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Ontology of Film
Edited by Frank Boardman (Worcester State University)
About this topic
| Summary | The Ontology of Film is a middle category home to work on the nature of film. The question, What is film? has received fairly little attention. There is some controversy about what should fall under the category, but more agree that 'film' applies to far more than celluloid. Philosophers have been more concerned with aspects of film. Three question structure much of the discussion: (1) Do mainstream movies have authors? Or more specifically, is it appropriate to call a single person, or some very small group of people, the author of a mainstream movie? (2) Must narrative films have fictional narrators? Must we attribute the narration to a narrator who is part of the world of the fiction? (3) Do film images really move, or is the impression of movement an illusion? |
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Film Authorship
- The Philosophy of Werner Herzog.M. Blake Wilson & Christopher Turner (eds.) - 2020 - Lexington Books.Legendary director, actor, author, and provocateur Werner Herzog has incalculably influenced contemporary cinema for decades. This essay collection by professional philosophers and film theorists from around the globe offers a diversity of perspectives on how the thinking behind the camera is revealed in the action Herzog captures in front of it.
- The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures.Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa & Shawn Loht (eds.) - 2019 - Springer.This handbook brings together essays in the philosophy of film and motion pictures from authorities across the spectrum. It boasts contributions from philosophers and film theorists alike, with many essays employing pluralist approaches to this interdisciplinary subject. Core areas treated include film ontology, film structure, psychology, authorship, narrative, and viewer emotion. Emerging areas of interest, including virtual reality, video games, and nonfictional and autobiographical film also have dedicated chapters. Other areas of focus include the film medium’s intersection with contemporary social (...)
- Minimal authorship (of sorts).Christy Mag Uidhir - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 154 (3):373 - 387.I propose a minimal account of authorship that specifies the fundamental nature of the author-relation and its minimal domain composition in terms of a three-place causal-intentional relation holding between agents and sort-relative works. I contrast my account with the minimal account tacitly held by most authorship theories, which is a two-place relation holding between agents and works simpliciter. I claim that only my view can ground productive and informative principled distincitons between collective production and collective authorship.
- On Authorship and Collaboration.Paisley Nathan Livingston - 2011 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2):221-225.
- Collective authorship in film.C. Paul Sellors - 2007 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (3):263–271.
Narration in Film
- Thinking about Stories: An Introduction to Philosophy of Fiction.Samuel Lebens & Tatjana von Solodkoff - 2024 - Routledge.Thinking About Stories is a fun and thought-provoking introduction to philosophical questions about narrative fiction in its many forms, from highbrow literature to pulp fiction to the latest shows on Netflix. Written by philosophers Samuel Lebens and Tatjana von Solodkoff, it engages with fundamental questions about fiction, like: What is it? What does it give us? Does a story need a narrator? And why do sad stories make us cry if we know they aren’t real? The format of the book (...)
- The Metamodern Slasher Film.Steve Jones - 2024 - Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.It is commonly proposed that since the mid-2000s, the slasher subgenre has been dominated by unoriginal remakes of "classics". Consequently, most original slasher films have been ignored by academics (and critics), leaving the field with a limited understanding of this highly popular subgenre. This book corrects that mischaracterisation by analysing contemporary slasher films that sincerely attempt to innovate within the subgenre. I argue that these films reflect broader cultural turns towards sincerity, optimism in the face of crisis, and an emphasis (...)
- The Possibility of Plato's Diegesis Through the Moving Image.Doga Col - 2022 - In Cinema studies: Different perspectives. Sarasota: University of South Florida M3 Publishing. pp. 15-28.When we think of diegesis and diegetic in film studies, we know what the words refer to within the confines of the traditional scholarly definition of film in the 20th and 21st centuries. This understanding comes from a certain ontological common sense that narratologically film has a dual nature that consists of mimesis and diegesis. Thinking about narration through images and sound, as opposed to the live-acted or read drama or epos in the times of Plato and Aristotle, has given (...)
- The TikTok Experience and Everything Everywhere All At Once: A Brief Analysis of Film Form.Doğa Çöl & Ömer Said Birol - 2023 - Intermedia International e-Journal 10 (18):178-194.The TikTok experience refers to a user’s interaction with the platform while scrolling through various videos. The user can change what they are viewing instantly on one screen much like a TV viewer, the only difference being that whatever is being watched is in the form of short videos made specifically for the platform. These videos vary in style and form and are made to be viewed within the platform itself. All the content that a user watches within the mobile (...)
