Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 370-373, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 365-369, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 357-364, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 326-352, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 301-325, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 282-300, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 262-281, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 240-261, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 222-239, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 197-221, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 173-196, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 151-172, June, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 146-149, February, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 142-145, February, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 137-141, February, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 115-136, February, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 98-114, February, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 79-97, February, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 64-78, February, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 50-63, February, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 29-49, February, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 7-28, February, 2023.

Film-Philosophy, Volume 27, Issue 1, Page 1-6, February, 2023.

In the introduction to his recent collection Filmed Thought, Robert B. Pippin offers in passing a broad definition of philosophy as “the non-empirical exploration of meaning and value” (2020, p. 5). This definition captures well the spirit of Hans Maes and Katrien Schaurbroeck’s edited collection, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight: A Philosophical Exploration, which forms part of the Routledge

One of the most important Hegel scholars of his generation, Robert Pippin has taken a very interesting late-career turn into the philosophy of film, with Filmed Thought: Cinema as Reflective Form being one of a string of works that Pippin has authored on the subject in recent years. While the majority of Pippin’s film books address the philosophical mode of expression found in genres, most notably

Nico Baumbach’s Cinema/Politics/Philosophy presents a systematic reinterpretation and reevaluation of three contemporary European philosophers’ work on cinema: Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben. Several features separate Baumbach’s work from similar studies of these figures. First, Baumbach pairs his interpretations of each of these philosophers’ engagement with cinema with a particular

Groundhog Day (GD) (1993), directed by Harold Ramis and Only Lovers Left Alive (Lovers) (2013), directed by Jim Jarmusch, are fantasy films that use the device of practical immortality in order to raise important philosophical questions about what constitutes a good life and to explore the nature of romantic love. GD provides fairly conventional answers about how to live a good life by focusing on

How could power “exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain, and multiply life?” (Foucault, 1976/1978, p. 138). In the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) Michel Foucault raises this question only to immediately answer: “One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others” (1978, p. 138). According

David Lynch’s early drawings of heads are characteristically unusual; looking at them does not replicate the feeling of looking in a mirror, of registering recognisable features. A cursory glance provides little, if anything, you might consider your own. The heads are clearly human, but their features are distorted (see S. Huijts, 2019, pp. 44–7). In one, a skull looks cracked and halved like the ground

The linking together that occurs when we reason … is not a linking of names but of the things that are signified by the names, and I am surprised that the opposite view should occur to anyone. Who doubts that a Frenchman and a German can reason about the same things, despite the fact that the words that they think of are completely different? And surely the philosopher refutes his own position when

Throughout the 20th century, Western society increasingly substituted the absolute for the particular, certainty for relativism, and religious and metaphysical dogmas for a widespread philosophical scepticism. In a progressively industrial and mechanical society, human existence is no longer primarily explained through the postulation of an “unmoved mover”. Not God but the individual carries the sovereign

This article discusses Michel Serres's topological thinking and his approach to space and time from a film studies perspective, specifically looking at connections between Serresian philosophy and the work of Christopher Nolan, using Dunkirk (2017) as an example of folded time. The article provides a selective overview of Serres's topological thinking, which opposes a geometrical approach to space

For Naomi Kawase, cinema’s ability to preserve time also makes it a medium that can capture memory, making the film itself a material form of preserved memory.1 As the director herself once stated in an interview: When I discovered cinema, I learned to record and film with the camera; I feel that it is a medium that can preserve time. This capacity of preserving time is what fascinates me most about

In Terrors of the Flesh: The Philosophy of Body Horror in Film, David Huckvale traces body horror in cinema back to the writings of the Marquis de Sade, who states that a human takes pleasure and suffers pain only by means of the senses or the organs of the body (p. 1). Such a corporeal philosophy, Huckvale continues, strongly anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche, who was eager to have a positive attitude

In the introduction to The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film, the late Gilberto Perez proposes that rhetoric offers a distinctive lens through which to conduct critical scholarship since it occupies a space between the poetics of construction studies and the responses of reception studies. For Perez, current trends in filmic analysis favour both philosophical and ideological perspectives. With this

