Film and Philosophy

Su Dracula di Bram Stoker di F.F. Coppola ( ovvero Dracula, Gesù e la Sincerità)

by Ruggero Barberi

'There as many paths to the time-image as there are films in the world': Deleuze and The Lizard

by William Brown

Published in David Martin-Jones and William Brown (eds.), Deleuze and Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 88-103.

This essay argues that the popular but banned Iranian comedy, Marmoulak/The Lizard (Kamal Tabrizi, Iran, 2004)... more This essay argues that the popular but banned Iranian comedy, Marmoulak/The Lizard (Kamal Tabrizi, Iran, 2004) troubles the distinction between Deleuze’s movement- and time-image categories. The essay also compares Deleuze’s work with that of Iranian philosopher Abdolkrim Soroush, arguing that both have in common a philosophy of becoming. Given that The Lizard has been read in the light of Soroush's work, and given that the two philosophers share becoming as a central tenet of their philosophy, the essay suggests that a Deleuzian reading of The Lizard is not inappropriate even though he is, so to speak, from the West and The Lizard is from the Middle East. Indeed, the essay also argues that not only can Deleuze help us to understand The Lizard but that The Lizard can also help us to understand Deleuze - by suggesting, as per a refrain oft-repeated in the film, that there are as many paths to the time-image as there are films in the world.

Introduction: Deleuze's World Tour of Cinema

by William Brown

Co-authored with David Martin-Jones.
Published in David Martin-Jones and William Brown (eds.), Deluze and Film, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 1-17.

This essay introduces the edited collection Deleuze and Film, and argues that there are many versions of Deleuze... more This essay introduces the edited collection Deleuze and Film, and argues that there are many versions of Deleuze circulating in film studies.

L'allégorie dans Metropolis, chez Lang et Rintaro

by Stephane Collignon

travail réalisé en 2005 dans le cadre du cours d'esthétique et philosophie du cinéma suivi pendant ma formation en Écritures et Analyses Cinématographiques à l'Université Libre de Bruxelles.

Études et comparaison des figures allégoriques (personnages, structure du récit, décors, etc) développées dans le... more Études et comparaison des figures allégoriques (personnages, structure du récit, décors, etc) développées dans le Metropolis de Fritz Lang et l'adaptation animée japonaise de Rintaro.

"Biopolitics on Screen": Aernout Mik's Moving-Image Installations

by Gabriella Calchi-Novati

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image
Issue 2 - December 2011

Penultimate Philosophy of Film and Film as Philosophy

by Tom McClelland

Published in Cinema: Jounral of Philosophy and the Moving Image

There are two respects in which the medium of film and the discipline of philosophy intersect. First, the philosophy... more There are two respects in which the medium of film and the discipline of philosophy intersect. First, the philosophy of film asks philosophical questions about the nature of film. Second, the notion of film as philosophy (FAP) proposes that films themselves can contribute to a range of philosophical debates. FAP raises some troubling conceptual problems. How is it possible for film to contribute to philosophical debate? And, if it is possible, why should we turn to film for those contributions rather than to traditional academic sources? I address these problems with a ‘Socratic Model’ of the role of film in philosophical debate. I argue that the representational limitations of motion pictures are compatible with film acting as a ‘midwife’ for philosophical insights in its audience. Furthermore, where a film fascilitates insights into the philosophy of film, I argue that it can be better positioned to prompt those realisations than an academic text. I put this model in to practice with an account of the philosophical value of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which invites its audience to consider moral and epistemic issues surrounding the activity of film viewing.

'What Cinema Does'

by Hamish Ford

Book review, 'The Cinema Effect' by Sean Cubitt, RealTime, no. 60, April-May, 2004.

'The Ister: Search for the Source'

by Hamish Ford

RealTime, no. 64, December 2004-January 2005.

'Antonioni's "L'Avventura" and Deleuze Time-Image'

by Hamish Ford

Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, July-August 2003.

'Broken Glass by the Road: Adorno and a Cinema of Negativity'

by Hamish Ford

in Havi Carel & Greg Tuck (eds.) New Takes in Film and Philosophy, London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 65-85.

'The Return of 1960s Modernist Cinema'

by Hamish Ford

Studies in Australasian Cinema 5: 2, 2011, pp. 155-170

This article concerns the complex nature of post-war European film modernism’s historicity. According to András Bálint... more This article concerns the complex nature of post-war European film modernism’s historicity. According to András Bálint Kovács, this cinema rose in an arc starting from the mid-1950s, peaking in the 1960s, and slowly petering out by 1980. At its best such historicizing produces precise contextual detailing, rather than romantic, hermetic affirmation or subsequent backlash dismissal, in the process creating room for new accounts of films and filmmakers beyond their role in the heated politics of then-contemporary critical taste and the competitive linear regime of vanguard innovation. But we also need to look closely at the peculiarities of this particular modernist cinema’s apparent ‘past-ness’ as revealing crucial elements of modernism’s perennial (if variously contested or disavowed) power, challenge and attraction. This article explores the uncanny, untimely return of such cinema’s 1960s apogee, embedded in a very real past while also emerging from virtual
futures, as it complicates anew our unstable present.

Personal Identity, Selective Memory Erasure and Utilitarianism in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

by Patrick Samuel

A look at personal identity, selective memory erasure and utilitarianism in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and asking "What makes us who we are?"

