In this article, I undertake a close reading of Isabel Rocamora's 2015 film installation Faith, which shows, on three separate screens, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim men simultaneously performing their morning prayers in three distinct, historically significant sites in the Judean desert. Setting the cinematic and installation properties of the work into dialogue with a number of philosophers (Levinas, Derrida, Cavell), film theorists (Bazin, Deleuze, Chion), and art theorists (Fried, Elkins), I argue that it adopts a postsecular approach to religious pluralism. (...) That is, without being a religious artwork, Faith nevertheless deconstructs the conventional liberal secular approach of universalist neutrality towards inter-religious relations and instead configures the relations between the human figures in the work according to an alterity that requires not cognitive certainty but inter-human faith. The work is thereby consistent with Derrida's notion that tout autre est tout autre (every other is wholly other). (shrink)

<P>While there are many books on the romantics, and many books on Heidegger, there has been no book exploring the connection between the two. Pol Vandevelde’s new study forges this important link. </P> <P>Vandevelde begins by analyzing two models that have addressed the interaction between literature and philosophy: early German romanticism (especially Schlegel and Novalis), and Heidegger’s work with poetry in the 1930s. Both models offer an alternative to the paradigm of mimesis, as exemplified by Aristotle’s and Plato’s discussion of (...) poetry, and both German romanticism and Heidegger owe a deep debt to Plato. The study goes on to defend the view that Heidegger was influenced by romanticism. The author’s project is thus both historical, showing the specificity of the romantic and Heideggerean works, and systematic, defending aspects of their alternative mode of thinking while also pointing to their weaknesses. </P>. (shrink)

The presence of interpretation according to different perspectives in art forms in which we expect the 'truth' about the subject matter, provides an opportunity to understand what truth means in the context of perspectivism, the view that there is no objective standard of truth free from any perspective against which we can measure the veracity of an account. In this article, I explore perspectival truth through Nietzsche's philosophical autobiography, Ecce Homo , and Herzog's films, particularly Little Dieter Needs to Fly. (...) I argue that these artworks both contribute to and exemplify a perspectival truth practice. (shrink)

This article examines the pedagogic vision of audiovisual archives in Ici et ailleurs ( Here and Elsewhere, 1974/1978) (shot by Sonimage and drawn from the abandoned project Jusqu’à la Victoire [1970]) in terms of the stratification of images and sounds. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, Tom Conley writes that a diagram that depends upon the division between the visible and the enunciable may be comprehended in terms of a map and as a line of forces. Such strata can (...) act as signposts for diverse and multilateral readings of film, as viewers “read” cinematic landscapes and time-images. In Ici et ailleurs, stratigraphic shots juxtapose the Western, static home life of a family in France with the nomadic life of Fedayeen troops in Jordan and Palestine. This article argues that Sonimage’s narrative specificity relies upon an “in-between” method that defines an inter-space between semantic orders. (shrink)

This article critiques Stephen Mulhall's reading of Cavell's response to skepticism. In the first half of the article, I argue that Mulhall is mistaken in two respects: he elides differences Cavell notes between external world and other minds skepticism as well as conflates empathetic projection and acknowledgment. In the second half of the article, I argue for a novel reading of Cavell's account of acknowledgment, which addresses the concerns I raise for Mulhall. The paper closes by considering and responding to (...) a worry that one's efforts at acknowledgment are more complicated projections of one's self onto the other. (shrink)

New words have found their way into the public sphere: we now commonly talk about “confinement”, “barrier-gesture” or “distancing”. The very idea of public space has been transformed: with restrictions on movement and interaction in public; with the reintegration of lives (certain lives) into the home (if there is one) and private space; with the publicization of private space through internet relationships; with the cities’ space occupied, during confinement, by so-called “essential” workers; with the restriction of gatherings and political demonstrations (...) in public space. With these and other recent changes, it is imperative to revisit the concept of public space, which continues to be used as if it were self-evident, despite its profound transformation over the past few decades, in a process of realization and “literalization”. No longer just a comfortable metaphor for reasonable debates, public space has become a concrete reality in the 21th century. This transformation in the various phenomena, such as the occupation of squares and public spaces; the demand for spaces of conversation and expression for those without a voice; the transition of private matters into the public realm through verbal expression; and the expression and circulation of public issues within popular cultures. As a result, the question of public space is increasingly intertwined with that of private spaces, such as the home or individual subjectivities, forming an internal, logical relationship. (shrink)

