John Ó Maoilearca
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816697342
- eISBN:
- 9781452952291
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816697342.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
All Thoughts Are Equal is an introduction to the work of French philosopher François Laruelle and an experiment in nonhuman thinking. For Laruelle, standard forms of philosophy continue to dominate ...
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All Thoughts Are Equal is an introduction to the work of French philosopher François Laruelle and an experiment in nonhuman thinking. For Laruelle, standard forms of philosophy continue to dominate our models of what counts as exemplary thought and knowledge. By contrast, what Laruelle calls his “non-standard” approach attempts to bring democracy into thought, because all forms of thinking are equal in value. Philosophy–the discipline that posits itself as the power to think at the highest level–does not have a monopoly on reason. Such democracy clearly has relevance for the nonhuman, too. If non-philosophy hopes to extend what we mean by thinking beyond the boundaries set by classical approaches, then such a project has important implications as regards the existence and value of nonhuman forms of thought. This study strives to see how philosophy might appear when we look at it with non-philosophical and nonhuman eyes. And it does so by refusing to explain Laruelle through orthodox philosophy, opting instead to follow the structure of a film, Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, to introduce the non-standard method. Von Trier’s documentary is a meditation on the creative constraints set by film, both technologically and aesthetically, and how they can push our experience of film, and of ourselves, beyond what is normally deemed “the perfect human.” All Thoughts Are Equal adopts those constraints in its own experiment by showing how Laruelle’s radically new style of philosophy is best introduced using our most nonhuman form of thought, that found in cinema itself.Less
All Thoughts Are Equal is an introduction to the work of French philosopher François Laruelle and an experiment in nonhuman thinking. For Laruelle, standard forms of philosophy continue to dominate our models of what counts as exemplary thought and knowledge. By contrast, what Laruelle calls his “non-standard” approach attempts to bring democracy into thought, because all forms of thinking are equal in value. Philosophy–the discipline that posits itself as the power to think at the highest level–does not have a monopoly on reason. Such democracy clearly has relevance for the nonhuman, too. If non-philosophy hopes to extend what we mean by thinking beyond the boundaries set by classical approaches, then such a project has important implications as regards the existence and value of nonhuman forms of thought. This study strives to see how philosophy might appear when we look at it with non-philosophical and nonhuman eyes. And it does so by refusing to explain Laruelle through orthodox philosophy, opting instead to follow the structure of a film, Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, to introduce the non-standard method. Von Trier’s documentary is a meditation on the creative constraints set by film, both technologically and aesthetically, and how they can push our experience of film, and of ourselves, beyond what is normally deemed “the perfect human.” All Thoughts Are Equal adopts those constraints in its own experiment by showing how Laruelle’s radically new style of philosophy is best introduced using our most nonhuman form of thought, that found in cinema itself.
Gregory Currie
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198159216
- eISBN:
- 9780191673566
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198159216.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter is a manifesto of the film theory of Gregory Currie. He thinks that his work brings a connection between film and cognitive psychology. The chapter begins with a glimpse of an ideal ...
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This chapter is a manifesto of the film theory of Gregory Currie. He thinks that his work brings a connection between film and cognitive psychology. The chapter begins with a glimpse of an ideal theoretical structure and his opinion on the philosophical background against the manifesto itself. Then the theses and the arguments on film theory and the philosophy of film, moving pictures, convention, intention, and genre, and the viewer is laid out. The description includes an outline of what he thinks is the ideal abstract structure for the film theory. He hoped that by doing this, he would contribute to the exemplification of the structure. The manifesto aims to promote the following: open criticism from the outside, struggle for inner coherence, comprehensiveness, and intuitive judgment. It is evident that his work is in a top-down mode which is why it is called a nervous manifesto.Less
This chapter is a manifesto of the film theory of Gregory Currie. He thinks that his work brings a connection between film and cognitive psychology. The chapter begins with a glimpse of an ideal theoretical structure and his opinion on the philosophical background against the manifesto itself. Then the theses and the arguments on film theory and the philosophy of film, moving pictures, convention, intention, and genre, and the viewer is laid out. The description includes an outline of what he thinks is the ideal abstract structure for the film theory. He hoped that by doing this, he would contribute to the exemplification of the structure. The manifesto aims to promote the following: open criticism from the outside, struggle for inner coherence, comprehensiveness, and intuitive judgment. It is evident that his work is in a top-down mode which is why it is called a nervous manifesto.
Hunter Vaughan
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231161336
- eISBN:
- 9780231530828
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231161336.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This introductory chapter outlines the notion of “film-philosophy”, the belief that the visual medium can challenge modes of thought using Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and ...