Shane Denson’s virtuosic new book introduces discorrelation as a concept for broaching the aesthetic, technical, and philosophical issues encompassed by the term “post-cinema”. Denson distances himself from scholars who characterise post-cinema as essentially non-indexical or aesthetically chaotic. Instead, he locates the primary distinction between cinema and post-cinema in the computational technologies

Lúcia Nagib opens Realist Cinema as World Cinema with a statement: “[t]his book is about films and filmmakers committed to reality” (p. 15). Realism for Nagib less concerns the Bazinian ontological link between film and referent, but rather deals with how and when such indexicality becomes essential in a film. This approach enables Nagib to study realism as “modes of production” (p. 22) that permeate

More than twenty years on from its from its initial release, Terrence Malick's 1998 epic, The Thin Red Line, still makes for captivating and challenging viewing.1 Adapted from James Jones's 1962 novel of the same name, The Thin Red Line signalled Malick's return to fully-realized filmmaking after a two-decade hiatus, and proved to be the inaugural work in a tonal triptych which also included The New

Since its inception the enigmatic and attractive nature of avant-garde animation has resided in both its seeming rejection of any overarching interpretation of the artwork per se and, ironically, the formulation of temporary understandings that come to the audience’s mind with every new viewing. The geometric and linear abstractions so prevalent in these works, when presented in sequence, generate

This article reconstructs and evaluates a debate between Robert B. Pippin and Slavoj Žižek over the proper interpretation of Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), in relation to the philosophical project of G. W. F. Hegel. Pippin and Žižek are each leading contemporary scholars of Hegel, while each also shares an abiding interest in film.1 Both Pippin and Žižek agree that Hitchcock’s Vertigo exemplifies

The art historian T. J. Clark, who examines the status of the female nude in 1860s France, posits that by the 1860s the genre of the nude established centuries previously – the body as an abstract ideal, with the nude desexualising the human form – was “disintegrating” (Clark, 1999, p. 128). To illustrate his point, he contrasts Ingres’ Venus Rising From the Sea (Vénus Anadyomène) from 1848, where

Timothy Treadwell is the protagonist of Werner Herzog’s documentary film Grizzly Man (2005) and he presented himself as an environmental activist and “bear protector” who, during thirteen successive summers, travelled to the Katmai National Park in Alaska, a grizzly bear territory, to camp in the wilderness and trying to “bond” with the bears, which he considered to be in danger. In addition to being

When we think of humility in fiction film (if we think of it at all), we might imagine quiet and unassuming characters or religious figures, often in the background or as sage advisers to the bolder lead characters. In contrast, the genre of biographical film, or for short the biopic, focusses by its very nature on the lives of outstanding, mostly secular, historical individuals.1 Moreover, mainstream

Carl Franklin’s well-known film, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), has been discussed, praised, and analyzed in a variety of illuminating ways. Scholars have, for example, written about this work’s efforts to use neo-noir to explore race, making it film noir with a difference; they have noted its distinction from earlier African-American films noirs through its thoughtful use of history as well as alternative

Rebecca Sheehan's American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between sets out to trace an intellectual and artistic genealogy that has often been overlooked in the field of film-philosophy. Engaging with experimental filmmakers in the USA from post-WWII to the present, Sheehan addresses how experimental films do philosophy through their formal aesthetic. This marks an important methodological

“With Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetic of Change […] I offer a cinematic philosophy of transgender embodiment through deep consideration of the ways that film constitutes a medium for transitioning,” (p. 2) writes Eliza Steinbock at the outset of their important monograph. In particular, Steinbock draws upon the shimmer both as a concept and as a formal property of film

In Hollywood's Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies, Hunter Vaughan argues for the necessity of new forms of production and spectatorship that are attentive to the environmental degradation caused by Hollywood filmmaking. Each chapter focuses on one of the earth's elements – Fire, Water, Wind and Earth – with a final chapter dedicated to analysis of the ‘Fifth Element’ – humanity – which