Film critics and theorists often refer to the ‘worlds’ that films create, present, or embody,e.g. the world of Eraserhead or the world in Fanny and Alexander. Like the world of a novel or painting, the world of a film in thisprevalent use of the term denotes its represented content or setting, or whatever formaland thematic aspects distinguish it from other films in a pronounced and oftenimmediately recognisable way. Yet there is much more to be said in philosophical termsabout films as, (...) or as containing, worlds. This paper will argue that pursuing this subjectentails a needed re-evaluation of multi-faceted issues that are of concern to bothcontemporary film theorists and philosophers of film, including the relation betweencinematic representation and expression, reflexivity, the nature of film style andauthorship, and cinema’s relation to, and direct interaction with, other art forms. (shrink)

Animation has employed film stars throughout its long history; however, there have been few studies that have examined the relationship between film stardom and animation. This article explores the...

This is a philosophical rumination on Shawn Loht’s important extension of “film as philosophy” into a Heideggerian phenomenological account of the philosophical response that cinema can engender. After considering the importance of these kinds of approaches, I turn to Loht’s phenomenological engagement with Terrence Malick’s early masterpiece, Days of Heaven (1978). After sympathetically reviewing his “interpretation”, I expand upon its delineation of “earth and world” to include the “fallenness” of the world as well as the possibility of a metanōetic awakening (...) to the vocation of “mud doctor”, that is, to heal the rift between earth and world, a rift made more exigent by world war, economic exploitation, and the ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This article grows out of the conviction that (some) films can philosophise. It looks to juxtapose the film Dogtooth and Wittgenstein's builders' example, such that they are seen as philosophising in similar ways over similar issues. Both strike me as probing the possibility—or denial—of a future with language. Using Stanley Cavell and Rush Rhees' responses to Wittgenstein's builders, I register the significance and meaning of themes from the film and Wittgenstein's work in a mutually enlightening way: language, games and breaking (...) free. This results in two different pictures of our hope of a future in and with language. (shrink)

This essay argues that film as a medium breaks through the clearly delineated boundaries between realism and anti-realism that have been established by film theory. Film itself is basically indifferent to each. As an alternative to both, I put forward a thesis of indeterminism, which argues that films engender a unique event of sight and sound that does not have to be perceived to be a real event or an illusion of such an event.

This special issue responds to the current discourse on cinema and education from a philosophical point of view. Considering the fact that young people worldwide are watching films and series via their smartphones or personal computers, we here explore the educative aspects of this popular activity. Does this wide-ranging habit mis-educate the next generation? Or does cinema carry a potential for ethical-political education, parallel to the ancient Greek tragedies and the modernist Bildungsroman? The authors of this special issue deliberate this (...) question by exploring the intersection between cinema and philosophy and the potential powers of cinematic education. (shrink)

Despite considerable differences, Stanley Cavell and Jean-Luc Nancy share the demand for a renewal of thinking produced through and with the concept of the world. Their articulation of the legacy bequeathed by Heidegger and Wittgenstein begins with an understanding of the world in excess of knowledge and insists on this impossible mastery as the most productive incentive for thinking. Inasmuch as philosophy has understood itself as producer of worldviews, systems and principle, philosophy has constantly suppressed the thinking of the world, (...) for any worldview absorbs and dissolves the world in its vision. For both Cavell and Nancy an insistence on this suppression leads to an emphasis on film. Two gestures can be said to intertwine in their thinking of film: to recapture our relation to the world as one that is not based on knowing as certainty, but on the reception of the singular; to recapture thinking as that which is attracted and called for by the insurgence of the singular, by the seam in experience. Nancy and Cavell reverse the idea of cinema as completing the regime of representation stressing how cinema produces a step away from thinking as representation in view of what the article names thinking as patience. The article concludes by asking: what does it mean for philosophy to understand itself as patience? (shrink)