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This introductory chapter outlines the notion of “film-philosophy”, the belief that the visual medium can challenge modes of thought using Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy. It tackles the question of how is the medium of film philosophical by examining the works of filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, which transform and shift the medium's sensory focus between the auditory and visual. This attribute of “flexible malleability” can be reduced to shifting dynamics in subject-object relations. The chapter argues that film can be seen as the site of intersection of both diegetic and extradiegetic “voices” and “gazes” and distributes them according to sets of formal relations. This intersection is referred to as the immanent field of the film image.Less
This introductory chapter outlines the notion of “film-philosophy”, the belief that the visual medium can challenge modes of thought using Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy. It tackles the question of how is the medium of film philosophical by examining the works of filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, which transform and shift the medium's sensory focus between the auditory and visual. This attribute of “flexible malleability” can be reduced to shifting dynamics in subject-object relations. The chapter argues that film can be seen as the site of intersection of both diegetic and extradiegetic “voices” and “gazes” and distributes them according to sets of formal relations. This intersection is referred to as the immanent field of the film image.
Noël Carroll
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- October 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780300091953
- eISBN:
- 9780300133073
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300091953.003.0012
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter describes Gregory Currie's Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science as a major event in the study of film. It represents the first thoroughgoing philosophy of film in the ...
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This chapter describes Gregory Currie's Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science as a major event in the study of film. It represents the first thoroughgoing philosophy of film in the analytic tradition. Covering such topics as the essence of cinema, the nature of representation in film, the relation of film to language, the nature of the spectator's imaginative involvement in film, and problems of film narration and interpretation, the book addresses a gamut of classical questions on film theory and answers them, often in surprising ways, from a perspective richly informed by Currie's impressive grasp of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. Even if one disagrees with Currie's solutions to various problems, one can only appreciate the way in which he has raised the level of analysis and argument in the area of film theory.Less
This chapter describes Gregory Currie's Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science as a major event in the study of film. It represents the first thoroughgoing philosophy of film in the analytic tradition. Covering such topics as the essence of cinema, the nature of representation in film, the relation of film to language, the nature of the spectator's imaginative involvement in film, and problems of film narration and interpretation, the book addresses a gamut of classical questions on film theory and answers them, often in surprising ways, from a perspective richly informed by Currie's impressive grasp of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. Even if one disagrees with Currie's solutions to various problems, one can only appreciate the way in which he has raised the level of analysis and argument in the area of film theory.
Peter Childs
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748620432
- eISBN:
- 9780748671700
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748620432.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The Matrix is unusual in being credited to two directors, brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, and yet this concerted authorship, or auteurship, helps to point up the collaborative nature of film ...
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The Matrix is unusual in being credited to two directors, brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, and yet this concerted authorship, or auteurship, helps to point up the collaborative nature of film production. While a novel is a kind of technologically ‘simple’ text whose compositional provenance and physical characteristics are largely taken for granted by literature students, a film is what has been called a ‘thick text’: one which is technically, creatively and compositionally complex. The technical and design aspects to film production need to be considered carefully in a specialist vocabulary, but the thematic elements of film and its use of plot, narrative, and imagery are clearly components that are amenable to literary analysis. The Matrix is a text that also lends itself to traditions of philosophical interpretation.Less
The Matrix is unusual in being credited to two directors, brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, and yet this concerted authorship, or auteurship, helps to point up the collaborative nature of film production. While a novel is a kind of technologically ‘simple’ text whose compositional provenance and physical characteristics are largely taken for granted by literature students, a film is what has been called a ‘thick text’: one which is technically, creatively and compositionally complex. The technical and design aspects to film production need to be considered carefully in a specialist vocabulary, but the thematic elements of film and its use of plot, narrative, and imagery are clearly components that are amenable to literary analysis. The Matrix is a text that also lends itself to traditions of philosophical interpretation.
Laura Rascaroli
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190238247
- eISBN:
- 9780190238278
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190238247.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Setting off from the question of the timeliness of the essay film and its dependence on ever-improving technology and against the backdrop of Theodor W. Adorno’s discussion of the essay form’s ...
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Setting off from the question of the timeliness of the essay film and its dependence on ever-improving technology and against the backdrop of Theodor W. Adorno’s discussion of the essay form’s anachronistic, antisystematic resistance, the introduction discusses the essay film as future philosophy—as a contrarian, political cinema of thought. Drawing on the centrality of the interstice to Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the cinema as thought, it brings issues of effect and of functioning, rather than of essence, to the fore, arguing that the essay film thinks not just verbally, but also through a disjunctive audiovisual method that exploits in-between filmic spaces to bring about new thought.Less
Setting off from the question of the timeliness of the essay film and its dependence on ever-improving technology and against the backdrop of Theodor W. Adorno’s discussion of the essay form’s anachronistic, antisystematic resistance, the introduction discusses the essay film as future philosophy—as a contrarian, political cinema of thought. Drawing on the centrality of the interstice to Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the cinema as thought, it brings issues of effect and of functioning, rather than of essence, to the fore, arguing that the essay film thinks not just verbally, but also through a disjunctive audiovisual method that exploits in-between filmic spaces to bring about new thought.
