Search Results

Perhaps because they are so immediately absorbing, narrative films can also be profoundly confusing and disorienting. This fascinating book neither proposes fool-proof methods for avoiding confusion, nor does it suggest that disorientation is always a virtue. Instead, it argues that the best way to come to terms with our confusion is to look closely at exactly what is confusing us, and why. At the heart of the book are original close readings of four important recent films: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (2006), Leos Carax's Holy Motors (2012), Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth (2006) and Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au langage (2014). Clearly written but critically and theoretically bold, The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions explores both how we get (or fail to get) our bearings with respect to a film, and what we might discover by (and while) doing so.

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.

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.

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.

In the tumultuous era of the late sixties and early seventies, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded and explored the immediacy of lived experience as both an aesthetic and political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of temporal alienation and distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown), and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, “the past” is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, whose study bridges diverse conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, media technologies, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.

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.

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.

How can movements in animated films be described? Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics introduces a powerful new method for the study of animation. By looking for figures—arrangements that seem to intuitively hold together—and forces—underlying units of attraction, repulsion, and direction—it reveals startling new possibilities for animation criticism, history, and theory. Drawing on concepts from Gestalt psychology, the book offers a wide-ranging comparative study of four animation techniques—soft-edged forms, walk cycles, camera movement, and rotoscoping—as they appear in commercial, artisanal, and avant-garde works. In the process, through close readings of little-analyzed films, the book demonstrates that figures and forces make fertile resources for theoretical speculation, unearthing affinities between animation practice and such topics as the philosophy of mathematics, scientific and political revolution, and love. Beginning and ending with the imperative to “look closely,” Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics is a performance in seeing the world of motion anew.

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.”