As an environmentalist, Rupert Read has long contributed to awakening the ecological consciousness of human beings living on their one and only Mother Earth by stressing that our world needs positive and radical change. A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment aligns with this “message”, applying an urgent ecological approach to film-philosophical analysis. By zooming in on twelve transformative

“The reality of transference is thus the presence of the past.”– Jacques LacanLuca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018) aggressively foregrounds a term from the discourse of psychoanalysis, now a relic of twentieth-century philosophical and psychological thought, with which to negotiate a sequence of historical problems specific to its articulation as a remake (adaptation or reimagining) of a gaudy 1977 giallo

Roughly fifty minutes into Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 2012), the camera temporarily pauses in a moment of intimacy: locking eyes with a decapitated fish. Until this point, the film's shaking frame coupled with its poor image quality foregrounded how bodies (human, non-human; alive, dead or dying) become blurred into an amorphous, anonymous assemblage (Fig. 1). In Leviathan

Over the years I have been watching the steady impoverishment of the people's ideal, the lying, the daily inveterate lying, the thirty-year-old deep corrosive habit of lying.—David Hare, Licking Hitler (1978) How about a prohibition against lying? According to the Old Testament it's an abomination to God. But social life teems with harmless or even helpful untruths. How do we separate them out? Who's

In their efforts to define the true nature of film and thus give it the status of a new art, some of the earliest film theoreticians, especially French impressionist authors, have identified image, movement and time as the basic properties of film. Canudo (1911, p. 170) describes film as “a painting and a sculpture developing in time”, Dulac (1925/2018) and Aragon (1918/1993) find its essence in movement

With Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides, editors Christina Rawls, Diana Neiva, and Steven S. Gouveia gather essays of diverse methodology and disciplinary orientation to productively construct points of connection – “bridges” – within scholarship treating philosophy and film. As the anthology's title rightly reflects, bridges are meaningful only when they span an existing divide, and there are many

In his latest monograph, Sean Cubitt proves his reputation as a leading scholar in media theory. The intellectual scope and breadth of ideas displayed in Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image equal its ambitious aspirations, as Cubitt offers “a root-and-branch rethinking of all the premises of environmentalism, including the concept of ecology” (p. 12). In this way, the book

The specter plays an archetypal role in film and literature, whether as a Freudian return of the repressed, the manifestation of a posthumous desire for justice, or an incarnation of our death-related fears, hopes, and anxieties. Yet, whatever the purpose, the ghost disrupts the symbolic order of society; as Slavoj Žižek aptly notes, the dead never stay properly buried (1992, p. 23). Colin Davis expands

In the deep darkness of a tunnel, sparks fly from the end of a cigarette. After the cigarette burns out and the last of the sparks bounce off the tunnel wall, Chen (Yongzhong Chen) lets his hand hang freely out of the train window. Sunlight suddenly pours onto the screen as the train passes out of the tunnel, before being swallowed by the darkness of a second tunnel. On emerging a few seconds later

The use of virtual reality (VR) has expanded in various subgenres of cinema, including documentary films, during the past decade. There are two key tropes that have driven many practitioners to venture into VR nonfiction artifacts: the first is immersion, through which participants feel as if submerged into the image space surrounding them; and the second is sense of presence (SoP), which refers to

The paper before my eyes fades yellow With a steel pen I chisel on it uneven black Full of working words Workshop, assembly line, machine, work card, overtime, wages… They've trained me to become docile Don't know how to shout or rebel How to complain or denounce Only how to silently suffer exhaustion When I first set foot in this place I hoped only for that grey pay slip on the tenth of each month

Almost all Europeans confound themselves with their role; they become the victims of their own “good performance”. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science EUDORA: Who are you? ZELIG: What do you mean who am I? These are tough questions. —Woody Allen, Zelig I did not know whether I was meeting the same man. So terrible was the change… —Witness in Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

For anyone acquainted with the work of Stanley Cavell, Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, 2008) provides much food for thought. Adapted from Richard Yates’ now celebrated 1961 novel of the same name, its story of the unhappy marriage of Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) in suburban Connecticut in the mid-1950s, is at once suggestive not only of Cavell’s interest in the blessings