- Meta-narrative in the movies: tell me a story.Joseph H. Kupfer - 2014 - New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.An interdisciplinary work in philosophy and film studies, Joseph Kupfer investigates narrative theory through the analysis of five films that have narrative as their subject matter and where stories and storytelling are central: A River Runs Through It, Wonder Boys, Ordinary People, The Shape of Things and Unforgiven. Kupfer's readings of the films explore the role of story creation in knowing ourselves and planning our future, in structuring social relationships, and in sharpening our experience of popular culture - including mass-marketed (...)
- Tony “Two-Toes”: the pragmatics of nicknames in films.Kristina Šekrst - 2022 - Quarterly Review of Film and Video.Films frequently employ nicknames not only for villains but also for non-criminal characters. In this paper, I present a classification of nicknames used in films, along with various examples, mostly from crime-related films. I argue that the use of nicknames in films is important not for the sake of reference, but for the sake of an additional narrative told by the nickname as a shorthand description of a character's background (cf. Tony “Two-Toes”, “Dirty” Harry, “Doc” Erwin or “Hatchet” Harry Lonsdale). (...)
- Why Philosophy of Language is Unreliable for Understanding Unreliable Filmic Narration.Marc Champagne - 2022 - Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 59 (2):43-50.A typical device in film is to have a character narrating what is going on, but this narration is not always a reliable guide to the events. According to Maier, distortions may be caused by the narrator’s intent, naivety, use of drugs, and/or cognitive disorder/illness. What is common to these various causes, he argues, is the presence of a point of view, which appears in a movie as shots. While this perspective-based account of unreliability covers most cases, I unpack its (...)
- Found footage at the receding of the world.Byron Davies - 2022 - Screen 23 (1):123-129.This essay argues that, despite the potential for an encounter between Stanley Cavell’s thought and found-footage experimental filmmaking, this has not yet taken place because the early Cavell’s picture of films as autonomous “wholes,” together with his "global-holistic" conception of modernism, prevented him from appreciating the expressive possibilities of filmic fragments. I then argue that these impediments to an encounter with found footage recede in Cavell’s later thought, as he moves away from a concern with modernism and as J. L. (...)
- Unreliability and Point of View in Filmic Narration.Emar Maier - 2022 - Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 59 (2):23-37.Novels like Fight Club or American Psycho are said to be instances of unreliable narration: the first person narrator presents an evidently distorted picture of the fictional world. The film adaptations of these novels are likewise said to involve unreliable narration. I resist this extension of the term ‘unreliable narration’ to film. My argument for this rests on the observation that unreliable narration requires a personal narrator while film typically involves an impersonal narrator. The kind of ambiguous story-telling that we (...)
- The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures.Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa & Shawn Loht (eds.) - 2019 - Springer.This handbook brings together essays in the philosophy of film and motion pictures from authorities across the spectrum. It boasts contributions from philosophers and film theorists alike, with many essays employing pluralist approaches to this interdisciplinary subject. Core areas treated include film ontology, film structure, psychology, authorship, narrative, and viewer emotion. Emerging areas of interest, including virtual reality, video games, and nonfictional and autobiographical film also have dedicated chapters. Other areas of focus include the film medium’s intersection with contemporary social (...)
- Le Grand Imagier Steps Out.George M. Wilson - 1997 - Philosophical Topics 25 (1):295-318.
- Fictional Indeterminacy, Imagined Seeing, and Cinematic Narration.Angela Curran - 2016 - In Katherine Thomson-Jones (ed.), Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Film. Routledge. pp. 99-114.This paper focuses on the debate over two central claims regarding cinematic narration: the claim that there are implicit cinematic narrators and the thesis that when we watch movies, we imagine seeing the events and characters in the film fiction. I examine what a consideration of the indeterminate nature of fictional narration, that is, what is specified by the fiction about how we come to imagine the story events, can contribute to the debate on these issues. It is argued that (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Narrative Manipulation and Documentary Truth.John Arthos - 1996 - Film and Philosophy:87-94.
- Film Music and Narrative Agency.Jerrold Levinson - 1996 - In David Bordwell Noel Carroll (ed.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. U Wisconsin Press.