Laura Rascaroli
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190238247
- eISBN:
- 9780190238278
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190238247.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Less than a decade ago the expression "essay film" was still encountered only sporadically; today, the term has been widely integrated into film criticism, and is increasingly adopted by filmmakers ...
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Less than a decade ago the expression "essay film" was still encountered only sporadically; today, the term has been widely integrated into film criticism, and is increasingly adopted by filmmakers and artists worldwide to characterize their work-while continuing to offer a precious margin of resistance to closed definitions. Eschewing essentialist notions of genre and form, and bringing issues of practice and praxis to the fore, this book offers a novel understanding of the epistemological strategies that are mobilized by the essay film, and of where such strategies operate. On the backdrop of Theodor W. Adorno’s discussion of the essay form’s anachronistic, anti-systematic and disjunctive mode of resistance, and capitalizing on the centrality of the interstice in Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the cinema as image of thought, the book discusses the essay film as future philosophy-as a contrarian, political cinema whose argumentation engages with us in a space beyond the verbal. A diverse range of case studies discloses how the essay can be a medium of thought on the basis of its dialectic use of audiovisual interstitiality. The book shows how the essay film’s disjunctive method comes to be realized at the level of medium, montage, genre, temporality, sound, narration, and framing-all of these emerging as interstitial spaces of intelligence that illustrate how essayistic meaning can be sustained, often in contexts of political, historical or cultural extremity. The essayistic urge is not to be identified with a fixed generic form, but is rather situated within processes of filmic thinking that thrive in gaps.Less
Less than a decade ago the expression "essay film" was still encountered only sporadically; today, the term has been widely integrated into film criticism, and is increasingly adopted by filmmakers and artists worldwide to characterize their work-while continuing to offer a precious margin of resistance to closed definitions. Eschewing essentialist notions of genre and form, and bringing issues of practice and praxis to the fore, this book offers a novel understanding of the epistemological strategies that are mobilized by the essay film, and of where such strategies operate. On the backdrop of Theodor W. Adorno’s discussion of the essay form’s anachronistic, anti-systematic and disjunctive mode of resistance, and capitalizing on the centrality of the interstice in Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the cinema as image of thought, the book discusses the essay film as future philosophy-as a contrarian, political cinema whose argumentation engages with us in a space beyond the verbal. A diverse range of case studies discloses how the essay can be a medium of thought on the basis of its dialectic use of audiovisual interstitiality. The book shows how the essay film’s disjunctive method comes to be realized at the level of medium, montage, genre, temporality, sound, narration, and framing-all of these emerging as interstitial spaces of intelligence that illustrate how essayistic meaning can be sustained, often in contexts of political, historical or cultural extremity. The essayistic urge is not to be identified with a fixed generic form, but is rather situated within processes of filmic thinking that thrive in gaps.
Laura Rascaroli
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190238247
- eISBN:
- 9780190238278
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190238247.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
The essay film is characterized not by its choice of objects, but by their “arrangement,” which is determined by a structure of gap. This structure is shaped by a framing and reframing activity, ...
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The essay film is characterized not by its choice of objects, but by their “arrangement,” which is determined by a structure of gap. This structure is shaped by a framing and reframing activity, which is central to the practice of the essay film as critique of ideology. What is distinctive of the essay film is its stubborn labor of testing its perspective, its positioning, and its distance from the world; the visible result of this labor is that the essay film detaches objects from their background, introducing a gap of potentiality between object and world. The film essayist is always at once a critic and a metahistorian, whose engagement with a historical object is also always a reflection on the gap—be it cognitive, temporal, cultural, or experiential—that distances him or her from that object and on how film may negotiate such a gap. This negotiation is its philosophy.Less
The essay film is characterized not by its choice of objects, but by their “arrangement,” which is determined by a structure of gap. This structure is shaped by a framing and reframing activity, which is central to the practice of the essay film as critique of ideology. What is distinctive of the essay film is its stubborn labor of testing its perspective, its positioning, and its distance from the world; the visible result of this labor is that the essay film detaches objects from their background, introducing a gap of potentiality between object and world. The film essayist is always at once a critic and a metahistorian, whose engagement with a historical object is also always a reflection on the gap—be it cognitive, temporal, cultural, or experiential—that distances him or her from that object and on how film may negotiate such a gap. This negotiation is its philosophy.
