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.
Alyssa DeBlasio
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474444484
- eISBN:
- 9781474476638
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474444484.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Known as the 'Georgian Socrates' of Soviet philosophy, Merab Mamardashvili was a defining personality of the late-Soviet intelligentsia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught required courses in ...
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Known as the 'Georgian Socrates' of Soviet philosophy, Merab Mamardashvili was a defining personality of the late-Soviet intelligentsia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught required courses in philosophy at Russia's two leading film schools, helping to educate a generation of internationally prolific directors.
Exploring Mamardashvili's extensive philosophical output, as well as a range of recent Russian films, Alyssa DeBlasio reveals the intellectual affinities amongst directors of the Mamardashvili generation - including Alexander Sokurov, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alexei Balabanov. This multidisciplinary study offers an innovative way to think about film, philosophy and the philosophical potential of the moving image.Less
Known as the 'Georgian Socrates' of Soviet philosophy, Merab Mamardashvili was a defining personality of the late-Soviet intelligentsia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught required courses in philosophy at Russia's two leading film schools, helping to educate a generation of internationally prolific directors.
Exploring Mamardashvili's extensive philosophical output, as well as a range of recent Russian films, Alyssa DeBlasio reveals the intellectual affinities amongst directors of the Mamardashvili generation - including Alexander Sokurov, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alexei Balabanov. This multidisciplinary study offers an innovative way to think about film, philosophy and the philosophical potential of the moving image.
Rebecca A. Sheehan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190949709
- eISBN:
- 9780190949747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949709.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter ...
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The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter rectifies influential misreadings of American avant-garde films by film-philosophers, and goes on to trace philosophy’s influences on the avant-garde, laying the groundwork for putting their films in conversation with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter outlines the various kinds of dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens at work in American avant-garde cinema, and explains the various ways in which American avant-garde filmmakers have used this figure to advance a philosophy that promotes behaviors of re-encounter and review applicable to the off-screen world.Less
The book’s introductory chapter situates its study of American avant-garde cinema in the context of the field of film-philosophy and the post-theory debates within cinema studies. The chapter rectifies influential misreadings of American avant-garde films by film-philosophers, and goes on to trace philosophy’s influences on the avant-garde, laying the groundwork for putting their films in conversation with the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This chapter outlines the various kinds of dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens at work in American avant-garde cinema, and explains the various ways in which American avant-garde filmmakers have used this figure to advance a philosophy that promotes behaviors of re-encounter and review applicable to the off-screen world.
Sarah Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474452786
- eISBN:
- 9781474476676
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474452786.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Film and the Imagined Image explores the extraordinary ways in which film can stimulate and direct the image-making capacity of the imagination. From documentary to art house cinema, and from an ...
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Film and the Imagined Image explores the extraordinary ways in which film can stimulate and direct the image-making capacity of the imagination. From documentary to art house cinema, and from an abundance of onscreen images to their complete absence, films that experiment variously with narration, voice-over, and soundscapes do not only engage the thoughts and senses of spectators in a perceptually rich experience. They also make an appeal to visualise more than is visible on screen and they provide instruction on how to do so as spectators think and feel, listen and view. Bringing together philosophy, film theory, literary scholarship, and cognitive psychology with an international range of films from beyond the mainstream, Sarah Cooper charts the key processes that serve the imagining of images in the light of the mind. Through its navigation of a labile and vivid mental terrain, this innovative work makes a profound contribution to the study of spectatorship.Less
Film and the Imagined Image explores the extraordinary ways in which film can stimulate and direct the image-making capacity of the imagination. From documentary to art house cinema, and from an abundance of onscreen images to their complete absence, films that experiment variously with narration, voice-over, and soundscapes do not only engage the thoughts and senses of spectators in a perceptually rich experience. They also make an appeal to visualise more than is visible on screen and they provide instruction on how to do so as spectators think and feel, listen and view. Bringing together philosophy, film theory, literary scholarship, and cognitive psychology with an international range of films from beyond the mainstream, Sarah Cooper charts the key processes that serve the imagining of images in the light of the mind. Through its navigation of a labile and vivid mental terrain, this innovative work makes a profound contribution to the study of spectatorship.
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.
Sarah Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474452786
- eISBN:
- 9781474476676
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474452786.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This opening chapter serves to introduce the principal focus of the book, which explores the felt experience of mental image-making while watching film. The introductory discussion positions the book ...