- Narration in Motion.K. J. Thomson-Jones - 2012 - British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (1):33-43.The moving frame of a tracking or crane shot, or of a camera tilt or pan, can affect the way we engage with a film narrative. In this paper, I argue that certain uses of the moving frame in narrative fiction film prescribe us to imagine ourselves moving through the world of the film. The existence of such an imaginative prescription ultimately threatens the necessity of the cinematic narrator. In light of the standard indeterminacy of our means of access to (...)
- Narrative.Paisley Livingston - 2000 - In Berys Nigel Gaut & Dominic Lopes (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Routledge.
- Cinematic narrators.Katherine Thomson-Jones - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (2):296-311.This article surveys the current debate among analytic philosophers and film narratologists about the logic and phenomenology of cinematic narration. Particular attention is given to the question of whether every film that represents a fictional narrative also represents a narrator's fictional narration.
- Unreliability refigured: Narrative in literature and film.Gregory Currie - 1995 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1):19-29.Aims to improve an understanding of the theoretical issues in response to the influence of fiction. Four things in narrative unreliability; Relation between narration in literary fictions and film; Comprehension of narrative essentially a matter of intentional inference; Fictions misdescribed; Asymmetry between literature and film; Ambiguity and unreliability; Implied author and narrator.
- The philosophy of the movies : Cinematic narration.Berys Gaut - 2004 - In Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. pp. 230--253.This chapter contains sections titled: Some Issues in the Philosophy of Film Film Narration: Symmetry or Asymmetry? The A Priori Argument Three Models of Implicit Cinematic Narrators Absurd Imaginings and Silly Questions Literary Narrators Medium‐Specific Explanations.$45.43 from Amazon (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citation Bookmark 6 citations
- Against the ubiquity of fictional narrators.Andrew Kania - 2005 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (1):47–54.In this paper I argue against the theory--popular among theorists of narrative artworks--that we must posit a fictional narrative agent in every narrative artwork in order to explain our imaginative engagement with such works. I accept that every narrative must have a narrator, but I argue that in some central literary cases the narrator is not a fictional agent, but rather the actual author of the work. My criticisms focus on the strongest argument for the ubiquity of fictional narrators, Jerrold (...)
- The literary origins of the cinematic narrator.Katherine Thomson-Jones - 2007 - British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (1):76-94.This paper reveals an ulterior motive for insisting on the necessary presence of narrators in film: the desire to fit film into a literary paradigm. Despite important theoretical links between film and literature, the assumption that films must be like novels in always having narrators is unsound. By moving beyond literature in the comparison of narrative media, and focusing specifically on cases of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ in film and theatre, we find that the presence and function of a cinematic (...)
- Need there be implicit narrators of literary fictions?Thomas E. Wartenberg - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 135 (1):89 - 94.
Movement in Film
- A Study of the Essence of the Cinematic Frame According to the Metaphors of the Window and Framework.Milad Roshani Payan - 2019 - Kimiahonar 8 (32):25-36.The cinematic frame is the boundary between the cinematic image and the outside world. In the history of theoretical studies of cinema, the essence of the cinematic frame is analyzed in many ways. Here we focus on two significant viewpoints among them. One of these significant viewpoints considered cinematic frame as a window, and another one considered it as a framework. Both of them had (and have) some supporters. In the case of the window, which realist theories preferred, the cinematic (...)
- Realism.Andrew Kania - 2008 - In Paisley Livingston & Carl Plantinga (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Routledge.An overview of the philosophical issues raised by the claim that film is a realistic medium, covering the realism of film images' motion, photographic representation, and pictorial representation.
- Noël Carroll, "Philosophy and the Moving Image.". [REVIEW]Clotilde Torregrossa - 2022 - Philosophy in Review 42 (4):4-7.
- The time-image.Gilles Deleuze - 1989 - New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Edited by Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta.Preface to the English Edition \ Translator's Introduction \1. Beyond the Movement-Image \ 2. Recapitulation of Images and Signs \ 3. From Recollections to Dreams: Third Commentary on Bergson \ 4. The Crystals of Time\ 5. Peaks of Present and Sheets of Past: Fourth Commentary on Bergson \ 6. The Powers of the False \ 7. Thought and Cinema \ 8. Cinema, Body and Brain,Thought \ 9. The Components of the Image \ 10. Conclusions \ Notes \ Glossary \Index.