Nico Baumbach
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748676118
- eISBN:
- 9780748695096
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748676118.003.0007
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter, written by Nico Baumbach, focuses on the Lumières’ film Le Repas de Bébé (Baby’s Meal); taking as its starting point Georges Méliès’s observation that it was through this film that he ...
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This chapter, written by Nico Baumbach, focuses on the Lumières’ film Le Repas de Bébé (Baby’s Meal); taking as its starting point Georges Méliès’s observation that it was through this film that he first registered the potential of cinema. It is not the spectacular that Méliès notices, but the incidental detail of moving leaves in the background of the film. Baumbach homes in on this incidental detail to explore the significance it held for filmmakers, including D. W. Griffith. Baumbach addresses film’s power to construct palpable, seemingly concrete visual phenomena, though here he examines the transitory aesthetics of the ‘wind in the trees’. Baumbach enriches the interest in what Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault called the ‘cinema of attractions’ by suggesting, via detours into Kant, Benjamin, German Romantic poetry, and Impressionist painting, that the inscription of the incidental could often be as powerful as the spectacular.Less
This chapter, written by Nico Baumbach, focuses on the Lumières’ film Le Repas de Bébé (Baby’s Meal); taking as its starting point Georges Méliès’s observation that it was through this film that he first registered the potential of cinema. It is not the spectacular that Méliès notices, but the incidental detail of moving leaves in the background of the film. Baumbach homes in on this incidental detail to explore the significance it held for filmmakers, including D. W. Griffith. Baumbach addresses film’s power to construct palpable, seemingly concrete visual phenomena, though here he examines the transitory aesthetics of the ‘wind in the trees’. Baumbach enriches the interest in what Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault called the ‘cinema of attractions’ by suggesting, via detours into Kant, Benjamin, German Romantic poetry, and Impressionist painting, that the inscription of the incidental could often be as powerful as the spectacular.
Hilary Radner
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474422888
- eISBN:
- 9781474444767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474422888.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This brief introduction offers an outline of the purpose and scope of the volume, which provides a synthetic overview of the work of a scholar characterized by a subtle and complex engagement with, ...
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This brief introduction offers an outline of the purpose and scope of the volume, which provides a synthetic overview of the work of a scholar characterized by a subtle and complex engagement with, and analysis of, cinema and moving-image installation art that takes place over a fifty-year span, addressing a massive list of films and artworks. It establishes that the goal of the book is not simply to summarize this oeuvre, but to offer “un passage,” a point of entry into the perspectives of this scholar, showing how they shifted and developed over many years.Less
This brief introduction offers an outline of the purpose and scope of the volume, which provides a synthetic overview of the work of a scholar characterized by a subtle and complex engagement with, and analysis of, cinema and moving-image installation art that takes place over a fifty-year span, addressing a massive list of films and artworks. It establishes that the goal of the book is not simply to summarize this oeuvre, but to offer “un passage,” a point of entry into the perspectives of this scholar, showing how they shifted and developed over many years.
Robert Hopkins
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- December 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198769736
- eISBN:
- 9780191822575
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769736.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Mind
Christopher Nolan’s Memento illustrates and explores two roles that memory plays in human life. The film’s protagonist, Leonard Shelby, cannot ‘make new memories’. He copes by using a ‘system’ of ...
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Christopher Nolan’s Memento illustrates and explores two roles that memory plays in human life. The film’s protagonist, Leonard Shelby, cannot ‘make new memories’. He copes by using a ‘system’ of polaroids, tattoos, charts, and notes that substitutes for memory in its first role, the retention of information. The system is supposed to help Leonard carry out his goal to find and kill his wife’s murderer. It proves a disastrous failure. But are we so very much better off? The film uses the failure to raise doubts about the effectiveness of our own capacities for grasping the past. However, memory does more than allow us to retain information. As Richard Wollheim showed, it enables the past to control our present, by perpetuating, while modifying, its affective hold over us. This is something wholly denied Leonard. By contrasting his position with ours, the film also explores this second role of memory.Less
Christopher Nolan’s Memento illustrates and explores two roles that memory plays in human life. The film’s protagonist, Leonard Shelby, cannot ‘make new memories’. He copes by using a ‘system’ of polaroids, tattoos, charts, and notes that substitutes for memory in its first role, the retention of information. The system is supposed to help Leonard carry out his goal to find and kill his wife’s murderer. It proves a disastrous failure. But are we so very much better off? The film uses the failure to raise doubts about the effectiveness of our own capacities for grasping the past. However, memory does more than allow us to retain information. As Richard Wollheim showed, it enables the past to control our present, by perpetuating, while modifying, its affective hold over us. This is something wholly denied Leonard. By contrasting his position with ours, the film also explores this second role of memory.