In this essay, I reconsider the constitution of democratic freedom in aesthetic terms. My interest is in articulating a conception of aesthetic freedom that can be mapped onto a conception of democratic freedom. For this purpose, I bring together Charles Sanders Peirce’s ontology, which comprises fragments of an aesthetic theory, Friedrich Schiller’s concept of aesthetic play and Stanley Cavell’s democratic perfectionism. By providing a philosophical framework for constructing an aesthetics and politics that supports the recent aesthetic turn in political theory, (...) which urges overcoming political theory’s excessive dependence on an epistemological theory of representation, and by proposing a modification to the turn’s heavy reliance on theories of affect, my reading of Peirce, Schiller and Cavell offers a new way to think about the political significance of the autonomy of aesthetic experience and affect for democratic freedom. (shrink)

In this article, I claim that film matters to political theory not because of the stories films recount, but because the medium of film offers political theorists an image of political thinking that emphasizes the stochastic serialization of actions. I thus argue that the stochastic serialization of moving images that films project makes available for democratic theory an experience of resistance and change as a felt discontinuity of succession, rather than as an inversion of hierarchical power. In my treatment of (...) these issues, I rely on Hume's ontology of ‘broken appearances’ and ‘interrupted perceptions’, as well as Stanley Cavell's ontology of film as treated in The World Viewed. I elaborate the following four aspects of the relation between film and political theory: the action-image; discontinuity and the fact of series; actors, artificial persons and human somethings; and political resistance and an aesthetics of politics. The manner in which I proceed is to show the aspectual overlay between film and political thinking. Such a method of exposition suggests a further, methodological site where film matters to political theory: the stochastic serialization of moving images in film provides political theory with a genre for elaborating ideas that is not reducible to the analytics of causal argument. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 1062-1076, September 2022.

Within the loose group of studies that are sometimes labelled Heideggerian cinema – studies in which scholars consider film in conjunction with Heidegger's philosophy – little attention has been paid to Heidegger's actual view of cinema. This omission is not only odd but it is also problematic. In the off-hand comments Heidegger directs towards film throughout his collected works he criticises the medium for its covering over of Being, a fact that makes engaging with film through Heidegger's thinking a questionable (...) project. The present article aims to address this omission and to provide a conception of Heideggerian cinema that does not ignore, but answers, Heidegger's criticism. It argues that it is not the technological nature of cinema that is the source of Heidegger's hostility towards the medium but his conception of the film-photographic image as a transparent copy of the world. It is on this basis that cinema is denied the ca... (shrink)

This article argues that a sustained, consistent, and ambitious argument underlies Annette Michelson’s writings on art and film across the 1970s and 1980s. Working in relation to modernist discourses of the 1960s, Michelson links an account of time and temporal organization in cinema to a developmental model of film spectatorship. Read in this way, Michelson’s writing represents an alternate and overlooked strand of film theory and criticism, one that provides a new account of cinematic avant-gardes—and an alternative to what I (...) call the infantile tendencies of film theory that is grounded in the terms of cognitive maturity. (shrink)

Within Luis Buñuel's classic surrealist film The Exterminating Angel is a philosophical motif which expresses, demonstrates, and develops two of Ludwig Wittgenstein's central concepts: language lays traps for the unwary that can lead to illogical thought and mind-bending quests; and any picture of the world is formed through cultural habits that cannot be rationally expressed but can be changed. This article argues that what we find in Buñuel's Angel is a “picture” that is at one level rational and habitual and (...) at another entirely absurd. These apparently rational preconceptions – the insular habits of privilege and the language that maintains it – produce a certain “aspect” which, when clung to, can entrap us. In this effort we thread a series of chance meetings into a web of encounters: of people at a dinner party, of a philosopher and a filmmaker, and perhaps most significantly, of games that form a totality of gamesmanship – a chance meeting of the game... (shrink)