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This opening chapter serves to introduce the principal focus of the book, which explores the felt experience of mental image-making while watching film. The introductory discussion positions the book first of all in relation to cognitivist work on imagination within film studies and points to the gap in scholarship on spectatorship regarding the experience of the image-making capacity of the imagination, situating it within a broader debate on mental imagery. The chapter engages with film theory and philosophy that anticipates the kind of image-making that will be focused on throughout the book and introduces what it means to imagine in images. It also justifies the book’s concentration on sound rather than silent cinema, since the verbal dimension and soundtracks are crucial to the kind of direction that produces the most vivid mental images, and the verbal dimension in particular permits introduction of the work of Elaine Scarry on guided imagining. It is the vivacity of such mental images that this first chapter outlines. In conceptual terms, this chapter and the following chapter serve to set up the key notion of ‘dual vision’ – of seeing what is on screen and ‘seeing’ what is in the mind – that informs the entire study.Less
This opening chapter serves to introduce the principal focus of the book, which explores the felt experience of mental image-making while watching film. The introductory discussion positions the book first of all in relation to cognitivist work on imagination within film studies and points to the gap in scholarship on spectatorship regarding the experience of the image-making capacity of the imagination, situating it within a broader debate on mental imagery. The chapter engages with film theory and philosophy that anticipates the kind of image-making that will be focused on throughout the book and introduces what it means to imagine in images. It also justifies the book’s concentration on sound rather than silent cinema, since the verbal dimension and soundtracks are crucial to the kind of direction that produces the most vivid mental images, and the verbal dimension in particular permits introduction of the work of Elaine Scarry on guided imagining. It is the vivacity of such mental images that this first chapter outlines. In conceptual terms, this chapter and the following chapter serve to set up the key notion of ‘dual vision’ – of seeing what is on screen and ‘seeing’ what is in the mind – that informs the entire study.
Rebecca A. Sheehan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190949709
- eISBN:
- 9780190949747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949709.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter investigates the philosophy of the ordinary and the everyday proposed in the films of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Phil Solomon. It places their work in the context of an interest in ...
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This chapter investigates the philosophy of the ordinary and the everyday proposed in the films of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Phil Solomon. It places their work in the context of an interest in ordinary experience and language that, for philosopher Stanley Cavell, unifies the thinking of Emerson and Wittgenstein. By pursuing Brakhage’s explicit interest in Wittgenstein and Mekas’s engagement with Transcendentalism through Thoreau, the chapter looks at how these filmmakers construct their films from overlooked means or in-betweens (for Brakhage and Solomon, the materials of the filmstrip itself; for Mekas and Brakhage, everyday happenings). This practice reflects these filmmakers’ collective investment in the ethical philosophy of “finding as founding” that locates ends in means to privilege the contingencies of individual experience over an authoritative truth that is found rather than made.Less
This chapter investigates the philosophy of the ordinary and the everyday proposed in the films of Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Phil Solomon. It places their work in the context of an interest in ordinary experience and language that, for philosopher Stanley Cavell, unifies the thinking of Emerson and Wittgenstein. By pursuing Brakhage’s explicit interest in Wittgenstein and Mekas’s engagement with Transcendentalism through Thoreau, the chapter looks at how these filmmakers construct their films from overlooked means or in-betweens (for Brakhage and Solomon, the materials of the filmstrip itself; for Mekas and Brakhage, everyday happenings). This practice reflects these filmmakers’ collective investment in the ethical philosophy of “finding as founding” that locates ends in means to privilege the contingencies of individual experience over an authoritative truth that is found rather than made.
Sarah Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474452786
- eISBN:
- 9781474476676
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474452786.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter opens with an example from Marguerite Duras’s film The Atlantic Man (1981), in order to introduce some of the ways in which the felt experience of image-making spoken about in relation ...
