Thinking Through Cinema Film as Philosophy

by Smith, Murray; Wartenberg, Thomas E.

• ISBN13: 9781405154116
• ISBN10: 140515411X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-03-10
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

The collection brings together a wide range of contributors, including both philosophers and film scholars. All of them address the question of whether philosophy can take the form of, or be articulated through, film. A new text for the growing field of philosophy of film, engaging with a variety of questions concerning the relationship between film and art, aesthetics and philosophy. Explores a wide variety of forms and periods of film, such as the avant-garde, continental film and popular American cinema, to present diverse answers to this question. Draws on a range of films, from the works of Hitchcock to Mission: Impossible and Being John Malkovich.

Author Biography

Murray Smith is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford, 1995) and Trainspotting (British Film Institute, 2002), and the co-editor of Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Routledge, 1998). He has published widely on the relationship between ethics, emotion, and films, including essays in this journal and Cinema Journal.

Thomas E. Wartenberg is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Mount Holyoke College, where he also teaches in the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism (Westview Press, 1999) and The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation (Temple University Press, 1990), the editor of The Nature of Art (Wadsworth Publishing, 2001), and the co-editor of Philosophy and Film (Routledge, 1995)and The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings (Blackwell, 2005).

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction	p. 1
The Very Idea of Film as Philosophy
Theses on Cinema as Philosophy	p. 11
Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy	p. 19
Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity	p. 33
Popular American Film: Entertainment and Enlightenment
Hitchcock and Cavell	p. 43
The Paradox of the Unknown Lover: A Reading of Letter from an Unknown Woman	p. 55
Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist	p. 67
Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film	p. 81
The Impersonation of Personality: Film as Philosophy in Mission: Impossible	p. 97
On Being Philosophical and Being John Malkovich	p. 111
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Morality of Memory	p. 119
Continental Philosophy, Continental Film
Sartre, the Philosophy of Nothingness, and the Modern Melodrama	p. 135
Cinema and Subjectivity in Krzysztof Kieslowski	p. 147
Is Sex Comedy or Tragedy? Directing Desire and Female Auteurship in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat	p. 157
Film as "Theory": The Avant-Garde
Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy	p. 165
Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity	p. 173
The Substance of Cinema	p. 187
The World Rewound: Peter Forgacs's Wittgenstein Tractatus	p. 199
Contributors	p. 213
Selected Bibliography	p. 217
Index	p. 221
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