James Cameron’s Titanic, the French New Wave and Postmodern Historicity

by Danielle Marquez

This was my last essay for my Film History class.

This essay discusses James Cameron as an auteur. While writing this paper, I was very inspired by my Philosophy class,... more This essay discusses James Cameron as an auteur. While writing this paper, I was very inspired by my Philosophy class, and might have taken it a little too seriously. :))

Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics

by Daniel Morgan

Critical Inquiry 32 (2006)

Simulation, History and Experience in Oshii's Avalon and Military-Entertainment Culture

by Patrick Crogan

Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media 4 (2010): 99-113.

Looks at Mamoru Oshii's film, Avalon as a means of theorising the implications of what is called the... more Looks at Mamoru Oshii's film, Avalon as a means of theorising the implications of what is called the 'military-entertainment complex'.

The Duck and the Philosopher: Rhythms of Editing and Thinking between Bernard Stiegler and The Ister

by Patrick Crogan

Transformations: Journal of Media and Culture 17 (2010). Article for special issue on Stiegler.

The Ister (Ross and Barison, 2003)—part documentary, travelogue and philosophical meditation supplementing Heidegger’s... more The Ister (Ross and Barison, 2003)—part documentary, travelogue and philosophical meditation supplementing Heidegger’s meditation on Holderlin’s poem about the Danube—opens and closes with sequences of a duck waddling along the bank of the river. The intervening film, all 3 hours of it, is in effect a large insert edit between these two sequences, or rather, this single sequence. Seen in this way, and given the significant involvement in and engagement with Bernard Stiegler’s thinking of technology that The Ister evinces (interviews with Stiegler, among others, take up much of the time of this insert), the film invites consideration in terms of his theorisation of cinema as key representational technology of the Twentieth century. His published work on cinema postdates the film but it nonetheless represents an intriguing anticipation of and in some ways response to his both theoretical and polemical approach to cinema. This paper will outline and examine some major tenets of Stiegler’s account of cinema by trying to time the momentary duck’s walk that is the extended duration of The Ister. This will involve an editing project of its own that cuts between analysis of the film, theories and practices of editing and Stiegler’s post-phenomenological account of consciousness.

" Henri Bergson Talks to Us About Cinema," by Michel Georges-Michel from Le Journal, February 20, 1914

by louis-georges schwartz

Cannibalistic Capitalism and other American Delicacies: A Bataillean Taste of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

by Naomi Merritt

Published in Film-Philosophy (Vol. 14, No. 1, 2010) 2010

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) presents a nightmarish vision of an America, metaphorically and... more The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) presents a nightmarish vision of an America, metaphorically and literally devouring itself. ‘Home, sweet, home’ becomes the slaughterhouse and consumers become the consumed as ‘cannibalistic capitalism’ (embodied by a family of unemployed but murderous abattoir workers), wreaks havoc on the lives of a hedonistic group of youths, as the ‘Age of Aquarius’ comes to a bloody end. Chain Saw offers a model of horror that is both deeply rooted in American ideology, taboos, and the key (and interdependent) institutions of the family, the worker and capitalism, yet produces aberrant and transgressive versions of these same social units. In this paper, the film’s representation of ‘cannibalistic capitalism’ will be explored in relation to Georges Bataille’s theory of taboo and transgression. While Bataille asserts that the ‘main function of all taboos is to combat violence’ (thus maintaining the power, integrity and conformity of social institutions), he also suggests that the taboo paradoxically begets its own violent transgression. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, capitalism’s transgressive excesses both ignite the taboo’s prohibitive power while revelling in and glorifying its violation. This paper offers a ‘taste’ of a Bataillean approach to the theorising of horror and the spectatorial ‘pleasures’ of submitting to the anguish it provokes.

Essential Viewing: Review of Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps 3: Le temps du cinéma et la question du mal-être [Technics and Time 3: The Time of Cinema and the Question of Ill-being]

by Patrick Crogan

Film-Philosophy 10:3 (September 2006), 39-54. Special issue on Continental film-philosophy today

Time-lapse, time map. The photographic body of San Francisco in David Fincher's Zodiac.

by Damian Sutton

Forthcoming in 2011

This article discusses the continued reliance of the cinema image on the notion of the photographic, as expressed in... more This article discusses the continued reliance of the cinema image on the notion of the photographic, as expressed in the 2007 Warner Bros. film Zodiac (David Fincher). This police procedural movie details the story of detectives and newspaper reporters as they follow the trail of the Zodiac, a serial killer who terrorised California residents in the late-1960s and early 1970s, sending taunting letters to the San Francisco Chronicle. The production involves extensive use of digital set-building and CGI compositing in order to reproduce the look and feel of the period, and is interspersed with segue sequences including an apparent time-lapse shot of the construction of the Transamerica building. Although this was created entirely digitally, the sequence relies heavily on the details expected of time-lapse photography, and therefore illustrates how the new digital cinema makes use of the codes and conventions of analogue cinematography. This is particularly significant because the time-lapse sequence as a technical flourish occurs within the feature film, which ordinarily makes the mechanics of cinema transparent. Unlike contemporary film and video art practice, studio features are not expected to explore the framing of time overtly but instead to reflect as much as possible our commonplace cultural conceptions. Using the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Kurt Lewin, this article explores the cinematic creation of hodological time, achieved through a reference to film’s photographic legacy, and the establishment in digital filmmaking of a cinema of the body.