for the reality and life of several spectators and subjectivities. Therefore, and from an initial epistemic perspective, we inquire different reality’s configurative and communicational devices as methods for allowing human being to discover and develop individual and collective senses of his existence, of his world and of his daily experience. Among them, art, metaphor, narrative, fiction and cinema emerge as important mechanisms to significantly format and transmit perspectives on reality, under codes, conventions and signs that acquire relevance on defining cognitive, affective and empirical truths and structures about Man’s world and real life. Within this context is where narrative and fictional cinema, as production and as reception of an intense and intentional human reality’s experience (and substantially different from any other artistic field), acquires importance and usefulness for their spectators’ life, through stories and texts that involve, in a very particular way, simulated and authorial characters, actions, contexts, spaces, times, perspectives, images, sounds, plots, intrigues and themes to the filmic experience developed by spectators. Still within the theoretical point of view of this research, it also confirms how narrative and fictional film’s receptive and utility potential entails the incorporation receptors’ existential elements in film experience and, at the same time, the transference and implication of fictional and filmic narratives’ data to and in the vital condition of its spectators. This process is related to the comprehension of the filmic experience as a reception of the authorial proposition’s that combines the involvement of characteristics of the spectators’ vital context (individual and sociocultural background) and the compliance of a narrative itinerary that is marked by certain expectations and determinations of the filmic perspective. Concurrently with the attention, the conscience and the pretence ability proper of narrative and fictional cinema’s experience, the spectator allows himself to be transported in an immersive way to the filmic universe, participating in movements of projection and identification with some elements of the film, which potentiate an experience full of cognitive, empirical and emotional consequences. These consequences frame the exploitation of the filmic experience as a field for a set of individual and sociocultural resonances in a person, distributed as much in remote and, often, unconscious elements of the spectators (affective satiation, catharsis and psychotherapy), as also by providing new forms of experience that allow them to reflect on and learn several materials, events and aspects of their daily life and reality. Therefore, narrative and fictional cinema establishes the possibility and the ability to integrate itself appropriately in pedagogical and educational contexts, as a means to satisfy needs, flaws and desires which human being struggles with and, often, cannot find a solution for them within its real condition and life. In order to figure out the effective correction and applicability of the pragmatic and vital potential imputed to narrative and fictional cinema in the previous mentioned moulds, this investigation implements four analysis procedures (distinct and, at the same time, complementary) on the real im- pact and implication between fiction and reality in the spectators’ reception of fictional and filmic narratives. First, it presents the main conclusions obtained from a focus group session with cinema and audio- visual narrative experts about the several fields mentioned previously concerning fictional and narrative cinema’s pragmatics and vitality. In order to confirm the epistemic relations established in the theoretical framework as pertinent and current, it establishes a series of implications between different fields as narrative, fiction, film, reality, reception, spectator’s impact and vital uses for narrative and fictional cinema, covering the theoretical range of inquiry about the study object and confirming effectively its suitability for a proper and prolific analysis on the subject. Second, it looks into film and audiovisual narrative non-experts’ perspectives, through digital surveys, on the habits, motivations, goals, preferences, implications and learnings identified and expressed by them concerning narrative and fictional cinema consumption. This inquiry delivers a set of clarifications about the receptive subjectivity of a large group of spectators from Spain and Portugal, specifying how their filmic experiences happen and the typologies of the resonances and contributions that those receptors recognize as the most outstanding and relevant for their real and vital context. Third, it analyses four fictional and filmic narratives (Ladri di biciclette, El Ángel Exterminador, The Shawshank Redemption and Jodaeiye Nader az Simin) very well-valuated by many spectators (based on the rankings of online databases and on public institutional or cultural listings) in order to validate the existence of similar characteristics between them and, therefore, identify possible factors that justify the impact and the valuation attached to the preference assumed by filmic receptors and by some cultural intervenients over them. Through the employment of a filmic analysis model to the referred four films – of distinct origins and with great spectatorial valuation as the only proximity between them -, it verifies effectively which elements of narrative configuration are transversal and pertinent among them, which allows the identification of possible spectatorial impact and valuation factors recurrent in different contexts and periods of narrative and fictional films production. Last, and fourth, it uses one of the films selected for narrative analysis (The Shawshank Redemption) as an object for a view and survey session with cinema and audiovisual communication students (semi-experts). Very similarly to the procedure adopted with the digital surveys, it acknowledges which aspects are inherent to the consumption, to the receptive involvement and to the subjective and vital exploitation of narrative and fictional cinema, but requiring opinions related with the experience of a single film. Therefore, it establishes the comprehension of the extensions and applications in spectators of the elements that constitute the filmic proposal, under the reflexions, emotions, resonances and learnings developed and identified by the students from experiencing a specific fictional and narrative universe. Therefore, the mentioned different procedures – justified by the initial epistemological frame- work - allow, in that sense, the effective verification of narrative and fictional cinema’s potential for causing transferences and implications between the simulated universes and the reality of different typologies of receptors. Through an exhaustive and complementary analysis on the fictional and filmic narrative’s pragmatic phenomenon, it identifies, on one hand, similar and transversal factors in the narrative construction of the different analysed films that are transferred to the experience of some of the inquired spectators as potential agents for the impact of their filmic undergoing. On the other hand, and through the manifestation of their perspectives and opinions on their narrative and fictional cinema’s consumption, it establishes a set of effective resonances and learnings that specify and verify how subjective reception frames filmic utilization and exploitation for a positive conditioning of the individuals life and reality. Therefore, the conclusions of this investigation on the verified transferences and implications between fiction and reality in narrative cinema determine a current and real perspective on the value and importance that narrative and fictional films assume on their spectators, opening for new understandings and new opportunities on the role that fictional and filmic narratives may represent for human lives and human reality.