Review of Graham Jones and Ashley Woodward, eds., "Acinemas: Lyotard's Philosophy of Film" (Edinburgh University Press).

This article considers aspects of Stanley Cavell’s film-philosophy in the light of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 film Phantom Thread, and vice versa. Methodologically, it concentrates on the interpretation of Cavell’s writing and of Anderson’s film. In arguing that Phantom Thread has affinities with Cavell’s famous cinematic genre of remarriage comedy, the article addresses Cavell’s understanding of the production of what Wittgenstein calls “criteria.” Affirming Steven J. Affeldt’s insistence that the production of criteria is occasioned by crisis, the article explores the (...) claim that Phantom Thread can be viewed as the story of the production of criteria in response to a situation of interpersonal confusion and disorientation, criteria according to which a remarriage may, or may not, eventually take place. The results of this enquiry, it is hoped, will help both to clarify aspects of Cavell’s philosophy and to articulate something of the nature of the distinctive cinematic achievement that Anderson’s film represents. (shrink)

The concept of suture has long been an important and controversial concept in investigations of the relationships between narrative, diegesis, character, and spectator. The dominant understanding of suture has paid more attention to its Lacanian derivation – and to the account given by Daniel Dayan – than to the work of Jean-Pierre Oudart which first introduced suture into Film Studies. This article, however, follows the recent work of George Butte, who argues that the way Oudart understands suture is very illuminating (...) for the study of the complex forms of intersubjectivity that cinema so readily, and so richly, dramatises – famously by means of shot/reverse shot figures. It argues that certain key moments in Ridley Scott's Alien activate ideas of corporeality, desire, and intersubjectivity in ways that contribute to a wider thematic and figurative nexus at work in the film directed at the exploration of impossible intersubjectivities. The article also proposes that, via this nexus, the film offers an intriguing instantiation of Nietzsche's notion of the “human, all too human”, thereby demonstrating that there is much more in Nietzsche of relevance to Alien than the xenomorph's superhuman “will-to-power”. The android Ash's admiration for the alien's lack both of conscience and consciousness ironically indicates his own all-too-human recognition of the superfluity but inescapability of his own consciousness. The article concludes by drawing briefly on the work of Stanley Cavell on acknowledgment, proposing that much of the horror of Alien lies not only in how bodies are ruptured but in the fact that some subjectivities cannot even be sutured. (shrink)