- Supercinema: film-philosophy for the digital age.William Brown - 2013 - New York: Berghahn.Introduction -- Chapter 1: Digital cinema's conquest of space -- Chapter 2: The nonanthropocentric character of digital cinema -- Chapter 3: From temporalities to time in digital cinema -- Chapter 4: The film-spectator-world assemblage -- Chapter 5: Concluding with love.
- Found footage at the receding of the world.Byron Davies - 2022 - Screen 23 (1):123-129.This essay argues that, despite the potential for an encounter between Stanley Cavell’s thought and found-footage experimental filmmaking, this has not yet taken place because the early Cavell’s picture of films as autonomous “wholes,” together with his "global-holistic" conception of modernism, prevented him from appreciating the expressive possibilities of filmic fragments. I then argue that these impediments to an encounter with found footage recede in Cavell’s later thought, as he moves away from a concern with modernism and as J. L. (...)
- L'immagine-inazione. Lo spazio e il tempo nel passaggio dall'image-mouvement all'image-temps in Gilles Deleuze.Fabio Vergine - 2019 - In Enrico Giannetto (ed.), La memoria del cielo. Catania CT, Italia: pp. 1-18.Nella sua riflessione filosofica sull’immagine filmica Gilles Deleuze sembra aver tradotto nella maniera più immediata, ancorché insolubilmente problematica, la presenza di uno spazio e di un tempo che giocano il proprio ruolo su di una forma passiva di soggettività: è proprio ne L’image- mouvement, infatti, che Deleuze mostra come uno dei passaggi più proficui delle sue osservazioni sul cinema sia proprio la crisi di ciò che egli definisce immagine-azione, a favore, invece, di un’immagine-tempo, o situazione ottica e sonora pura. Per (...)
- Film Ontology: Extension, Criteria and Candidates.Frank Boardman - 2019 - In Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa & Shawn Loht (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Springer. pp. 3-27.What sort of thing is film? Before we can answer this question, we’ll have to first determine which things count as “films” in the relevant sense and work out what we ought to look for in an acceptable answer. There is little consensus among philosophers of film on any stage of this process. Here I make the case for a particular understanding of “film” to investigate as well as a particular set of criteria to use in that investigation. I then (...)$163.92 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation Bookmark
- The Moving Image.Nick Wiltsher & Aaron Meskin - 2019 - In Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa & Shawn Loht (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. pp. 49-69.Films typically provide an experience that is very much like the experience of ordinary motion. It is for this reason that they are commonly known as moving pictures or, slightly more broadly, moving images. Our focus in this chapter is on making sense of that experience. We begin our chapter by exploring the centrality of the experience of movement to film. We turn then to various explanations of that experience. Perhaps film images are transparent and allow us to indirectly see (...)$163.92 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation Bookmark 1 citation
- The Philosophy of Werner Herzog.M. Blake Wilson & Christopher Turner (eds.) - 2020 - Lexington Books.Legendary director, actor, author, and provocateur Werner Herzog has incalculably influenced contemporary cinema for decades. This essay collection by professional philosophers and film theorists from around the globe offers a diversity of perspectives on how the thinking behind the camera is revealed in the action Herzog captures in front of it.
- The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures.Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa & Shawn Loht (eds.) - 2019 - Springer.This handbook brings together essays in the philosophy of film and motion pictures from authorities across the spectrum. It boasts contributions from philosophers and film theorists alike, with many essays employing pluralist approaches to this interdisciplinary subject. Core areas treated include film ontology, film structure, psychology, authorship, narrative, and viewer emotion. Emerging areas of interest, including virtual reality, video games, and nonfictional and autobiographical film also have dedicated chapters. Other areas of focus include the film medium’s intersection with contemporary social (...)
- Does the debate about cinematic motion rest on a mistake?Rafael De Clercq - 2017 - Analysis 77 (3):519-525.The debate about cinematic motion revolves around the question of whether the movement of cinematic images is real. That the movement we perceive in film should be construed as the movement of images is taken for granted. But this is a mistake. There is no reason to suppose that cinematic images of moving objects are themselves perceived to be moving. All that is necessary is to perceive these images as continuously changing images of one and the same object.
- The 'I' of the Beholder: On Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality.Karen Bardsley - 1998 - Film-Philosophy 2 (1).
- Moving Pictures.Arthur C. Danto - 1979 - Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4 (1):1-21.
- Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis.J. Remes - 2012 - British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (3):257-270.While some film theorists and philosophers have seen motion as a necessary element of cinema, this view is challenged by a body of avant-garde films which offer little or no movement. These experiments—by film-makers such as Andy Warhol, Larry Gottheim, and Michael Snow—challenge essentialist definitions of film, while simultaneously foregrounding the crucial role played by duration in cinema’s ontology.
- Dall'immagine alla vita: introduzione alla cinefilosofia di Gilles Deleuze.Marcello De Gregorio - 2012 - Roma: Aracne.
- Seeing motion and apparent motion.Christoph Hoerl - 2015 - European Journal of Philosophy 23 (3):676-702.In apparent motion experiments, participants are presented with what is in fact a succession of two brief stationary stimuli at two different locations, but they report an impression of movement. Philosophers have recently debated whether apparent motion provides evidence in favour of a particular account of the nature of temporal experience. I argue that the existing discussion in this area is premised on a mistaken view of the phenomenology of apparent motion and, as a result, the space of possible philosophical (...)
- Il Rilievo Della Visione Movimento, Profondità, Cinema Ne Le Monde Sensible et Le Monde De L’Expression.Anna Caterina Dalmasso - 2010 - Chiasmi International 12:83-110.Le relief de la vision. Mouvement, profondeur et cinéma dansLe monde sensible et le monde de l’expressionEst-il possible d’établir une connexion entre Le monde sensible et le monde de l’expression et la pensée du dernier Merleau-Ponty? De quelle manière une formulation germinale de la réflexion ontologique serait-elle présente dans le cours de 1953? Et quels sont les éléments de contact et de convergence qui permettent de retracer un tel lien?J’ai l’intention de proposer cette hypothèse à partir d’une considération du thème (...)
- Projecting illusion: film spectatorship and the impression of reality.Richard Allen - 1995 - New York: Cambridge University Press.Projecting Illusion offers a systematic analysis of the impression of reality in the cinema and the pleasure it gives to the film spectator. Film provides a compelling experience that can be considered as a form of illusion akin to the experience of day-dream and dream. Examining the concept of illusion and its relationship to fantasy in the experience of visual representation, Richard Allen situates his explanation within the context of an analytical criticism of contemporary film and critical theory. He argues (...)
- The illusion of realism in film.Andrew Kania - 2002 - British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (3):243-258.Gregory Currie, arguing against recent psychoanalytic and semiotic film theory, has defended various realist theses about film. The strongest of these is that ‘weak illusionism’—the view that the motion of film images is an illusion—is false. That is, Currie believes film images really do move. In this paper I defend the common-sense position of weak illusionism, firstly by showing that Currie underestimates the power of some arguments for it, especially one based on the mechanics of projection, and secondly by showing (...)
- External realism about cinematic motion.Trevor Ponech - 2006 - British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (4):349-368.Cinematic motion is, I argue, a genuine and intrinsic property of some cinematic works and not just a matter of how things look to us. It is an event—an item's change of position—happening prior and external to our sensory responses to movies. I therefore defend against common-sense illusionism a minority opinion within cinema studies: that movie viewing normally occasions veridical perceptions of a kind of objective displacement. I also dispute another version of anti-illusionist realism about cinematic motion, the implication that (...)
Ontology of Film, Misc
- The Subjective and Corporeal Perception of the Cinematographic Frame According to Kantian Viewpoint.Milad Roshani Payan - 2018 - Kimiahonar 7 (28):45-56.The cinematographic frame is a boundary which separates the image from the external world. From an ontological viewpoint which dates back to Greek philosophy, the boundary of a thing separates it from other things, thus leading to its ontological independence from other things. But, according to this point of view, the being of things as external objects is considered to be free from the impact of subjective interference and the experience of the viewer. This idea was radically changed with Kant’s (...)
- A Study of the Essence of the Cinematic Frame According to the Metaphors of the Window and Framework.Milad Roshani Payan - 2019 - Kimiahonar 8 (32):25-36.The cinematic frame is the boundary between the cinematic image and the outside world. In the history of theoretical studies of cinema, the essence of the cinematic frame is analyzed in many ways. Here we focus on two significant viewpoints among them. One of these significant viewpoints considered cinematic frame as a window, and another one considered it as a framework. Both of them had (and have) some supporters. In the case of the window, which realist theories preferred, the cinematic (...)
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