Engaging "Authors"

David Bordwell's Narration in the Fiction Film is a uniquely valuable overview of narration in one medium, lucid, rigorous, rational, broadly comprehensive and finely detailed, and unequalled in any other narrative medium. But Bordwell proposes that the cognitive activity of the viewer of a fiction film is to construct the story from the film. While true, and brilliantly analyzed by Bordwell, this omits an important part of our cognitive activity: our engagement with the "author" or filmmaker, an essential part of our engagement with any fiction (or for that matter non-fiction), a response not confined to films by auteurs or to high literary fiction. Our compulsion and capacity to engage with characters, actors, and filmmakers reflects our sophisticated cognition, including our ability to respond to multiple levels of intentionality and our swift emotional attunement.