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This chapter opens with an example from Marguerite Duras’s film The Atlantic Man (1981), in order to introduce some of the ways in which the felt experience of image-making spoken about in relation to dual vision and mental pictures in the first chapter can be further fleshed out. It is the substantiality of the vivid mental image that is explored in this chapter, which furthers what it means to imagine in images while watching film. Duras’s work is a point of reference throughout the book but serves here to lead into discussion of perception and imagination as theorised by twentieth-century phenomenologists. The felt experience of image-making begins to take shape in palpable form, and the relationship between perception and imagination that informs subsequent chapters is articulated first of all through a dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work in particular, and then with that of other philosophers and film theorists.Less
This chapter opens with an example from Marguerite Duras’s film The Atlantic Man (1981), in order to introduce some of the ways in which the felt experience of image-making spoken about in relation to dual vision and mental pictures in the first chapter can be further fleshed out. It is the substantiality of the vivid mental image that is explored in this chapter, which furthers what it means to imagine in images while watching film. Duras’s work is a point of reference throughout the book but serves here to lead into discussion of perception and imagination as theorised by twentieth-century phenomenologists. The felt experience of image-making begins to take shape in palpable form, and the relationship between perception and imagination that informs subsequent chapters is articulated first of all through a dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work in particular, and then with that of other philosophers and film theorists.
Rebecca A. Sheehan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190949709
- eISBN:
- 9780190949747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949709.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter considers how the American avant-garde utilizes landscape as a site in-between the subject and the world, one which negotiates skepticism’s dilemma of the perceiving subject’s ...
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This chapter considers how the American avant-garde utilizes landscape as a site in-between the subject and the world, one which negotiates skepticism’s dilemma of the perceiving subject’s simultaneous distance from and conflation with the world. Examining the films of James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, David Gatten, and Ernie Gehr, as well as Phil Solomon’s machinima and the figure of the border in Chick Strand’s work and recent work by Peggy Ahwesh, the chapter argues that these cinematic takes on landscape forge multiplicity within a singularity of space, staging a paradoxical plurality of encounters with the “same.” Taking up the figure of geological strata prevalent in Benning’s and Gatten’s work, the chapter theorizes the function of the interstitial where re-encounters invited by extreme long takes (Lockhart, Benning) or the obsessive review of “missable” details (Gatten, Solomon) yield forking conceptions of historical time and meaning rather than linear ones. Similarly, the chapter turns to how films by Benning, Gatten, Strand, and Ahwesh use the figure of the in-between to undermine the authority of man-made borders.Less
This chapter considers how the American avant-garde utilizes landscape as a site in-between the subject and the world, one which negotiates skepticism’s dilemma of the perceiving subject’s simultaneous distance from and conflation with the world. Examining the films of James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, David Gatten, and Ernie Gehr, as well as Phil Solomon’s machinima and the figure of the border in Chick Strand’s work and recent work by Peggy Ahwesh, the chapter argues that these cinematic takes on landscape forge multiplicity within a singularity of space, staging a paradoxical plurality of encounters with the “same.” Taking up the figure of geological strata prevalent in Benning’s and Gatten’s work, the chapter theorizes the function of the interstitial where re-encounters invited by extreme long takes (Lockhart, Benning) or the obsessive review of “missable” details (Gatten, Solomon) yield forking conceptions of historical time and meaning rather than linear ones. Similarly, the chapter turns to how films by Benning, Gatten, Strand, and Ahwesh use the figure of the in-between to undermine the authority of man-made borders.
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.
Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstić
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474429245
- eISBN:
- 9781474464772
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474429245.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
In this introductory chapter readers are made familiar with the expanding research field of essayistic filmmaking in world cinema-contexts around the globe. Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstíc argue that ...
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In this introductory chapter readers are made familiar with the expanding research field of essayistic filmmaking in world cinema-contexts around the globe. Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstíc argue that the essay film is a privileged political and ethical tool by means of which filmmakers around the world approach historically specific and locally, geographically concrete issues against larger global issues and universal concerns. The chapter also includes a genealogical overview of important moments in the development of essay filmmaking, particularly during the 1920s and 1960s, and provides readers with short abstracts on the individual chapters and their specific transnationally inflected case studies on essay film practitioners from around the world.Less
In this introductory chapter readers are made familiar with the expanding research field of essayistic filmmaking in world cinema-contexts around the globe. Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstíc argue that the essay film is a privileged political and ethical tool by means of which filmmakers around the world approach historically specific and locally, geographically concrete issues against larger global issues and universal concerns. The chapter also includes a genealogical overview of important moments in the development of essay filmmaking, particularly during the 1920s and 1960s, and provides readers with short abstracts on the individual chapters and their specific transnationally inflected case studies on essay film practitioners from around the world.
