Examining Henri Bergson's work, philosophy, and the body, this volume explores the history and philosophy of comedy, film, psychoanalysis and the comic performance of the future, creating a theoretical and practice-based framework for the field.

The relationship between film and philosophy, along with the idea of film as philosophy, has attracted widespread interest over the last decade. Film theorists and philosophers of film have explored not only the philosophical questions raised by cinema as an artform, but also the possibility that cinema might contribute to philosophical understanding or even engage in varieties of “cinematic thinking” that intersect with, without being reducible to, philosophical inquiry. Inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, many theorists (...) are now engaged in what has come to be known as “film-philosophy,” developing philosophical insight out of their close engagement with film, and bringing philosophical... (shrink)

This paper takes issue with the idea recently promulgated by film-philosophers that the relationship between philosophy and film is untroubled by the encounter between reason and art. To do this I consider how in Je vous salue, Marie Jean-Luc Godard uses allegory, cinematic automatism and montage not to provide rational arguments but to raise questions about the legacy of the Christian aesthetics for contemporary cinema.

This paper takes Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s film Le Fils and its critical reception as an occasion to explore Gilles Deleuze’s proposition that cinema’s capacity to show belief in this world—as a secular corollary to Søren Kierkegaard’s religious belief as a leap of faith—is one avenue by which the medium might rediscover its pertinence after the demise of the movement-image. Previous interpretations of The Son have taken up the film’s connection with the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac to argue (...) that the film’s ethical stance rests in its allusion to and rejection of the conception of faith demonstrated in the Hebrew Bible... (shrink)

Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed was the first book on cinema to attempt to provide an ontological theorisation of film that could account not only for its popular instances and the reason why they enthralled audiences for over half a century but also for the demise of its mythic function and the possibility of its redemption in serious modernist film. Inadequately understood at the time of its publication, and for too long ignored by Film Studies, Cavell's arguments about modernist cinema (...) all but disappeared in the wake of the rise of postmodern theory. Yet the crisis of belief that confronted modern arts, condemned them to the production of serious works, and eventually unsettled the privileged place of mainstream cinema in twentieth century liberal democracies, still laps at our feet. This essay follows on the back of Kathleen Kelley's recent essay on Cavell, Greenberg, Bazin and medium specificity in film and Robert Sinnerbrink's work aligning Cavell’s understanding of cinema as 'a moving image of skepticism' with the project of thinking philosophically about film. It aims to continue to unpack the idea of automatism as it is conceived by Cavell to operate in film and to argue, along with Kelley and Sinnerbrink, for its importance for understanding the conviction of serious films. (shrink)

Melds philosophical analysis with early cinematic history to develop a fresh theory of the notion of comedy.