This article revisits Jean-Louis Comolli's “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much” in the spirit of film-philosophy's various efforts to reassess the field's seminal texts, and it recasts Comolli's attentive analyses of film acting in terms of the original interpretations they produce. In short, I look to “A Body Too Much’ for its subtle disclosure of an underappreciated substratum of hermeneutics in so called “1970s film theory.” Comolli's study of the discord between actor and referent, I argue, is surprisingly consistent with (...) Paul Ricoeur's pioneering contemporaneous work on metaphor and interpretation, and it leads him to understand the meaningful deployment of film actors in very particular ways. I provide an extended analysis of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York to further demonstrate how the distinctive utilization of actors constitutes both a redescription of the historical past and a spur to interpretation. When critically apprehended as a solution to the broadly construed problems of creating historical fictions, the calculated deployment of film actors can reveal a manner of thinking about the historical past – simply put, it can tell us what a film is thinking and how it regards its historical characters and events. In the final analysis, I claim, our attention to – and critical interpretation of – the embodiment of such filmic thinking permits us to grasp the imaginative form of historical knowledge on view in such films. (shrink)

Despite its oft-noted ambiguities, critical reception of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner ; Director's Cut ; Final Cut ) has tended to converge upon seeing it as a futuristic sci-fi film noir whose central concern is what it means to be human, a question that is fraught given the increasingly human-like replicants designed and manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation for human use on off-world colonies. Within the terms of this way of seeing things a great deal of discussion has been devoted (...) to putative criteria of being human and the question whether the once-retired blade runner, Rick Deckard, is or is not a replicant. I aim to explore a radically different course of interpretation, which sees the film in fundamentally moral and religious terms. Put in the starkest light, the film is not about what makes us human but whether we can be saved from ourselves, from our terrifying inhumanity, our moral blindness. (shrink)

As part of the widespread turn to narrative in contemporary philosophy, several commentators have recently attempted to sign Kierkegaard up for the narrative cause, most notably in John Davenport and Anthony Rudd's recent collection Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative and Virtue. I argue that the aesthetic and ethical existence‐spheres in Either/Or cannot adequately be distinguished in terms of the MacIntyre‐inspired notion of ‘narrative unity’. Judge William's argument for the ethical life contains far more in the way of substantive (...) normative content than can be encapsulated by the idea of ‘narrative unity’, and the related idea that narratives confer intelligibility will not enable us to distinguish Kierkegaardian aesthetes from Kierkegaardian ethicists. ‘MacIntyrean Kierkegaardians’ also take insufficient notice of further problems with MacIntyre's talk of ‘narrative unity’, such as his failure to distinguish between literary narratives and the ‘enacted dramatic narratives’ of which he claims our lives consist; the lack of clarity in the idea of a ‘whole life’; and the threat of self‐deception. Finally, against the connections that have been drawn between Kierkegaardian choice and Harry Frankfurt's work on volitional identification, I show something of the dangers involved in putting too much stress on unity and wholeheartedness. (shrink)

This paper aims at elucidating the present strength of the social and political ideas one can draw from Wittgenstein’ later work, rooting in it his conception of the subjectivity of language and of the speakers’ authority and voice; of the I and the us. The article uses the concept of forms of life – understood, following Stanley Cavell and Veena Das, not only in the social sense but also in the natural sense, as life forms. – in order to rearticulate (...) the natural and conventional and to perceive, as Cavell puts it, “the mutual implication of the natural and the social” in the constitution of us – and in a renewed, ordinary conception of democracy. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 263-281, February 2021.

This paper explores the potential of realist cinema to portray resistance to oppression and restrictions on people’s lives. Wadjda presents a special case in world cinema in being made in Sa...