Rebecca A. Sheehan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190949709
- eISBN:
- 9780190949747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949709.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter examines the role of paradox in the films and film theory of Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow. Paradoxes such as Zeno’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Benoît ...
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This chapter examines the role of paradox in the films and film theory of Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow. Paradoxes such as Zeno’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal theory of geometry, which inform the work of these filmmakers, propose and repeat the unresolvable gap between subject and world that informs skepticism. This chapter argues that the skeptical encounters these films invite, which entice the spectator to work toward solving a riddle or problem of incompleteness, also provide a model for overcoming skepticism by prompting re-encounters with the images on screen and the world to which they refer. These re-encounters occur in the same way that Stanley Cavell imagined the images of mainstream cinema could overcome problems of philosophical skepticism by drawing the subject closer to the world. The author argues, however, that these avant-garde meditations on mises en abyme are possibly more effective than Hollywood filmmaking for overcoming skepticism because of their more immediate emphasis on cinema’s very ability to engage and stage re-encounters between the subject and the limits of the world, rather than their reference to the world through images.Less
This chapter examines the role of paradox in the films and film theory of Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow. Paradoxes such as Zeno’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal theory of geometry, which inform the work of these filmmakers, propose and repeat the unresolvable gap between subject and world that informs skepticism. This chapter argues that the skeptical encounters these films invite, which entice the spectator to work toward solving a riddle or problem of incompleteness, also provide a model for overcoming skepticism by prompting re-encounters with the images on screen and the world to which they refer. These re-encounters occur in the same way that Stanley Cavell imagined the images of mainstream cinema could overcome problems of philosophical skepticism by drawing the subject closer to the world. The author argues, however, that these avant-garde meditations on mises en abyme are possibly more effective than Hollywood filmmaking for overcoming skepticism because of their more immediate emphasis on cinema’s very ability to engage and stage re-encounters between the subject and the limits of the world, rather than their reference to the world through images.
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.
Rebecca A. Sheehan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190949709
- eISBN:
- 9780190949747
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949709.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that ...
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Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde indeed “do” philosophy, and it illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The author traces the avant-garde’s philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how reflections on the creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself. This entails the avant-garde’s locating of cinema’s—and thought’s—ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found, that unites with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rectifying film-philosophy’s neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how, rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde’s interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerge from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. The author reads the avant-garde’s interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as an extension of Pragmatism’s commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde’s philosophies to Deleuze’s time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche’s “powers of the false.”Less
Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde indeed “do” philosophy, and it illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The author traces the avant-garde’s philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how reflections on the creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself. This entails the avant-garde’s locating of cinema’s—and thought’s—ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found, that unites with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rectifying film-philosophy’s neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how, rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde’s interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerge from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. The author reads the avant-garde’s interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as an extension of Pragmatism’s commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde’s philosophies to Deleuze’s time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche’s “powers of the false.”
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.
Bruce Isaacs
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190889951
- eISBN:
- 9780190889999
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190889951.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Alfred Hitchcock’s notion of a “pure cinema” has continued to fascinate and perplex film audiences, critics, and theorists alike. The concept first emerged loosely in the 1920s, as European ...
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Alfred Hitchcock’s notion of a “pure cinema” has continued to fascinate and perplex film audiences, critics, and theorists alike. The concept first emerged loosely in the 1920s, as European avant-garde artists and intellectuals grappled with the essence of the moving image as an aesthetic form. But what, precisely, was pure cinema as an artistic philosophy and style? How did it evolve within Hitchcock’s body of work, and how was a pure cinema artistic style then developed by the filmmakers who came after Hitchcock, such as Dario Argento and Brian De Palma? The Art of Pure Cinema connects film history and philosophies of image and sound to better understand the legacy of this aesthetic tradition.Less
Alfred Hitchcock’s notion of a “pure cinema” has continued to fascinate and perplex film audiences, critics, and theorists alike. The concept first emerged loosely in the 1920s, as European avant-garde artists and intellectuals grappled with the essence of the moving image as an aesthetic form. But what, precisely, was pure cinema as an artistic philosophy and style? How did it evolve within Hitchcock’s body of work, and how was a pure cinema artistic style then developed by the filmmakers who came after Hitchcock, such as Dario Argento and Brian De Palma? The Art of Pure Cinema connects film history and philosophies of image and sound to better understand the legacy of this aesthetic tradition.
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.