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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.