Rory Kelly

This article draws out two injustices to which retrospective criminal legislation may give rise: undermining accessibility of law and challenging equality before the law. It is argued that the censuring function of criminal law exacerbates both wrongs. This sets the stage for an analysis of delaying prisoners’ release. It is suggested that retrospective reform in this context threatens the same values as those threatened by retrospective criminalisation. Yet, the safeguards against retrospective reform of release provisions are weak due to two important strands of case law, one concerning which penalty was ‘applicable at the time’ of the offence and another which draws a distinction between penalties and their execution. Both strands of case law are in need of fundamental reconsideration if article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights is to realise its purposes of upholding rule-of-law values and providing practicable safeguards.

In this paper, we describe two film conventions for representing what a character sees: point of view (POV) and sight link. On a POV interpretation, the viewpoint of a shot represents the viewpoint of a particular character; while in sight link, a shot of a character looking off-screen is associated with a shot of what they are looking at. Our account of both treats them as spatial in nature, and relates them to similar spatial interpretative principles that generalize beyond character eyelines. We additionally observe that whether the object shot in a sight link takes a POV interpretation depends on whether the glance shot precedes or follows it. We offer a processing account of this effect of order on interpretation, which relies on the assumption that spatial coherence in film is established by incremental viewpoint grounding.

This paper examines the interplay of semantics and pragmatics within the domain of film. Films are made up of individual shots strung together in sequences over time. Though each shot is disconnected from the next, combinations of shots still convey coherent stories that take place in continuous space and time. How is this possible? The semantic view of film holds that film coherence is achieved in part through a kind of film language, a set of conventions which govern the relationships between shots. In this paper, we develop and defend a new version of the semantic view. We articulate it for a pair of conventions that govern spatial relations between viewpoints. One such rule is already well-known; sometimes called the "180° Rule," we term it the X-Constraint; to this we add a previously unrecorded rule, the T-Constraint. As we show, both have the effect, in different ways, of limiting the way that viewpoint can shift through space from shot to shot over the course of a film sequence. Such constraints, we contend, are analogous to relations of discourse coherence that are widely recognized in the linguistic domain. If film is to have a language, it is a language made up of rules like these.

The view that allegiance to characters is a matter of general moral assessment, as developed by Carroll (1984) and Smith (1995), has the resources to respond to counterexamples proposed in the literature, including appeals to anti-heroes, rough heroes and other ‘reprehensible characters’ that garner our allegiance. It can even admit non-moral factors as subterranean influences on moral assessment. Nevertheless, the view requires that the characters we most favour are those with the highest moral standing, and this does not seem to be true of the character arc story (Kelly, 2020). Rather, the mixture of good and bad impulses in the protagonist is set off by the unalloyed moral example of the moral centre, a supporting character whose fate may barely interest us. We conclude that narrative theory is better served by allowing the moral hierarchy of a story to differ from the rank order of its allegiances, and hence that audience affiliation is not simply a matter of moral assessment.