The indexicality of film and sound recordings remains an unresolved problem in contemporary documentary theory. The prevailing conceptualisation of the documentary assigns it the status of a sober discourse, a framing in which history is modelled as absent cause and the unqualified distinction between fiction and non-fiction is considered sacrosanct. The denotative literalism characteristic of indexical media, however, confounds this conceptualisation, which in turn encourages the devaluing of documentary aesthetics; the documentary is not a medium of art, it is said, (...) but of argument. In this article, I examine how philosopher Jacques Rancière offers an alternative account of the documentary grounded on aesthetics rather than sobriety. I show how, in rethinking the absent cause model of history as well as the relationship between fiction and nonfiction, Rancière's aesthetic approach resolves the conceptual problem posed by indexicality and brings clarity to the value and function of indexical media with respect to the documentary. (shrink)

This article examines a number of philosophical concepts that are at stake in the visual culture of the nude. It particularly focuses on Aphrodite’s appearance, or rather, what I call her exposed concealment, in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Le Mépris. A film, I argue, which is not only concerned with Aphrodite and the figure of the female nude via Brigitte Bardot, but which also explores the very idea of the sex goddess in cinema. In the first section I introduce arguments from (...) T.J. Clark about the changing status of the nude in nineteenth-century France. In the second section, having introduced Kenneth Clark’s work on Aphrodite, I outline Michael Williams’ work on the archaeology of divine stardom and discuss my disagreement with the way Ginette Vincendeau and Colin Gardner interpret Bardot in the film. In the longest section, the third, I examine several shots in Le Mépris in conversation with Stanley Cavell and argue that the nude scenes both invoke and rework the pictorial language of nudity found in the history of painting and sculpture, as well as Bardot’s film back catalogue, and I conclude by suggesting the film provides an indirect critique of what Hegel says about female nudity. (shrink)

A book in which analytic philosophers examine the portrayal of sex in art and the possible artistic value of pornography proves a disappointment. Although a transcendental objection to pornographic art is rebutted, the papers employ barren philosophical methods that divert energy away from significant problems and into scholastic quibbles.

Film audiences are no longer in a position to know for certain which images, or features of images they see on the screen were created by photography and which were created in a computer. Yet they are reacting to the advent of computer graphics as if it is merely a technical improvement, not a change in the nature of film itself. This would mean that one of the most influential early theories of film—realism—is wrong. It held that film is by (...) nature photographic and that its unique value is to afford the audience the physical connection with reality that photography, uniquely among pictorial media, brings. I argue that the audience is right about this. Even as applied to purely photographic films, realism was simply a mistake. (shrink)

This article examines the political themes in Cavell’s philosophy through a reading of the film Gaslight in the context of contemporary American politics. It demonstrates how Cavell’s ideas offer valuable insights into gender politics, fascism, and propaganda in American society. The article proceeds in three sections, first reviewing Cavell’s ontology of film and genre to elucidate his claim that film embodies scepticism. Next, it analyses gaslighting in the film as an enactment of gendered politics of scepticism and explores Cavell’s resources (...) for responding to it. Lastly, it investigates the political implications of gaslighting, particularly in light of its association with post-truth politics, using Cavell’s interpretation as a philosophical framework to understand instances like Donald Trump’s manipulation of America. (shrink)

This paper proceeds from the premise that film can be educational in a broader sense than its current use in classrooms for illustrative purposes, and explores the idea that film might function as a form of education in itself. To investigate the phenomenon of film as education, it is necessary to first address a number of assumptions about film, the most important of which is its objective character under study. The objective study of film holds that the meaning of film (...) awaits its correct interpretation according to an informed viewer. I suggest that theoretical modes of interpretation in this vein really amount to attempts to control meaning via a particular lens, rather than allowing films to present meaning in necessarily ambiguous, and thus sometimes unsettling, ways. Situating film as the object of study in this way continues a tradition of empiricism or naturalism in thought that both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein sought to critique as psychologism. Whilst no claim is made for reconceiving of Wittgenstein as phenomenologist, a dialogue between the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology and the Phenomenology of Perception reveals sympathies in attempts made by both to overcome a metaphysics of the perceived or experienced object, thereby broadening the educational reach of film. (shrink)

This paper proceeds from the premise that film can be educational in a broader sense than its current use in classrooms for illustrative purposes, and explores the idea that film might function as a form of education in itself. To investigate the phenomenon of film as education, it is necessary to first address a number of assumptions about film, the most important of which is its objective character under study. The objective study of film holds that the meaning of film (...) awaits its correct interpretation according to an informed viewer. I suggest that theoretical modes of interpretation in this vein really amount to attempts to control meaning via a particular lens, rather than allowing films to present meaning in necessarily ambiguous, and thus sometimes unsettling, ways. Situating film as the object of study in this way continues a tradition of empiricism or naturalism in thought that both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein sought to critique as psychologism. Whilst no claim is made for reconceiving of Wittgenstein as phenomenologist, a dialogue between the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology and the Phenomenology of Perception reveals sympathies in attempts made by both to overcome a metaphysics of the perceived or experienced object, thereby broadening the educational reach of film. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This article uses Carl Plantinga’s and Noël Carroll’s theorizations regarding cinematic disgust to analyze Carl Franklin’s 1995 film noir, Devil in a Blue Dress. Plantinga argues for a link between disgust and ideology that helps to reveal deeper cultural significance in film, which Carroll’s work likewise supports. Plantinga further argues that disgust in art may be strangely attractive as well as repulsive, thereby eliciting reflection. I argue that combining these elements with philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s explanation of how moral revolutions (...) happen by means of honor codes helps to clarify not only viewer sympathy and solidarity for this film’s African-American protagonist, but also viewer moral disgust at another important white character’s racism. In particular, the film encourages its more thoughtful white viewers to reconsider as well as potentially change their affective responses, ideological predispositions, and habits of perception and attention regarding race, thereby facilitating fundamental moral change and even the possibility of moral revolution. (shrink)

This article begins with Werner Herzog's programmatic statements on new images and deep truth and connects it to ideas of Nietzschean aesthetics, mainly the Apollonian image and the Dionysian horror. My main argument is that Herzog contributes to the literary and aesthetic tradition of new mythology within the medium of film by developing a distinct visual language that tries to express non-rational truth claims. In a first step I explore how Nietzschean aesthetics influenced the debates about the mythic image and (...) total cinema in classic film theory and visual studies. More importantly I show how the desire to create new mythic images not only influenced Herzog's discourse on film, but his actual aesthetic practice. In my analysis of his 1971 documentary Land of Silence and Darkness I show how the dynamic between Apollonian veil and Dionysian Urbild is effective in the construction of what Herzog calls “deep truth”. This article attempts to shift t... (shrink)

This article connects the theory of Hannah Arendt and the philosophy of Stanley Cavell to the questions of what thinking is and how it appears on film. It focuses on two theatrical trials: Adolph Eichmann’s trial (1961) and the ending sequence in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) in which the questions of thought and thoughtlessness are at stake. Whereas Arendt considers the ways that thinking poses challenges to representation (there is, she writes, a “scarcity of documentary evidence”), (...) Cavell turns to cinema and the camera’s “knowledge of the metaphysical restlessness” that becomes manifest when the mind thinks and the body fidgets. He goes so far as to argue that cinema may even “prove thinking.” Though they arrive at opposite conclusions, Cavell and Arendt share a critique of modern subjectivity that these trials bring to light: reason has replaced thinking and skepticism of the world has replaced consciousness in it. But film, as read through Cavell, may reveal a crisis of altogether different order. It is not that thinking cannot be represented, as Arendt argues; in the age of cinema, thinking cannot be concealed. If anything, thoughtlessness defies representation. (shrink)

The notion of forms of life points to a crucial aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach that challenges an influential line in the philosophical tradition. He portrays intellectual activities in terms of a cohesion of things held together in linguistic scenes rooted in the lives of people and the facts of the world. The original inspiration with which Wittgenstein worked on this approach is still relevant today in the recent technological turn associated with AI. He attacked a conception that treated human (...) activities as material to be examined by external models of rationality. Along with other modernists such as Musil, he saw the danger of losing faith in human intellectual and moral capacities. In contrast, Wittgenstein elucidates and substantively defends an idea of forms of life in which the great normative enterprises, from science to the works of the imagination, are based on our individual capacity to take the next step from a normative authority that rests entirely with us, as agents who can claim it in the name of others, in the name of arithmetic, in the name of our native language, in the name of justice, and so on. Forms of life are the place to look to claim this authority over the mistrust we feel compelled to cultivate in our human endeavors. (shrink)